Shade and Shape in Pale Fire
by Brian Boyd
page seven of nine
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:
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."All right, I am ready. Give me the sign," he avidly said.
[ page four | page five ] | page six ]
[ page seven | page eight | page nine ]
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,--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.
But through it a gentle wind ex
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment