PALE FIRE

'''Pale Fire''' (1962) is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, his fourteenth and his fifth written in English. The Nabokov authority Brian Boyd has called it "Nabokov's most perfect novel".^[1] It has drawn a great deal of critical attention, with commentators offering a wide variety of interpretations.

Contents

Plot summary

Explanation of the title

Interpretations

Allusions and references

External links

References

Plot summary

At first glance, ''Pale Fire'' is the publication of a 999-line poem in four cantos ("Pale Fire") by a famous American poet, John Shade. The poem digressively describes many aspects of Shade's life. Canto 1 includes his early encounters with death and glimpses of the apparent otherworldly. Canto 2 is about his family and the death (possibly by suicide) of his daughter, Hazel. Canto 3 focuses on Shade's search for knowledge about an afterlife, culminating in a "faint hope" in higher powers "playing a game of worlds" as indicated by apparent coincidences. Canto 4 offers many personal details on Shade's daily life and creative process, as well as some thoughts on his poetry, which he finds to be a means of somehow understanding the universe.
The poem appears with a Foreword, extensive Commentary, and Index by Shade's self-appointed editor, Charles Kinbote, Shade's neighbor in the small college town of New Wye. According to Kinbote, Shade has been murdered. Kinbote takes it upon himself to oversee the poem's publication, telling readers that it lacks only one line.
In the Foreword, Commentary and Index, Kinbote explicates the poem surprisingly little. Instead, he tells his own story, notably including his friendship with Shade, and the story of Charles Xavier Vseslav, aka Charles II, "The Beloved," the deposed king of the "distant northern land" of Zembla who picturesquely escaped imprisonment by Soviet-backed revolutionaries. Yet no chronicle of Charles's intricate adventure -- indeed, no comprehensible reference to him whatsoever -- is to be found in Shade's poem, although Kinbote repeatedly claims in the Commentary that possible allusions to Charles, and to Zembla, abound in the text.
The reader soon realizes that Kinbote himself is Charles Xavier, living incognito—or perhaps, though he builds an elaborate picture of Zembla complete with samples of a constructed language, that he is insane and that his identification with Charles and perhaps all of Zembla are his delusions. A third story told by Kinbote in his Commentary is that of Gradus, an assassin dispatched by the new rulers of Zembla to kill the exiled King Charles.
The narrative of the novel fuses with Kinbote's critical apparatus, especially his Commentary, which takes the form of notes to various numbered lines of the poem and is full of complex cross-references, many of which convey essential plot information. By means of this device, the book's Foreword, and an alphabetically arranged Index, Kinbote narrates his stories in a highly nonlinear way. The book has been cited by Ted Nelson as an archetypal proto-hypertext.
Nabokov said in an interview that Kinbote committed suicide after finishing the book.^[2] The critic Michael Wood has stated, "This is authorial trespassing, and we don't have to pay attention to it,"^[3] but Brian Boyd has argued that internal evidence points to Kinbote's suicide. Nabokov's "Pale Fire": The Magic of Artistic Discovery, , Brian, Boyd, Princeton University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-691-08957-4 One of Kinbote's notations to Shade's poem (corresponding to line 493) addresses the subject of suicide in some detail.

Explanation of the title

As Nabokov pointed out himself, Books and Authors: Nabokov's Plums Maurice Dolbier the title of John Shade's poem is from Shakespeare's ''Timon of Athens:'' "The moon's an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun" (Act IV, scene 3), a line often taken as a metaphor about creativity and inspiration. Kinbote quotes the passage but doesn't recognize it, as he says he has only a Zemblan version of the play, and in a separate note even rails against the common authorial practice of using phrases from other books as titles.
Some interpreters have noted a secondary reference in the book's title to ''Hamlet'', where the Ghost remarks how the glow-worm "'gins to pale his uneffectual fire" (Act I, scene 5).^[4]

Interpretations

Some readers concentrate on the apparent story, focusing on traditional aspects of fiction such as the relationship among the characters.^[5][6] They may make a case that Kinbote is parasitic on Shade, or that Shade's poem is mediocre and Kinbote, the inventor of Zembla, is a true genius. In 1997, Brian Boyd published a much-discussed study Shade and Shape in ''Pale Fire'', , Brian, Boyd, Nabokov Studies, arguing that the ghost of John Shade influenced Kinbote's contributions. He later expanded this essay into a book, in which he also argues that Hazel's ghost induced Kinbote to say things to Shade that inspired Shade's poem.
Other readers see a story quite different from the apparent narrative. "Shadeans" maintain that John Shade wrote not only the poem, but the commentary as well, having invented his own death and the character of Kinbote as a literary device. According to Boyd, Andrew Field invented the Shadean theory^[7] and Julia Bader expanded it;^[8] Boyd himself espoused the theory for a time.^[9] "Kinboteans", a decidedly smaller group, believe that Kinbote invented the existence of John Shade. Boyd credits the Kinbotean theory to Page Stegner^[10] and adds that most of its adherents are newcomers to the book. Some readers see the book as oscillating undecidably between these alternatives, like the Rubin vase (a drawing that may be two profiles or a goblet). The Imaginary Library: An Essay on Literature and Society, , Alvin B., Kernan, Princeton University Press, 1982, Reprinted as "Reading Zemblan: The Audience Disappears in ''Pale Fire''" in Vladimir Nabokov, , Harold (ed.), Bloom, Chelsea House, 1987, ISBN 1-55546-279-0 ^{[11] [12]}
Though a minority of commentators believe that Zembla is as "real" as New Wye, most assume that Zembla, or at least the operetta-quaint and homosexually gratified palace life enjoyed by Charles Xavier before he is overthrown, is imaginary in the context of the story. The name "Zembla" (taken from "Nova Zembla", a former anglicization of Novaya Zemlya) may evoke popular fantasy literature about royalty such as ''The Prisoner of Zenda'', signaling that it is not to be taken literally. As in other of Nabokov's books, however, the fiction is an exaggerated or comically distorted version of his own life as a son of privilege before the Russian Revolution and an exile afterwards,^[13] and the central murder has resemblances (emphasized by Priscilla Meyer Find What the Sailor Has Hidden: Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, Meyer, Priscilla, , , Wesleyan University Press, 1989, ISBN 0-8195-5206-2 ) to Nabokov's father's murder by an assassin who was trying to kill someone else.
Some readers, starting with Mary McCarthy A Bolt from the Blue, , Mary, McCarthy, The New Republic, Revised version in A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays, Mary McCarthy, , , The New York Review of Books, 2002, ISBN 1-59017-010-5 and including Boyd, Nabokov's annotator Alfred Appel,^[14] and D. Barton Johnson,^[15] see Charles Kinbote as an alter-ego of the insane Professor V. Botkin, to whose delusions John Shade and the rest of the faculty of Wordsmith College generally condescend. Nabokov himself endorsed this reading, stating in an interview in 1962 (the novel's year of publication) that ''Pale Fire'' "is full of plums that I keep hoping somebody will find. For instance, the nasty commentator is not an ex-King of Zembla nor is he professor Kinbote. He is professor Botkin, or Botkine, a Russian and a madman." The novel's intricate structure of teasing cross-references is apparent here. The Index, supposedly created by Kinbote, features an entry for a "Botkin, V," describing this Botkin as an "American scholar of Russian descent"—and referring back to a note in the Commentary on line 894 of Shade's poem, in which no such individual is directly mentioned. What the note to line 894 does feature, however, is an episode involving, among other people, a nosy academic who asks Kinbote/Charles/Botkin/Botkine unwelcome questions about his past, and then theorizes that Kinbote's name is a playful reassembly of the letters in "Botkin" or "Botkine."
In this interpretation, the "Gradus" who kills Shade is an American named Jack Grey who wanted to kill Judge Goldsworth, whose house "Pale Fire's" commentator -- whatever his "true" name is -- is renting. Goldsworth had condemned Grey to an asylum from which he escaped shortly before mistakenly killing Shade, who resembled Goldsworth.
Still other readers de-emphasize any sort of "real story" and may doubt the existence of such a thing. In the interplay of allusions and thematic links, they find a multifaceted image of English literature, criticism, literary idolatry,Vintage edition of ''Pale Fire,'' rear cover copy, 1989 politics, or some other topic.

Allusions and references

Like many of Nabokov's books, ''Pale Fire'' alludes to others. "Hurricane Lolita" is mentioned, and Pnin appears as a minor character.
The book is also full of references to culture, nature, and literature. Some have been greatly emphasized by critics; others may be trifles. Many feel the book is more enjoyable if the reader deciphers or pursues these references independently.

