‘Pale Fire’: A Maze of Madness and Meaning

A review of ‘Pale Fire’, by Vladimir Nabokov; G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962.

At a 100th anniversary tribute to Vladimir Nabokov, Martin Amis compared the author to another great novelist and stylist, James Joyce. Both were gifted writers, he said; but Nabokov was more mindful of his audience. Were we, as readers, to visit the home of Nabokov, he would greet us at the door, seat us in front of the fire, and open his finest bottle of wine for us to drink. Upon visiting Joyce—author of the ‘400-page cryptic crossword clue’ that is Finnegan’s Wake—we would find the door ajar and Joyce in the kitchen, from which he would call out blearily before forcing us to try a peculiar punch. For all Nabokov’s linguistic playfulness—for all his complex plots, clever world play, creative metaphors, and at times parodic, at times impassioned prose—he makes himself understood. He is, to use a hackneyed metaphor he himself would have avoided, fabulous company on the page.

Pale Fire is my favourite of his novels, and the poem at its heart, which gives its name to the title, is a masterpiece in its own right. It is a story disguised as a scholarly edition of the poem ‘Pale Fire’ by the fictional American poet John Shade. It opens with a foreword by the eccentric editor Charles Kimbote, an exiled academic from the fictional land of Zembla. Kimbote claims to have been a close friend of John Shade and to possess special insight into his work. He also insists that the poem ‘Pale Fire’ contains hidden references to Zembla’s history and its overthrown king, Charles the Beloved, with whom Kinbote strongly identifies. Kinbote complains briefly about Shade’s widow, Sybil, who dislikes him and resents his interference. We then get into the poem, a work of 999 lines told in heroic couplets:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!

Kimbote claims to have been a close friend of John Shade and to possess special insight into his work.

This rather beautiful opening describes a bird knocking itself out, in full flight, ‘against the outer surface of a glass pane in which a mirrored sky, with its slightly darker tint and slightly lower cloud, presents the illusion of continued space’. Thus the commentary which follows the poem opens. The poem itself deals with mortality, art and the possibility of an afterlife. At its centre is a near-death experience in which Shade sees a white fountain against a ‘blood-black nothingness’. He is excited to learn of a ‘Mrs Z.’ who also claims also to have seen ‘beyond the veil’ and glimpsed ‘a tall white fountain’, only to discover that the article in which he read her account contained a misprint: it was a mountain she saw, not fountain. Shade also describes his love for his wife, and the pain of losing their ugly daughter to suicide.

Kinbote’s commentary is bizarre. Rather than analyse ‘Pale Fire’, he hijacks the text to tell a fanciful story about political turmoil in Zembla. Kinbote clearly sees himself as the hero of this tale, but it grows increasingly clear to us that he is quite mad. His footnotes come to resemble a maniac’s memoir: he believes Shade was writing about his life; that hidden messages are everywhere in the text; that a secret assassin has been sent to kill him:

Often, almost nightly, throughout the spring of 1959, I had feared for my life. Solitude is the playfield of Satan. I cannot describe the depths of my loneliness and distress. There was naturally my famous neighbor just across the lane, and at one time I took in a dissipated young roomer (who generally came home long after midnight). Yet I wish to stress that cold hard core of loneliness which is not good for a displaced soul.

Everybody knows how given to regicide Zemblans are: two Queens, three Kings, and fourteen Pretenders died violent deaths, strangled, stabbed, poisoned, and drowned, in the course of only one century (1700–1800). The Goldsworth castle became particularly solitary after that turning point at dusk which resembles so much the nightfall of the mind.

Stealthy rustles, the footsteps of yesteryear, an idle breeze, a dog touring the garbage cans — everything sounded to me like a bloodthirsty prowler. I kept moving from window to window, my silk nightcap drenched with sweat, my bared breast a thawing pond, and sometimes, armed with the judge’s shotgun, I dared beard the terrors of the terrace.

Rather than analyse ‘Pale Fire’, he hijacks the text to tell a fantastical story.

There is a battle here between two minds: that of Shade, the poet, who seeks to reconcile himself to the events of his life, and that of Kinbote, lost, perhaps irretrievably, in delusion. The true genius of Pale Fire is that neither man controls the story. And this is the point. Pale Fire is about interpretation. Kinbote’s madness is an extreme version of what every reader does, that is, impose a personal meaning onto what she reads. To what extent is that meaning sound? Roland Barthes, in his celebrated ‘Death of the Author’, argues against the accepted practice in literary criticism of turning to the author—his intentions and background—for ‘ultimate meaning’. The individual reader’s reading is not just valid but pre-eminent. But Kinbote’s take is absurd and egotistical, if intoxicating.

Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things, uses the example of Hamlet to discuss truth in criticism. We may not be able to say what Hamlet is truly ‘about’ in any lasting, final sense; but we can say it is not about peasant life in 14th-century Uzbekistan. Truth, at least as it pertains to art, grows out of conversation, so long as its participants engage with the art in a genuine way, and exchange ideas in a spirit of good faith. There is much in Shade’s poem that is unclear, which makes those 999 words a playground for literary sleuths. There are stray phrases, false identities, shifting timelines. But still, the presence of certain themes, such as mortality, are plainly not a matter of interpretation. The poem starts and ends with bird killing itself because it mistakes a mirror for reality. That invokes the fine line between interpretation and truth — but the bird still dies.

Truth, at least as it pertains to art, grows out of conversation.

If Shade contemplates mortality and attempts to make peace with it, perhaps Kinbote’s madness is a way of escaping it. Both men approach the problem of death in starkly different ways. Shade explores it through emotion and intellect, Kinbote by reinventing reality. Shade’s quest is marked by openness and uncertainty, Kinbote’s by closed-mindedness and conviction. The ‘pale fire’ of the poem (and novel’s) title, taken from Timon of Athens (‘The moon’s an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.’), points to how Kinbote’s ‘light’ is not his own, but stolen; not real, but reflected. The name Shade evokes death, as in the ‘shades’ in Dante’s Commedia. But it is also ironic: for a shade is not the real thing. It is a darkened copy, a lesser version, an outline rather than a substance.

Pale Fire suggests that, as with life, the ultimate meaning of literature lies with us and our outlook. It is true that some takes are more faithful to reality than others, that interpretation can be a form of distortion. It is true that interpretation may, at times, serve self-centred ends. But even a violently delusional take may contain a grain of hidden truth, which makes the individual understanding worthy of protection. Truth is a matter of probabilities. But it is never certain, and even less certain in the case of the big questions that have animated thinkers and artists for as long as we have existed. And so it is up to us to decide what life is about, what happens when we die, whether we are free. We decide what the ultimate meaning is.

And so it is with Pale Fire.