Final Thoughts

First ~ I have more ideas for my paper...the paper that never ended...usually once I turn them in, I let it go, but this one just won't do that...must be because of how Nabokov, and this class have rearranged my brain...once you know something, you cannot go back to ignorance...even if you want to in order to stop the cascade of random discoveries and thoughts that keep popping up. I will not elaborate because I have too much other work to finish tonight...

Second ~ I loved the presentations today, especially Jon's and Aaron's poem was awesome! I am counting on other blogs for a complete, more detailed summary of today's presentations....

Third ~ As difficult and frustrating as Nabokov has been (and will continue to be) for me, I am glad I had the chance to experience him with Dr. Sexson and all my amazing, inspiring, and brilliant classmates.

Fourth ~ I am a little concerned about the final, particularly the "intimate religious sacrifice"? That is ominous sounding....

Fifth ~ The final will be 25 questions - primarily derived from the class blogs, presentations (group and individual) and the final papers (which should be in the blogs).

I am sure I will think of at least 3 or 4 more things to say as I am falling asleep tonight, but I think this is the end of the blogging for this class for me...

If I could add to my paper...

After finishing (well, not really, as you can tell) my paper, more ideas haunted my day ~ showing me several key pieces of information and connections that would have been beneficial, and enhanced my term paper. Since I could not continue to work on the paper, I decided to add one more blog and share them here.

I am in another class with Sam, and when we were discussing the Lewis Hyde text Trickster Makes the World in Lynda Sexson's class this morning, Dr. Sexson read a passage about Jung discussing Mercurius (aka Hermes) on page 181 "Mercurius consists of all conceivable opposites....He is the process by which the lower and material is transformed into the higher and spiritual, and vice versa. He is the devil, a redeeming psychopomp, an evasive trickster, and God's reflection in physical nature". (my emphasis) That reflection in nature of God would have added another layer of texture to my Jungian discussion of reflections in water. I might have also used it to connect Nabokov, as the 'god' figure using his imagination and reflection to create a fictional world in the text he created. God created the 'real' world and Nabokov created a world within his work - parallel mirroring.

I should have also explored Nabokov's dislike of sleep, how he felt it was a loss of consciousness and was repulsive to him. Again, just another layer added to what has already been said.

I wish I had further elaborated on the "tension film" I briefly discussed from Transparent Things. It could have become a much deeper, more complex aspect of my discussion of reflection and mirroring.

I originally planned to talk more about anagrams, palindromes, etc. as well as just physical reflections using words and language, to really bring word play and world play together more fully.

So, maybe you could pretend I included these ideas in my final paper...or as more food for thought...

This is my final blog for English 431 ~ Good Luck on the final and have a great holiday break!

Final Paper

Time has just flown by...I cannot believe the semester is just about over. So, here is my final paper for the class...revised (again)

Playing with Worlds, Playing with Words

One of the aspects of the literature of Nabokov that has fascinated and astonished me this semester has been the way he uses words. He twists, pulls, tweaks, and remolds language and words into a completely new form to retexturize the words and their meanings, giving texture to the text. One of the main tools Nabokov uses throughout his works, which is especially prevalent in Pale Fire, is reflection. Mirrors, water, anagrams, palindromes, doppelgangers, twins, and doubles are just a handful of the many devices Nabokov uses to create the textured reflections in the texts. In Pale Fire, Nabokov does not just play with worlds; he plays with words. In Partial Magic, Robert Alter says,

“…it is obvious that the texture of Shade’s poem and it informing sensibility are far from Popean prosody, but the disparity is quite to the point, for Pale Fire is in part about how literature reuses literature, assimilates it and makes something strange and new out of it” (Alter, p. 201)

This quote resonates with Nabokov’s explanation of readers, "Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader." – Nabokov, "Good Readers and Good Writers". Nabokov is both a perceptive rereader and an elegant reuser of literature. In his rewriting of literature, he alters the substance and makes something new out of it. In Pale Fire, he molds a poem and commentary into a novel. This is only the most elementary layer of the magic and texture he adds to the reflections of literature. It is both a reflection of other literature, such as Pope’s poetry and his own epic commentary on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, and a new type of literature at the same time, a shade of previous works, yet a light all its own. This reflection of light and dark is another prevailing theme throughout the text. Nabokov layers the tensions within the novel by juxtaposing the light against the dark, the sun’s light reflecting off the moon to create a new kind of light, a pale fire.

The poem Pale Fire begins, “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” (Pale, 33) and the Index ends with “Zembla, a distant northern land” (Pale, 315), which is a mirrored, magical world beyond “reality”. The mirror images, literal and figurative, abound, between the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega. The reflections often double back and fold in and over themselves in layers, creating lemniscates or spirals, creating layers upon layers of intrigue, building the texture, richer, thicker, and more intricate.

In the Forward of Pale Fire, Charles Kinbote tells us,

"I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse" (Pale, 27).

John Shade is creating a brilliant poem by transforming and re-combining the elements (of language – words) into something magical and completely unique. Though Kinbote says this concerning Shade, we know it is really Nabokov speaking and being spoken about. The “unique physiological phenomenon” is the entire novel. In class, we have seen and discussed how exactly and precisely Nabokov crafted his texts - every word, every phrase, and every reflection intentional and deliberate.

Nabokov rereads, rewrites, and recreates previous texts, making the words all his own. He is speaking about, to, and through literary history. In order to understand the textures of Nabokov’s text, the reader must also be a rereader of the text, and even then, there will always remain elusive textures. His work is a reflection of other kinds and forms of literature, as well as specific works themselves. He relights the fire of the words in a mirror image of the previous uses. Some seem evident, such as when Shade asks “Will” to help him with a title for the poem. Our discussion with Dr. Minton and subsequent discussions showed that the ‘obvious’ explication may not be correct, or that there may be layers and textures beyond and beneath the visible. “Will” is most likely William Shakespeare, but Dr. Sexson made a case for it to potentially be William Yeats. Similarly, ghosts in Transparent Things can reach through the surface of objects to all the textures below the obvious surface.

The reflection and mirroring even play a role in his ‘biography’ Speak, Memory,

In the purity and vacuity of the less familiar hour, the shadows

were on the wrong side of the street, investing it with a sense of not

inelegant inversion, as when one sees reflected in the mirror of a barber-

shop . . . a stretch of sidewalk shunting a procession of unconcerned

pedestrians in the wrong direction, into an abstract world that all at once

stops being droll and loosens a torrent of terror. (Speak, Memory, 296)

Nabokov plays with worlds, even when he is describing his personal “reality”. In Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery Brian Boyd says,

Nabokov dons the mask of a reviewer of his autobiography, and writes, among amusingly disparaging comments, of the "retrospective acumen and creative concentration that the author had to summon in order to plan his book according to the way his life had been planned by unknown players of games."

Nabokov plays games with worlds, in all the texts we have discussed in class, but I think the most complex is Pale Fire. If Nabokov is a player of games with his own “reality”, does that make his own reality as fractured as Kinbote’s appears to be? Did his incredible genius with language and words come from a disjointed world within Nabokov’s own world and mind? Was the magic a produce of madness or genius, and is there a difference? To read and reread Nabokov, is to find more questions than answers within the texture beneath the textual surface.

Near the end of Canto Three of the poem Pale Fire are the words, “this/ Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme; / Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream/ But topsy-turvical coincidence, / Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense” (Pale, 62-63) Nabokov builds a web, to trap the reader. In doing so, he combines the reader with the text, trapping the reader in the texture beneath the text, bringing “reality” and reflection together in harmony. Coincidences are what logicians loathe and poets love. Nabokov uses coincidences to ensnare the reader and reflect deception and duplicity.

One of the types of reflections Nabokov uses is looking into still water. This form of reflection is used in the Greek myth of Narcissus and beyond, reflecting the self. "Water," Carl Jung says, "is the commonest symbol for the unconscious". (Jung, C.G. Collected Works 9,1: 18, par. 40) Many of the water and mirror reflections occur in the commentary, when Kinbote is embellishing his tale of Zembla, the reflected inner world of Kinbote’s “reality”. Dreams are directly linked to the imagination through the unconscious mind; thus, the reflection in the water is a dream or altered world. Nabokov uses Kinbote and his imaginary world of Zembla to mirror his childhood in Russia and his family’s exile during the Bolshevik Revolution.

Jung delineated five main archetypes, including the Shadow, which he said is “the opposite of the ego image, often containing qualities that the ego does not identify with but possesses nonetheless”. Jung also believed that "in spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness—or perhaps because of this—the shadow is the seat of creativity”. (Kaufman, C. Three-Dimensional Villains: Finding Your Character's Shadow. http://archetypewriting.com/articles/articles_ck/archetypes2_shadow.htm) The light and the dark create the whole of the self. “Anyone who perceives his Shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle. (Jung, C.G. Collected Works l0: Civilization in Transition: 872, p 463.) Kinbote is the Shadow to Shade’s light; together they create a whole, a reflection of each other, mirroring the conscious and unconscious mind, weaving “reality” and imagination into a “complex web of sense” for the reader. Nabokov texturizes the web with the mundane and unexpected with the “realities” of the two characters. Because of his penchant for playing with worlds and words, the character that represents the light is, contrarily, named Shade, which signifies the dark, the Shadow, the world beyond the veil. A world Shade desperately wants to understand, but is beyond his reach.

Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind
Of correlated pattern in the game,
Plexed artistry, and something of the same
Pleasure in it as they who played it found.

It did not matter who they were. No sound,
No furtive light came from their involute
Abode, but there they were, aloof and mute,
Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns
To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns....

The artistry and pleasure is in the play. The inventing and playing of games within the layers of the text creates the “correlated pattern” in the game of writing and reading. The game is to find the patterns reflected in the texture of the text and the web of complexities inherent in Nabokov’s play with worlds and words. He uses familiar and ordinary literary forms, such as poetry and commentary, to create an extraordinary novel. In order to experience the texture within the text, one must be a rereader, and willing to play a game of words and worlds.

***NOTE*** My paper ended up going in a completely different and surprising direction from where I had thought it would go, but when where the imagination and play took me. As a reader and rereader of Nabokov, I can say, without a doubt, that I will never look at a text the same way again. I will continue to reread Pale Fire and explore other works by Nabokov. The patterns, reflections, and complex layers thrill and astound me as a lover of both texts and games of words. Thanks for such a complex, confounding, enlightening, and textured exploration of Nabokov’s texts.

SOURCES

Alter, Robert. Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre. Berkeley: University Of California Press, 1975

Boyd, Brian. Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Jung, C.G. Collected Works 9,1: 18, par. 40.

Jung, C.G. Collected Works l0: Civilization in Transition: 872, p 463.

Kaufman, C. Three-Dimensional Villains: Finding Your Character's Shadow. http://archetypewriting.com/articles/articles_ck/archetypes2_shadow.htm

Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Vintage International, 1989.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Transparent Things. New York: Literary Classics, 1996.

Paper Presentations - Day #1

Congrats to all the people who presented the first day. The topics and papers were creative, entertaining, and thought provoking.

I really liked the creative pieces - hope you had fun writing them.

To the people who presented unexpectedly - fantastic job stepping up and sharing your ideas, and plans.

Christina - Amazing paper and great job reading it for us. I enjoyed hearing your ideas in your own voice.

To those yet to present - the first day set the bar pretty high, but I expect there will be many more great discoveries and surprises ahead. I am looking forward to hearing more next week.

Fun Anagrams

I found a site with anagrams from literature, movies and more...here are a few of my favorites. (the link is first in my links section)

Erewhon = Nowhere
The author Samuel Butler titled his satirical novel as an angram; incidentally, the word "nowhere" is a literal translation of the Greek utopia.

Redrum = Murder
In "The Shining", a horror movie based on Stephen King's novel of the same name. Danny, holding a knife, shouts REDRUM and writes it with a lipstick on a bathroom mirror. His mother sees in the reflection that it's MURDER spelled backwards.

Torchwood = Doctor Who
BBC science fiction series Torchwood is a spinoff of Dr. Who.

Gregory House = Huge ego, sorry
In the television series House, in the episode titled "Housetraining", the character Dr. House says his name, Gregory House, is an anagram for "Huge ego, sorry."

Memory Almost Full = For my soulmate LLM
Paul McCartney's 2007 album is titled Memory Almost Full. LLM are the initials of Linda Louise McCartney, his wife who died of breast cancer in 1998.

Salvador Dali = Avida Dollars
Andre Breton, the founder of surrealism, came up with this anagram to refer to Dali. Avida Dollars means, roughly, 'eager for dollars' in Spanish.

Group #2 Script

Here is the script from "The Vivian Darkbloom Show" aka the Group #2 Presentation, if anyone is interested. It is not exact as some last minute and improv changes were made, but the basic ideas are there:

VD – Welcome to the Vivian Darkbloom Show, I am you your host, Vivian Darkbloom. Today my guests are characters from Vladimir Nabokov’s novels Lolita and Pale Fire.

My first guest today is the elusive American dramatist Mr. Claire Quilty, educated at Columbia and known for plays such as “The Girl who Loved Lightning” and “Fatherly Love”.

CQ – Darkbloom, hmmm, sounds like a made up name…

VD – I can assure you Mr. Quilty, I am as real as you are.

CQ – I see I’ll have to remember that name. Might want to use it later on.

VD - Next is Miss Delores Haze, also known as Lolita and is accompanied by her stepfather Mr. Humbert Humbert, who is the novel’s narrator.

HH – says _______________________________________________________________

VD - And from Pale Fire, I am happy to introduce Zemblan commentator Mr. Charles Kinbote, also known as Charles the Beloved.

VD - Our final guest today is the daughter of famous poet John Shade. She is The Lady of the Lake, Miss Hazel Shade.

HS & CK – REDIPS!!!

VD – We will start out with a little icebreaker to get everyone talking. What are your hobbies?

HH – My hobbies are chess, writing, and road trips. And I enjoy sitting on a park bench, holding a book, while the soothing sounds of children splash my ears.

LO – I like playing tennis, acting, and going to the movies.

CQ – My hobbies are fast cars, photography, and pets.

VD-And what kinds of pets do you have?

CQ-I have many...(looks at Lolita)

CK –Well Vivian, In Zembla, I often entertained myself with my “boy pages, a whole mountain of gift boys from Troth, and Tuscany, and Albanoland” but my favorite playmate was certainly my dear Oleg, Duke or Rahl However now that I am living here in New Wye, I spend most of my time gazing in the windows of the Shade home.

HS – Reading, in my room, ALONE. Knitting. Swimming late at night, in the lake.

VD - Though some people may find this question too Freudian, I must ask, “How do you feel about being a character in a novel?”

CK – Well Mrs. Darkbloom let me say that I am not surprised in the least, firstly I am sure that I already exist in many history textbooks in my native Zembla and our poet and my dear friend John Shade wrote his poem Solus Rex about my fascinating life and me…

HS – No. The poem Pale Fire “might have been about you, me, or some quaint blend”. I am horrified that my father turned my suffering into entertainment.

CK – Absurd! Ahh yes I know about you, Jane Provost told me all about you. It is clearly about me and my fantastic escape from Zembla. “But then it is also true that Hazel Shade resembles me in certain respects” how very fortunate for you (looking at hazel)

VD – Moving on, Mr. Humbert?

HH – I wrote the novel about myself, so I planned to be in it. My story seems to have bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. I elude my own slippery self, and have tried in vain to find who I am. So I welcome any exploration into the deep abyss of my soul, and prostrate myself before the winged gentle man of the jury.

VD – Miss Haze?

LO – Whatever...I guess it's cool....it doesn't surprise me that this brute would write an entire book about me.

VD – And you? (Addressing CQ)

CQ – I don’t think I am really in that book.

VD – I would not have invited you to be on the show today if you were not in the novel.

CQ – You prove to me that I’m in the book and I’ll believe you.

LO has fit, interrupt at the end of CQ’s line.

DAD you promised me we were going to go see a movie...you know, the western...the one with the cowboys and indians...and now we're HERE at this stupid TV show?

HH- Need I remind you, darling, of the desolate place I will take where we will spend years in seclusion, if need be, studying Latin and French. Enfant charmate et foubre (sly and lovely child)

VD – OK, we must get back on topic now please. You all steal and become thieves in some way, why is that?

CK – Vivian let me cut you off there as you are clearly referring to my family, the Zemblan royal family, and our crown jewels and our throne stolen from us by the extremists.

HS – No, you fool. She means because you stole my dad’s poem.

LO – (looking back and forth between HH and CQ) they both stole my life.

HH – You stole my heart, delicious daughter, with your wily ways.

CQ – You came to me.

HH – What did you say?

CQ – I said, “I saw a bee.”

CK – Ahh, yes, yes bees! Yes I once knew a beautiful man boy beekeeper, he worked in the royal mows at our palace. A mow being the Zemblan word for a field next to a barn of course!

LO – OMG not this stuff again. Shut him up.

CQ – Where’d you get her?

HH – Hmmm?

CQ – I said, “The weather’s getting better.” Who’s the girl?

HH – My daughter.

CQ – No, she’s not.

HH – What?

CQ – I said, “July was really hot.”

LO-(interrupts) When will this be over? I just want to go now...

HH – Hush. I will get you an ice cream as soon as we are done.

LO – Pedophile.

HH – I can’t help it if I suffer from excessive desire.

CQ-What ever happened to strength and reverence?

VD – Human beings attend! If you all cannot get along, I will have to stop reading, close my book and you will cease to exist until the book is opened again. Vladimir Nabokov, who created you all, has a great love for the game of chess. If you were a chess piece, which piece would you be? (Confusion and questioning who VN is…yes or no on this, we have not been using it while practicing)

CK – mmm of course you are referring to Solus Rex, the chess problem in which the king is left alone on the board. This is why my friend John Shade wrote about me and why the poem was meant to be entitled Solus Rex, I am clearly the king piece! And soo… (cut CK off here)

HH – Solus Rex is an inferior move. I am of course the knight protecting my Frigid Queen.

LO – Well, I guess that makes me the queen. Gee, thanks for answering that one for me, DAD. And while we're on the topic, SHE would be a pawn because pawns are useless, common, and ugly.

HS – XANAX or another silly nonsense phrase (crying)

CQ – (jumps in) Chess, hmmm, nope don’t play chess. Too much deception. Too much strategy. Kind of beneath a man of my ilk. Besides I’m a terrible liar.

VD – Back to our rational discussion if you please. Since there has been so much disagreement, I am going to try something different now. I am going to ask you each to talk about another guest. What mythic character would another guest be?

CK – Vivian I am going to have to cut you off again because I think we can all agree that no one here is really qualified to make any commentary on a man like myself! So let me just say that I would certainly be considered Zeus, as he is king of the gods and I am a king myself, what could be more fitting! Although I did once overhear someone, I think it was Sybil Shade, say that I was more akin to Narcissus which make very little sense indeed! ( take out mirror and admires self)

HH – my Lolita is, of course, the Goddess Venus, and Hazel over there is Mania, the very personification of insanity, Goddess of the dead and nights spirits.

HS – She (looking at LO) must be Persephone because she gets raped.

LO – At least I get some.

CQ silences the girls before it goes further.

CQ – You, Mr. Humbert are Acteaon from my play, The Enchanted Hunters

LO – On that topic, Vivian, Mr. Quilty here would be Pan, who is said to be the companion and seducer of nymphs, as well as the god of theatrical criticism...seeing as you write plays and all....

HH – Lolita, darling, don’t talk to strangers.

CQ – I’d hardly consider myself a stranger.

HH starts to pull a gun, realizing who CQ is, everyone begins talking loudly over one another and VD closes the book. Everyone stops.

VD – Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.

Good night and thank you for watching the Vivian Darkbloom Show. Tune in tomorrow when my guest will be Mr. Hugh Person.

Helena will be posting the Group Presentation Blog for our group.

Initial Impressions

My initial impressions of Transparent Things was one of confusion, which is not surprising given the author and topic. My main struggle was figuring out who the narrators were. I knew they were shades, ghosts, specters, 'transparent things' from the beginning. The 'we' and the language changes indicated there were more than one, but the questioning of who it was made me feel the narrator was unreliable, like Kinbote and Humbert. The discussion about the narrator in class helped me a lot, and I am sure will enhance my second reading of Transparent Things.

Briefly looking for more information about the novel, I found the following on the Zembla website:

Transparent Things

Transparent Things, Nabokov's 16th novel, and 7th in English, McGraw-Hill, 1972. (Transparent Things can be found in many public libraries and is available online from Available from Amazon.com and from Barnes & Noble.)

"In matters of art, 'avant garde' means little more than conforming to some daring philistine fashion, so, when the curtain opened, Hugh was not surprised to be regaled with the sight of a naked hermit sitting on a cracked toilet in the middle of an empty stage."

Awkward American Hugh Person is sent to Switzerland to interview R., a novelist represented by the Publishing firm Person works for. He meets and falls in love with sensuous, sullen Armande, and their odd courtship and marriage, coupled with R.'s literary observations, shape the events of the novel. Diaphanous, dream-like, fleeting, Transparent Things explores the interaction between memory and observation in a delicate yet precise style.

"Once more he has managed to shape a formless, potentially threatening reality into a precise and transparent work of literary art while continually demonstrating for the benefit of attentive and imaginative readers the exact means employed for bringing about this transformation."
Simon Karlinsky

Akiko Nakata's Notes to Transparent Things [in Japanese, with images]
A Bibliography of Critical Works on Transparent Things

I love the Simon Karlinsky quote...elegant, concise, and insightful. I look forward to exploring the bibliography linked above for more discussion of the book (Hope I can find some of the articles). The Akiko Nakata site is full of interesting articles on Nabokov and his works.

Time to go be a rereader...

Transparent Things

I am noticing many familiar images, and themes, such as doubles, mirroring, chess, adult men fantasizing over pictures of naked young girls, changing words, butterflies, and contact with the other side/ghosts. These are clearly things that Nabokov thought about a lot since they reoccur in many of his works.

T.T. is definitely the easiest read so far, though the layers and complexities are still there too.

Quiz #2

How can I attend lecture, read the texts, articles and blogs, and still do so badly (according to my personal grade expectations for myself)? I felt more confident before this test, yet I scored lower than on the first one...uggggg.....frustrating sometimes.

Now, on to explore Transparent Things and work on group projects and the term paper.

Quote

"Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader."

– Nabokov, "Good Readers and Good Writers" (3)


I love this quote, which is, of course, especially true when reading (or rereading) works by Nabokov. He really took the idea of rereading to heart when designing and writing his novels, particularly Pale Fire.

Rant

I have to say, I get frustrated when I am told to see note to line --- in a note about another line. It is annoying enough flipping between the commentary and the poem. On page 216 Kinbote says "The reader should notice the nice response to line 312" except there is no note for line 312!!!!!

Then on page 217, he sends us to a note on line 550 (which is at least really there) but theorically shouldn't have been written yet because we are only on line 493. I get referring back to a previous note, but referencing a future note????

I am sure there is a purpose, given that we are discussing Nabokov, but I am not sure, at this point, what it is other than to annoy me. Can anyone tell me what I am not seeing here????

Narrator

Who's the Narrator of Nabokov's Pale Fire? William C. Dowling Rutgers University

Almost since the moment Nabokov's Pale Fire was published, readers have been engaged in a complex argument about who the "real" narrator of the story is.

The controversy among Nabokovians has separated into three possibilities: (1) The real narrator is the person corresponding to John Shade, who does not really die but composes a work in which he makes his own death an incident so that he can go on and compose a commentary to his own completed poem: "Man's life as commentary to abstruse / Unfinished poem." (2) The real narrator is the person corresponding to Kinbote (Botkin), who writes a poem and imagines the death of the poet so as to have an excuse to tell the story he is really interested in -- the magical tale of his lost kingdom of Zembla and his escape and exile. Or (3) there really are two narrators in Pale Fire, one corresponding to Shade, one to Kinbote.

In his brilliant book Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery, Brian Boyd gives a complete review of these positions, with all the evidence and counter evidence, before presenting his own "two narrator" solution. I'm not going to repeat Boyd's summary here, but will simply refer you to his account of the various positions.

Nor will I attempt to recapitulate Boyd's "two narrator" solution. In brief, he thinks that, in a poem and commentary much concerned with the life of consciousness in "another realm" after physical death, that the ghosts of both Hazel Shade and John Shade exert pressure on the narrative at various points, sending "coded" messages that account for the resonances and reverberations between the poem and commentary.

So what's right? Who is the "real" narrator of Pale Fire.

Let me put my cards on the table. I think that John Shade and Kinbote are creations of a narrator resembling Vladimir Nabokov, and that this narrator "shows himself" at a certain crucial point in a way that cannot be denied.

But here's what I don't mean. I don't mean that the narrator corresponds in any sense to the "real" Vladimir Nabokov -- that is, the Russian emigre writer who today lies buried in a cemetary in Montreux, Switzerland.

Nabokov when he was alive believed in art as something like the ultimate reality. If he explicitly survived in his art as "Nabokov" -- as he does, for instance, as the narrator of the novel Pnin, where he appears as rather an unpleasant character -- it would have to be as a presence IN the story.

That's what I think is happening in Pale Fire: the Nabokov-like narrator is telling the story as a voice that, if it survives, will have exactly the same status as John Shade and Kinbote.

What, then, about all those ghosts and voices and "communications from beyond"? I think the Nabokov-like narrator is saying something like this: "A work of art originates in the consciousness of a creator, but it does so in a manner of speaking 'from the outside' ." This is what the ancient invocation of the Muses was about. It is what John Shade goes through in parts of the poem Pale Fire. When the creator has finished a work of art, he's still present in the world, but there is this 'other him' that is caught forever in the words of the work that has come to birth through him."

The Sublime Relay Race

So you can read Pale Fire like this. There is are consciousnesses in the world that belong to literary geniuses like Shakespeare, Puskin, and Nabokov. But when the "real" Nabokov who escaped from Russia and came to the United States begins work on Pale Fire, his consciousness "passes into" John Shade and becomes, for the nonce, the American poet who writes Pale Fire. Then this same consciousness "passes into" Kinbote and becomes, for the nonce, the mad commentator of Pale Fire. Then, as this consciousness leaves Kinbote, it briefly shows itself as a "third consciousness" identical neither with Shade nor Kinbote.

The end of the "passing through" period -- what involves consciousness passing on and leaving the completed work behind -- is in each case represented as a death. For John Shade, it is getting killed by the bullet of an assassin. For Kinbote, it is when his commentary and notes begin, as he says, "petering out," and he realizes that he will have no more existence when the commentary is done. For the "third narrator," it is the spectre that briefly appears at the very end of the book -- "a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus" -- and shows that he is aware that an actual death lies ahead for him, as it does for all mortals.

The moment at which I see Shade "dying" and Kinbote coming into existence as a narrator is, therefore, the moment of Gradus's assassination attempt. What happens in terms of Kinbote's mad fantasy is that the Extremist assassin is aiming at him, the exiled King, and hits Shade by mistake. But watch carefully and you'll see the "transmigration of consciousness" from one narrator to the next as the manuscript of the poem Pale Fire passes from poet to commentator:

I instinctively backed, bellowing and spreading my great strong arms (with my left hand still holding the poem) in an effort to halt the advancing madman and shield John, whom I feared he might, quite accidentally, hit. . . . I felt -- I still feel -- John's hand fumbling at mine, seeking my fingertips, finding them, only to abandon them at once as if passing to me, in a sublime relay race, the baton of life.

Here is the evidence for my reading.

Gradus

On the "naturalistic" level, the man who kills John Shade is just Jack Grey, an escaped lunatic from a local hospital for the criminally insane.

In Kinbote's exiled-king fantasy, Grey becomes "Gradus," a dull-witted assassin who is sent by the Extremist party to kill the exiled king of Zembla. In the Commentary, we get detailed accounts of Gradus -- his pursuit of Charles the Beloved, his travels, his search for clues, etc -- until he finally arrives on the campus of Wordsmith University. In Kinbote's mad fantasy, therefore, Gradus didn't mean to kill Shade. He is just a dullwitted bungler who, aiming at Charles II, the exiled King of Zembla, misses his aim and hits the American poet instead.

All that's fine, but there is one problem. Gradus doesn't start out by being a killer or assassin in any normal sense. What he IS is the "death" that occurs when, the consciousness of an artist having "passed into" a speaker or character inside a work of art, the work is completed and its creator is marooned outside it. Gradus is the moment at which the spirit of a creator is immortalized in a work of art and the poet or artist goes back temporarily to being just an ordinary human being. This is why Kinbote goes to such lengths to synchronize the approach of the "assassin" Gradus with the actual writing of the poem Pale Fire:

We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem, following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words (see note to line 596), reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night.

Shade's "death," in short, is simply the moment at which the poem Pale Fire comes to an end (with one missing line, which would have been, as Kinbote observes, identical to the first line and a completion of an elaborately symmetrical 1000-line poem).

