In reply to the query that was recently formulated in
a posting ["...Kinbote comments: "Spacetime itself
is decay. Gradus is flying west; he has touched gray-blue Copenhagen (...). Once
again I must puzzle about the insistence on Denmark (Shakespeare,
Hamlet?) by the sudden passage from spacetime, decay, Gradus and
"gray-blue" Copenhagen"] I was stimulated to search for such
a "Danish connection". In fact, there is one! It's to be found in
Priscilla Meyer and Jeff Hoffman's article (http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/div1facpubs/29
) "Infinite Reflections in Pale Fire: The Danish Connection
(Hans Christian Andersen and Isak Dinesen). Russian Literature XLI
(1997):197-221.
Priscilla Meyer's 1988 book on "Pale Fire" is a product of
immense erudiction, particularly at a time when "search-machine" facilities
were not yet available and only scholarly competence held the floor. Now, in
this other (now joint work), some of Meyer's
theories gain further branchings, also meticulously detailed and
correlated, in order to demonstrate how "the Danish material...provides a
model for interpreting Pale Fire." In it, Denmark, is not only
associated with the Hamlet tragedy but to "Andersen's magical fairy tales, and
Dinesen's fantastical Romantic tales, which serve as a magic lantern
slide whose images project the Zemblan (for Kinbote) and Russian (for Nabokov)
past onto (Shade's) American present, the Old World onto the New, the imagined
onto the actual" (215)
For the authors, "The reflection of Andersen and Dinesen in
Pale Fire create infinite perspectives on the permeability of our world
by an otherworld: the mermaids underwater idealization of this world is mirrored
in the prince's idea of his savior from the temple in an infinite succession of
concepts of immortality. As children, Gerda and Kay look through facing
windows that in the course of the tale develop into opposing principles, the Ice
Queen's ideal of crystalline perfection and the Lapp woman's earthly devotion,
which present conplementary paths to immnortality. In the 'Shadow' (as in
Pale Fire) the poet and his shadow hold differing views of reality and
immortality that are meant to be somehow combined. The several tales show
multiple paths to an ideal world, itself depicted as mirroring transcendent
realms beneath the sea and the air"...demonstrating that these and other
examples (such as two Dinesen tales, in which we find characters
named Nat-og-Dag) are "emblematic of counterposed worlds, temporal and
eternal. The Copenhagen-based Shadows and "grjaduscji" goon Gradus are the
agents of death; the immortal Danish tales of Andersen and Dinesen are
themselves about eternal life." (p.217)
For Meyer and Hoffmann we may be "easily trapped in our
earthly room, like the bumblebee or in an illusory sense of infinity that is a
solipsistic hall of mirrors reflecting only ourselves. But these reflections may
also lead outwards to other worlds, to the infinite images found in history,
myth and art." * Their arguments serve as guides that help us avoid many of
Nabokov's theatrically laid traps which, as the authors show us,
are aimed at reproducing reality's "infinite succession of steps, levels
of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable."( SO,p.11,
quoted as an epigraph on p.197) Their quest in not aimed
at well-intentioned and inspirational ghosts or any definite ultimate
solution to a contrived puzzle, but (so it seems to me) towards Nabokov's
"infinite reflections" that stimulate the reader towards
an apprehension of another "existence beyond our own" as "it may be
discerned in nature, in fate's workings, and in art."
(197)
....................................................................
* Since the article is easily available on-line, I will simply
quote the parts that relate more closely to my own inquiries, moving
from how" Nabokov updates the Danish connection almost invisibly by subtle
parallels to Danish history and geography, as well as by references to more
modern Danish literature" (besides Shakespeare's Hamlet and the Viking legend of
Amlothi and the Danish stiletto as "botkin or bodkin", 202) towards the
contrast, brought up by Meyer and Hoffman, after we elaborate
upon our initial beliefs that "Shade and Kinbote appear to be simply Jekyll
and Hyde, the good (heterosexual) professor-poet and the evil (homosexual) mad
professor-editor. But in Nabokov's novel good and evil are more ambiguous and
complementary: Shade the atheist struggles toward faith in an afterlife as he
writes his poem, but is immune to its signals; Kinbote the Protestant is
susceptible to alfear and creates a brilliant and hilarious fantasy, but does
not know he is mad. The first has a commonsense American faith in the pragmatic;
the second has an Old World acceptance of the magical. FromShade's vantage
point, Zembla is a mad fantasy, while for Kinbote it is vivid reality...Pale
Fire is predicated on the tension of this opposition " (201).
According to the authors, because of the (German Romantic
philosophy's) depiction of "the dilemma of the iimpossibility of embodying the
ideal in the real world, characters go mad attempting to reconcile the
irreconcilable. The popularized double tales, however, interpret the problem not
philosophically, but morally and psychologically...leaving out altogether the
problem of an otherworld, or reducing it to mere spookdom."...The mark of this
aesthetic philosophy, because "it located madness as an aesthetic rather than a
psychological phenomenon," can be recognized in Nabokov, through his
'failed' artists who "are often given mock psychological motivations" whereas
their "true problem is the unattainability of an ideal (usually misconstrued)
reality."(198). "Shade and Kinbote have facing
windows. Shade's quest for the secrets of an otherworld through earthly love and
flawed poetry is no more valid than Kinbote's longing for his lost Zemblan ideal
in which he seeks to immortalize himself by having Shade record the material of
his skewed imagination" (217)
It is important that those who haven't read M&H's article
do not base their comments on my hasty appraisal, but go directly to the source
should any related argument spring forward after this summary.