Nabokov's Pale Fire

Nabokov’s Pale Fire is like nothing I have ever read, so fully realized are the dark mysteries of human experience within the magical world of his creation. Audre Lourde said that we cannot take apart the master’s house, using the master’s tools, and Nabokov brings this concept to fruition in Pale Fire. We must find a different way of seeing, of speaking as well as structuring, if we are to know and think about what we sense and feel but can’t seem to articulate. This is always the challenge we face as writers: how to craft work that speaks to that otherness that encapsulates each of us. The otherness of believing we are separate, that our experience is in some ways isolated and disconnected, when in truth we live lives of incredible similarity. Just as Charles Kimbote believed that his story of the fall of Zembla was so spectacular that John Shade was a fool not to use it in his great masterpiece, so too do we see ourselves at times—our great particularity. And yet in reading Pale Fire, as one comes to recognize the duel beauty of the magical world of Zembla and the world of the Shades, each seeking to recreate the pain and beauty of their histories in the aftermath of loss, we are given the experience …

We cannot help but scoff at Kimbote’s arrogance in his notes on the poem, even while we take great pleasure in the world of Zembla, and in fact eventually begin to forget the Shades as we more and more want only to return to the world of kings and adventure. This is Nabokov’s goal, to allow his readers to navigate an experience that we might come out of it with a different understanding of who we are. To be clear, I believe Nabokov is poking fun at his readers, but greater than that at our way of creating the world in our honor, or seeing it from the central focal point of “me”. Kimbote makes Shade’s poem into his own personal story of adventure, and even though we know all along that he is doing this, we are drawn so fully into Kimbote’s Zembla that we take more interest in it and in fact while giggling to ourselves about Kimbote’s interpretations of his interactions with the Shades, we allow the poem and the Shade’s to slip into the background, hoping that we’ll get our fill of Zembla and not have to think too often of the Shade’s. Yet, in the end, our great narrator begins to crumble, and we feel that perhaps we’ve been duped by a crazy, estranged professor making up fancy stories about himself¹.

How does this then affect us, the reader? In a way it reads like a poetic metaphor that must eventually be slaughtered if the poem is to manifest itself fully: we must kill the metaphor. Shade is dead and Kimbote’s credibility is destroyed, and we are left with ourselves, wondering what it all means, thinking a bit about whom this Nabokov guy is and what he’s up to? Is he taunting us?

Beyond the obvious beauty of Nabokov’s gorgeous sentences, which can be held up to those of Woolf, both sometimes so rich and exact that one wants to stop reading after a paragraph because so much is given in just that short space, Nabokov crafts this work with a duel plot meant bridge the world of the everyday with that of fantasy. I assert that the poetic rests only in both these worlds in that as Shade’s poem anchors itself in the familiar world of object and place through which we enter the fantastical realm of the poetic—a beyond of created perceptions—that we might then return to the familiar upon exiting the poem with an altered sense of what is, and what is possible. Similarly, we enter Zembla through Kimbote’s analysis of Shade’s poem, where we then become lost in the narrative of Zembla, in fantasy. But, what is changed of the reality of the Shade’s? What do we come to understand? If we see at the center of Shade’s poem, the suffering of the loss of his daughter Hazel, and his attempt to reconcile her tragedy, then perhaps we understand the truth behind Kimbote’s statement that he is rather like Hazel Shade. Rejected and socially marginalized, Hazel lived in the fantasy of her own creation, a place as beautiful (we might imagine) as that of Zembla. Her date, unwilling to waste his time getting to know her, makes an excuse to depart early, is this unlike the excuses made by the Shade’s when Kimbote came to call? Nabokov crafts his characters so that we cannot write them off as good, bad, honest, or ignorant, and when we think we’ve captured a character, Nabokov destroys our illusions, refusing to give us easy answers.
by Emily Casey

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