But why, then, can't the "real" narrator of Pale Fire be the person who corresponds to Kinbote, the mad commentator who survives Shade?

Here's why.

Access to a Good Library

The conclusive evidence that the narrator of Pale Fire can't be either Shade or Kinbote comes at the very end of the sequence that has him arriving in the United States. Being a dullwitted fellow, Gradus is at a loss about how to kill the time that he has to spend in New York before his plane leaves for the airport at Exton.

Gradus settles on a bench in Central Park and reads the New York Times. As always in Nabokov's fiction, a careful reader is given the exact day of the Times that Gradus is reading. Here is the passage. It's long, but it's also perhaps the most important in Pale Fire:

He began with the day's copy of The New York Times. His lips moving like wrestling worms, he read about all kinds of things. . . . The United States was about to launch its first atom-driven merchant ship (just to annoy the Ruskers, of course, J.G.) Last night in Newark, an apartment house at 555 South Street was hit by a thunderbolt that smashed a TV set and injured two people watching an actress lost in a violent studio storm (those tormented spirits are terrible! C.X.K. teste J.S.). The Rachel Jewelry Company in Brooklyn advertised in agate type for a jewelry polisher who "must have experience in costume jewelry" (oh, Degre had!). The Helman brothers said they had assisted in the negotiations for the placement of a sizable note: $11,000,000, Decker Glass Manufacturing Company, Inc., note due July 1, 1979, and Gradus, grown young again, reread this twice, with the background gray thought, perhaps, that he would be sixty-four four days after that (no comment). . . . A pro-Red revolt had erupted in Iraq. Asked about the Soviet exhibition at the New York Coliseum, Carl Sandburg, a poet, replied, and I quote, "They make their appeal on the highest of intellectual levels." A hack reviewer of new books for tourists, reviewing his own tour through Norway, said that the fjords were too famous to need (his) description, and that all Scandinavians loved flowers. And at a picnic for international children a Zemblan moppet cried to her Japanese friend: Ufgut, ufgut, velkam ut Semberland!" (Adieu, adieu, till we meet in Zembla!) I confess it has been a wonderful game--this looking up in the WUL of various ephemerides over the shadow of a padded shoulder.

The "I" of the final sentence is the narrator of Pale Fire. I'll explain in detail in a moment why this must be so, but let me make the logical argument clear: (1) "WUL" means "Wordsmith University Library," which means that the "I" of the final sentence must at this very moment be present in New Wye, Appalachia, the home of Wordsmith University; (2) John Shade cannot be present in New Wye because he is dead, and his poem, to which this is a commentary, is in the hands of Kinbote, writing away in a mountain cabin in distant Cedarn, Utana, and (3) Kinbote, of course, also can't be looking at old copies of the New York Times, because he is not only several thousand miles away, but does not have access to any library at all.

This last point is especially important. Throughout the commentary, Kinbote remarks again and again that he is working without access to reference books.

So, for instance, when Shade writes in the poem Pale Fire about his encounter with a certain "Mrs. Z," Kinbote goes out of his way to protest that he doesn't consider such merely "factual" matters part of his responsibility: "Anybody having access to a good library could, no doubt, easily trace that story to its source and find the name of the lady; but such humdrum potterings are beneath true scholarship."

In the Index, however, in the entry under "Kinbote, Charles, Dr.," there occurs a quite different account of this same omission: "his not being able, owing to some psychological block or the fear of a second G [Gradus], of traveling to a city only sixty or seventy miles distant, where he would certainly have found a good library, 747."

Kinbote's fear of a "second Gradus" is not unreasonable, because it is precisely someone with "access to a good library" who is in a position to identify the "I" who is looking over the padded shoulder of the imaginary Gradus as he reads a real New York Times in Central Park, and so to put an end to the imaginary reality in which Kinbote has dwelt since the moment of Shade's death.

Still, the careful inclusion of what should be ascertainable or public facts is always a sign in Nabokov's fiction that layers of reality are being peeled back to expose a more fundamental reality. In Nakokov's Pnin, for instance, the protagonist of the story solves the problem of the "relativity of time" in Tolstoi's Anna Karenina by linking certain events in the story to their corresponding newspaper accounts.

The New York Times Gradus is holding is that for Monday, July 20, 1959. A few minutes in the newspaper files of any major library very quickly turns up the various items about which he reads while sitting there on his bench in Central Park. Carl Sandburg appears, for instance, in an story entitled "Two Octogenarians Hail Soviet Fair--Both Sandburg and Steichen Pleased by Coliseum Show." "Of the Soviet exhibition, Mr. Sandburg said," says the Times reporter, "'They make their appeal on the highest of intellectual levels'." Another item is this: "Pro-Red Revolt Erupts in Iraq." On page 12 is a story ("30 Children Join Picnic of Nations") corresponding to Kinbote's "Zemblan" revoicing: "When the party ended the children shook hands and embraced. A Swedish girl told her Japanese friend: "Adjo, adjo, valcommen till Sverige!" Good-by, Good-by, welcome to Sweden!") The "hack reviewer" of Kinbote's account turns out to be Orville Prescott, who says, among other things that "Norway's fjords are too famous to need description" and "All Scandinavians love flowers." In the following day's Times, Kinbote's "Rachel Jewelry Company" corresponds to an actual ad by the Charel Jewelry Company in Brooklyn: "Jewelry polishers. Must have experience on costume jewelry. Charel Jewelry Co, 620 62 St. Bklyn." And so on.

In short, Gradus is imaginary -- we knew that -- but then Kinbote is also imaginary -- we may have suspected that -- and Shade is imaginary as well. The narrator of Pale Fire has been, all along, the "I" who at a crucial moment in the narrative ties his story to real or ascertainable events that then situate him in a university library in upstate New York, leafing through an actual New York Times for July 21, 1959.

The Narrator Unmasked

The details in the Gradus passage do not need a great deal of explanation. The parenthetical comments are all traceable to the "I" who here situates himself in the Wordsmith University Library, speaking in one or another of the voices he has created in the story to this point. Thus "J.G." reacts predictably to the story that the United States is launching an atomic-powered ship "just to annoy the Ruskers" because the Extremists for whom Jacob Gradus works are an extension and tool of the Soviet Union.

Thus, too, "C.X.K." (Charles Xavier Kinbote) sees the lightning that strikes the house in the Times story as belonging to tormented souls because he has, under the influence of a poem by John Shade, come to think of all forms of electricity as embodiments of the souls of the dead. The sentiment is witnessed or authenticated by John Shade ("teste, J.S.") because the original thought was expressed in his poem "The Nature of Electricity": "The dead, the gentle dead--who knows?--/In tungsten filaments abide, / And on my bedside table glows / Another man's departed bride. . . . /And when above the livid plain / Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell / The torments of a Tamerlane, / The roar of tryants torn in hell."

The slippage in narrative voice that begins as this narrator's "Kinbote personality" starts to dissolve is carefully prepared for in Pale Fire. Earlier in the story, in one of the passages in which Kinbote undergoes remorseful dreams for the pain he has caused his long-suffering wife Disa, he has seen himself cut off from her by a large anonymous audience:

He absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an American businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead.

Disa has, of course, become a character in a novel (Pale Fire), and that is the fate that awaits Kinbote himself as his commentary draws to an end and the work goes out to a large anonymous public that neither Kinbote nor his creator will live to see. The picture that more and more confronts Kinbote is precisely that of a lecturer looking out at an auditorium, a speech to humanity that is also a speech into the void:

Well folks, I guess many in this fine hall are as hungry and thirsty as me, and I'd better stop, folks, right here. Yes, better stop. My notes and self are petering out. Gentlemen, I have suffered very much, and more than any of you can imagine. I pray for the Lord's benediction to rest on my wretched countrymen. My work is finished. My poet is dead.

There are many kinds of slippage in this short passage: the drop into an American idiom that Kinbote would never use, the equation of "notes" and "self," the hint that "his poet" has in a certain sense been kept alive by the transmigration that has allowed the same consciousness that once dwelt within the Shade of the poem Pale Fire to then dwell for a time within the consciousness of Kinbote. And what the slippage reveals is someone instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with the biography of Vladimir Nabokov. "What will you be doing with yourself, poor King, poor Kinbote?" a voice asks. The answer: "I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art."

It is only at this point that the imagined audience of Pale Fire suddenly understands that it may ask the same question of this exiled Russian writer: "And you, poor narrator, what will you be doing with yourself?" The answer is clear-sighted and resolute: he will exist in his art, knowing, however, that such existence is limited by a final silencing of the voice that has transmigrated through Shade and Kinbote and the "I" who spends an afternoon in the newspaper archives of the Wordsmith University Library, who has assigned the name Gradus to the "death" that is the fate of a purely literary voice when its creator has moved on to dwell within another fictive consciousness: "Whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out--somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed . . . and presently he will ring at my door--a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus." This is the final silencing of the artistic voice, the death that is shared alike by literary genius and ordinary mortals.

That leaves untouched, of course, the "puzzle of consciousness" -- and, in particular, of consciousness as it may exist beyond physical death -- as Brian Boyd and others have addressed it as the central theme of Nabokov's writing. I will deal in another note on the solution to that problem that seems to me implicit in my own account of the narrator problem in Pale Fire.

Copyright (c) 2003 by William C. Dowling

Dowling, William C. “Who’s the Narrator of Nabokov’s Pale Fire?” 2003. http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~wcd/palenarr.htm

Oswin Bretwit

Shade and Shape in Pale Fire
by Brian Boyd
page seven of nine

Change of Key

Since Nabokov feels sure that if there is something beyond human consciousness, it cannot be conceived in human terms (See Boyd, Nabokov's Ada, 67-88), he does not linger long at these levels. He returns rapidly from the cosmic to the comic, from the playfulness of those who play the game of worlds to the pieces we can see being moved across the board.

Or to make the transition another way: as a scientist, Nabokov knew that there were often many paths to discovery, and as an artist he would therefore hide, and then have us seek, multiple maps to still more deeply hidden secrets. Let us explore just one more way in which he has Shade sign himself, as it were, into the Gradus theme.

Nabokov loved and imitated magicians from his childhood and knew how to divert attention and lull us into discounting clues. When Kinbote writes in the note to line 286, "If two secret agents belonging to rival factions meet in a battle of wits, and if one has none, the effect may be droll; it is dull if both are dolts. I defy anybody to find in the annals of plot and counterplot anything more inept and boring than the scene that occupies the rest of this conscientious note" (177), it should be a sign to the experienced reader of Nabokov to watch closely what his hands are doing.

While Kinbote echoes "pale fire" several times within his commentary, Shade echoes it only once in his poem: line 286, "A jet's pink trail above the sunset fire." Ever eager to be acknowledged as Shade's muse, Kinbote overlooks the echo of the title but comments immediately that like Sybil, whose responsiveness to her world Shade is celebrating here, "I, too, was wont to draw my poet's attention to the idyllic beauty of airplanes in the evening sky." Then comes the swift transition: "Who could have guessed that on the very day (July 7) Shade penned this lambent line (the last line on his twenty-third card) Gradus, alias Degré, had flown from Copenhagen to Paris, thus completing the second lap of his sinister journey!" (174)

The scene that follows describes the meeting between Gradus and Oswin Bretwit, a Karlist (a staunch Karl the Beloved loyalist) to whom Gradus has been instructed to offer a cache of old Bretwit family letters in return for the chance of being put in contact with the fugitive king. This is the first scene in which Gradus speaks, and since Oswin Bretwit dies in an operation the day after this scene, Kinbote's "evidence" for what happened would have to be entirely Gradus's.

