After associating the name of the polar explorer Shackleton to two different possible references in VN's novel "Pale Fire" and the poem "The Refrigerator Awakes" ( the Novaya Zemlya mirage and the brocken effect ), I came to another indication of the second kind of illusion, recreated by mingling memory and imagination, in VN's "Speak, Memory". " Every now and then, she [Mademoiselle] looks back to make sure that a second sleigh, bearing her trunk and hatbox, is following—always at the same distance, like those companionable phantoms of ships in polar waters which explorers have described." (5,1 S.M).
While exploring what I'd initially isolated under "atmospheric trickery" in some of VN's stories, poems and novels so as to identify more examples of human beings and animals being deluded by natural phenomena (in contrast to or in parallel with mimicry), I noticed how these "refractions"arise in "Pale Fire" with a particular insistence. Its thieving moon, that "fancy's rear-vision mirror",# provides the reader with a "feeling" that is distinct from the one that results from simply observing the outside world. Cf. John Shade:"Maybe some quirk in space/ Has caused a fold or furrow to displace/ The fragile vista" - whose recollection of his parents multiplies images that suggest a Brocken effect*: "I’ve tried/ So often to evoke them that today/ I have a thousand parents." Kinbote's "multiplication" is of another sort, as in the King's disguised followers romping about in the landscape as an example of "lost similes without a string" ***.
Check also his eerie interpretation of an opalescent cloud as an approximation to a "novaya zemlya mirage". Kinbote (n.109) sees in it a common occurrence (in Zembla...) which has merely been renamed by the poet: "An iridescent cloudlet, Zemblan muderperlwelk. The term "iridule" is, I believe, Shade’s own invention." and yet, in John Shade's poem we read something more (and it works as a metaphor): "that rare phenomenon/ The iridule — when, beautiful and strange,/ In a bright sky above a mountain range/ One opal cloudlet in an oval form/ Reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm/ Which in a distant valley has been staged."
There must be various ways to spot the "parhelia" ( small rainbows close to the sun and created by refractions in icy particles in the air) which Kinbote found in Canto I ** - and elsewhere. He is insistent in having a reader notice his "phenomenal" effect on Shade: The poem, "in its pale and diaphanous final phase, cannot be regarded as a direct echo of my narrative [ ], one can hardly doubt that the sunset glow of the story acted as a catalytic agent upon the very process of the sustained creative effervescence [ ] I have reread, not without pleasure, my comments to his lines, and in many cases have caught myself borrowing a kind of opalescent light from my poet’s fiery orb [ ]". In Kinbote's notes to Shade's retake of the first lines, the iteration of "mirage shimmers": " Today, when the "feigned remoteness" has indeed performed its dreadful duty, and the poem we have is the only "shadow" that remains, we cannot help reading into these lines something more than mirrorplay and mirage shimmer. We feel doom...."
Beside the mirrorplays, there are mirror words and, perhaps, Word Golf: "I am quite sure it was I who one day, when we were discussing "mirror words," observed (and I recall the poet’s expression of stupefaction) that "spider" in reverse is "redips," and "T.S. Eliot," "toilest." But then it is also true that Hazel Shade resembled me in certain respects (Line 347-48) and later, in Line 819: Playing a game of worlds - "My illustrious friend showed a childish predilection for all sorts of word games and especially for so-called word golf. He would interrupt the flow of a prismatic conversation to indulge in this particular pastime, and naturally it would have been boorish of me to refuse playing with him" (note "prismatic conversation).
Before the selected quotes become too copious, I'd like to bring up a different question, now related to what is "real" and "fake". Should we consider it important that Kinbote alters the nature of a panda rug (real and imitation) spread in his palace and in his rented room in Coriolanus Lane? In note to line 12: "During these periods of teaching, Charles Xavier made it a rule to sleep at a pied-ŕ-terre he had rented, as any scholarly citizen would, in Coriolanus Lane: a charming, central-heated studio with adjacent bathroom and kitchenette. One recalls with nostalgic pleasure its light gray carpeting and pearl-gray walls (one of them graced with a solitary copy of Picasso’s Chandelier, pot et casserole émailée), a shelfful of calf-bound poets, and a virginal-looking daybed under its rug of imitation panda fur. How far from this limpid simplicity seemed the palace and the odious Council Chamber with its unsolvable problems and frightened councilors!" and line 80: "It was in this ample nest that Fleur now slept, curled up in its central hollow, under a coverlet of genuine giant panda fur that had just been rushed from Tibet by a group of Asiatic well-wishers on the occasion of his ascension to the throne."
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# "All is still, spellbound, enthralled by the moon, fancy’s rear-vision mirror. The snow is real, though, and as I bend to it and scoop up a handful, sixty years crumble to glittering frost-dust between my fingers." (5,1 S.M)
* Compare to CK's commentary to line 287: "The more I fumed at Sybil’s evident intention to keep it concealed from me, the sweeter was the forevision of my sudden emergence in Tirolese garb from behind a boulder and of John’s sheepish but pleased grin. During the fortnight that I had my demons fill my goetic mirror to overflow with those pink and mauve cliffs and black junipers and winding roads and sage brush changing to grass and lush blue flowers, and death-pale aspens, and an endless sequence of green-shorted Kinbotes meeting an anthology of poets and a brocken of their wives, I must have made some awful mistake in my incantations, for the mountain slope is dry and drear, and the Hurleys’ tumble-down ranch, lifeless."
** "The short (166 lines) Canto One, with all those amusing birds and parhelia, occupies thirteen cards"(CK,Fwd)
*** CK, note to line 70: "There are events, strange happenings, that strike/ The mind as emblematic. They are like/ Lost similes adrift without a string,/Attached to nothing./ Thus that northern king,/Whose desperate escape from prison was/Brought off successfully only because/Some forty of his followers that night/Impersonated him and aped his flight — [ ] He never would have reached the western coast had not a fad spread among his secret supporters, romantic, heroic daredevils, of impersonating the fleeing king. They rigged themselves out to look like him in red sweaters and red caps, and popped up here and there, completely bewildering the revolutionary police..."
CK, note to line 80: " his grandfather’s...cheval glass, a triptych of bottomless light, a really fantastic mirror, signed with a diamond by its maker, Sudarg of Bokay. She turned about before it: a secret device of reflection gathered an infinite number of nudes in its depths, garlands of girls in graceful and sorrowful groups, diminishing in the limpid distance, or breaking into individual nymphs, some of whom, she murmured, must resemble her ancestors when they were young — little peasant garlien combing their hair in shallow water as far as the eye could reach, and then the wistful mermaid from an old tale, and then nothing.
There's also his observation about the literary creative process being witnessed by him (lines 47-48): "Incidents of perspective and lighting, interference by framework or leaves, usually deprived me of a clear view of his face; and perhaps nature arranged it that way so as to conceal from a possible predator the mysteries of generation; but sometimes when the poet paced back and forth across his lawn, or sat down for a moment on the bench at the end of it, or paused under his favorite hickory tree, I could distinguish the expression of passionate interest, rapture and reverence, with which he followed the images wording themselves in his mind, and I knew that whatever my agnostic friend might say in denial, at that moment Our Lord was with him."