★ Bobolink

★ Maud Bodkin

★ Robert Browning, including "My Last Duchess" and ''Pippa Passes'' (inspired in a wood near Dulwich)

★ Cedar, including a colloquial American meaning, juniper

★ Charles II of England

★ Disa (orchid) and the butterflies ''Erebia disa'' and ''E. embla'' (which may lead to Disa and Embla)

★ T. S. Eliot and ''Four Quartets''

★ "''Der Erlkönig''"

★ Thomas Flatman

★ Edsel Ford (poet) and the poem "The Image of Desire"

★ ''Forever Amber''

★ Robert Frost

★ Oliver Goldsmith

★ Gutnish language

★ Bret Harte and his character Colonel Starbottle

★ Sherlock Holmes and "The Adventure of the Empty House"^[16]

★ A. E. Housman, including "To an Athlete Dying Young"

★ ''In Memoriam A.H.H.''

★ Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Boswell's ''Life of Johnson'' and Hodge

★ James Joyce

★ The ''Konungs skuggsjá'' or ''Royal Mirror''

★ Krummholz

★ Jean de La Fontaine

★ Franklin Knight Lane

★ Angus McDiarmid or MacDiarmid—see this page from the Glasgow Zoo

★ Novaya Zemlya

★ "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"

★ ''Papilio nitra'' and ''P. indra'' (now ''P. zelicaon indra'')

★ ''Parthenocissus''

★ Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift

★ Marcel Proust

★ Red Admiral

★ Alberto Santos-Dumont

★ Walter Scott, including "Lord Ronald's Coronach", ''The Lady of the Lake'', and '' The Pirate''

★ Robert Southey

★ ''Speyeria atlantis'' and ''S. diana'' (fritillaries)

★ Waxwing

★ Whites (butterfly)

★ Word golf

★ William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, including "Kubla Khan"

★ Lev Yashin

External links

★ Summary of a radio adaptation of ''Pale Fire'' broadcast in 2004 by BBC Radio 3

★ Nabokov Library - ''Pale Fire'' and other works by Nabokov

★ For Nabokovians at Zembla. Clicking on "Criticism" will reach a page with a chronology of ''Pale Fire'' and many essays about it, along with other writing on Nabokov's works.

References

1. Nabokov's World. Volume 2: Reading Nabokov, , Brian, Boyd, Palgrave, 2002, ISBN 0-333-96417-9
2. Strong Opinions, , Vladimir, Nabokov, McGraw-Hill, 1973, ISBN 0-679-72609-8 (Vintage reissue, 1990)
3. The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction, , Michael, Wood, Princeton University Press, 1994, ISBN 0-691-00632-6
4. The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, , Herbert, Grabes, Garland Publishing, Inc, 1995, ISBN 0-8153-0354-8 See also references therein.
5. Autobiography as Alchemy in ''Pale Fire'', , Robert, Alter, Cycnos, 1993
6. Nabokov and the Novel, , Ellen, Pifer, Harvard University Press, 1980,
7. Nabokov: His Life in Art, , Andrew, Field, Little, Brown, 1967,
8. Crystal Land: Artifice in Nabokov's English Novels, , Julia, Bader, University of California Press, 1972,
9. Vladimir Nabokov: the American Years, , Brian, Boyd, Princeton University Press, 1991, ISBN 0-691-06797-X
10. Escape into Aesthetics, , Page, Stegner, Dial, 1966,
11. Postmodernist Fiction, , Brian, McHale, Routledge, 1987, ISBN 0-415-04513-4
12. See also the archives of NABOKV-L for December 1997 and January 1998.
13. Nabokov, ''Speak, Memory''
14. The Annotated Lolita, , Alfred Jr. (ed.), Appel, Vintage Books, 1991, ISBN 0-679-72729-9 Appel's annotations to ''Lolita'' also address ''Pale Fire'', and "in place of a note on the text", Appel reproduces the last two paragraphs of Kinbote's foreword, which discuss poetry and commentary.
15. Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov, , D. Barton, Johnson, Ardis, 1985, ISBN 0-88233-908-7
16. The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, , Jonathan B., Sisson, Garland Publishing, Inc, 1995, ISBN 0-8153-0354-8