In recounting the scene, Kinbote gloats with sarcasm at the "Shadows' neat plan" (175). The scene has insistent overtones of a chess problem, but a bungled one. Bretwit is an avid solver of chess problems; his very name means "Chess Intelligence" (180: German Schachbrett, "chessboard" and English wit), and the two members of his family whose letters he is offered by Gradus have first names Zule and Ferz, meaning, according to the Index, "chessrook" (311) and "chessqueen" (305: Russian ferz).

Once he has set out the positions of the trap, Kinbote breaks off with a tribute to Oswin Bretwit:

From beyond the shining corrugations of the ocean I salute here brave Bretwit! Let there appear for a moment his hand and mine firmly clasping each other across the water over the golden wake of an emblematic sun. Let no insurance firm or airline use this insigne on the glossy page of a magazine as an ad badge under the picture of a retired businessman stupefied and honored by the sight of the technicolored snack that the air hostess offers him with everything else she can give; rather, let this lofty handshake be regarded in our cynical age of frenzied heterosexualism as a last, but lasting, symbol of valor and self-abnegation. How fervently one had dreamed that a similar symbol but in verbal form might have imbued the poem of another dead friend; but this was not to be . . . Vainly does one look in Pale Fire (oh, pale, indeed!) for the warmth of my hand gripping yours, poor Shade! (176-77; ellipsis in original)

"Pale, indeed!": Kinbote here pointedly echoes the title of Shade's poem, in a note to a line that he does not realize shows Shade himself echoing "pale fire." His tribute to Bretwit "from beyond the shining corrugations of the ocean" offers a symbol of male friendship "over the golden wake of an emblematic sun" that also echoes (and also without his awareness, since he does not know Shade's source) the image of broken reflections off the sea that completes the circle of theft in Timon's speech. Kinbote then calls up in contrast to his own image of lofty male friendship an image of "frenzied heterosexualism" in advertising that reminds us yet again of the "jet's pink trail above the sunset fire" that he has not registered as an echo of "pale fire"; and, addressing the dead Shade, he laments that such a symbol of male friendship across a vast gulf is not echoed in Pale Fire.

Yet we have good reason to think that in a sense it is, that the echoes Kinbote does not catch show Shade extending to him, as it were, a hand from the beyond, allowing him to steal "Pale Fire" and to get as much light from the poem as he can in the Commentary. Shade talks in his poem of wanting to stress "the contrapuntal theme," to play "a game of worlds, promoting pawns / To ivory unicorns and ebony fauns" (P.819-20, 63), and someone in this chess-filled note is unmistakably playing a game of worlds. For although Baron A., the Shadow whose father-in-law has the family letters that Baron A. hopes will provide the key to the problem of contacting the King, proves to be dismally wrong--the letters are insufferably dull, already published, and not the originals anyway but a scribal copy--his name provides someone else with a key move: "A., Baron, Oswin Affenpin, last Baron of Aff, a puny traitor, 286" becomes the first line in the Index, so that a Zemblan Shadow matches the position of Shade's "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain" in the first line of the poem, just as the unfinished last entry to the Index matches the unfinished last line of the poem.21

Although the letters prove useless, Gradus asks obliquely how he can reach the King; Bretwit thinks "How obtuse of me! He is one of us!" Since any Karlist agent revealing himself to a superior "was expected to make a sign corresponding to the X (for Xavier) in the one-handed alphabet of deaf mutes" (179) Bretwit's own left hand involuntarily starts prompting Gradus. "On the several occasions Bretwit had been given it, the manifestation had been preceded for him, during a moment of suspense--rather a gap in the texture of time than an actual delay--by something similar to what physicians call the aura, a strange sensation both tense and vaporous, a hot-cold ineffable exasperation pervading the entire nervous system before a seizure. And on this occasion too Bretwit felt the magic wine rise to his head." The "gap in the texture of time" and the "aura" recall Shade's childhood fainting fits and his adult near-death-experience, those moments that had seemed so packed with promise, but nothing comes clear here either:

"All right, I am ready. Give me the sign," he avidly said.
Gradus, deciding to risk it, glanced at the hand in Bretwit's lap: unperceived by its owner, it seemed to be prompting Gradus in a manual whisper. He tried to copy what it was doing its best to convey--mere rudiments of the required sign.
"No, no," said Bretwit with an indulgent smile for the awkward novice. "The other hand, my friend. His Majesty is left-handed, you know."
Gradus tried again--but, like an expelled puppet, the wild little prompter had disappeared. Sheepishly contemplating his five stubby strangers, Gradus went through the motions of an incompetent and half-paralyzed shadowgrapher and finally made an uncertain V-for-Victory sign. Bretwit's smile began to fade. (179-80)

Kinbote had wished for a symbol of his friendship with Shade, and thinks he has none; Bretwit wishes for a sign from Gradus, and despite prompting receives none. But the "shadowgrapher" and the "V-for-Victory sign" that indicate Gradus's failure can be read another way, as Shade asserting victory from beyond the grave; even if he cannot signal directly to Kinbote, he can reach him by way of the very moves he puts Gradus through.

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Notes

21. If Shade's intervention in Kinbote's imagination in ways such as this has helped shape the Index, this perhaps accounts for Nabokov's otherwise astonishing ending to the 1965 draft foreword for his revised Speak, Memory: "As John Shade says somewhere:

Nobody will heed my index,
I suppose,
But through it a gentle wind ex
Ponto blows" (cited in Boyd, VNAY 445)

--astonishing because it attributes the Index to Shade after his death. Naturally I had used this note in VNAY in support of the Shade-as-sole-author hypothesis; but if it is Shade's shade shaping only aspects of the Index, Nabokov would have reason both to call the Index Shade's and then, realizing that this might confuse, to decide not to attribute the quatrain to Shade.

I found this article segment when I went searching for information on Oswin Bretwit. I decided to include the who page because many on the topics discussed have been covered in class or in blogs.

With the name Oswin Bretwit, Nabokov once again brings us back into the realm of chess. I am in awe of all the layers and complexities within this novel. Every word, ever phrase is included for a specific purpose.