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.
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