Stalking Nabokov (61 page)

At a more general level, humans are extraordinary open-ended pattern detectors because we so compulsively inhabit the cognitive niche. Art plays with cognitive patterns at high intensity. The pleasure this generates is an essential part of what it is to be human and matters both at the individual level, for audiences and artists, and at the social level, for the patterns we share (in design, music, dance, and story). The pleasure that art’s intense play with patterns affords compels our engagement again and again and helps shape our capacity to create and process pattern more swiftly. Perhaps it even helps explain the so-called Flynn effect,
¹³
the fact—and it seems to be one—that IQs have risen with each of the last few generations: perhaps as a consequence of the modern bombardment of the high-density patterns of art through television, DVDs, music and iPods, computer games, You-Tube, and the like.

And with their high intensity of pattern and their fixed form, works of art should provide ideal controlled replicable experiments for the study of both rapid and gradual pattern recognition in the mind.

Literary studies have no need to feel embarrassed at the art of literature or the pleasure we derive from it. Literature and other arts have helped extend our command of information patterns, and that singular command makes us who we are.

24. “Pale Fire”: Poem and Pattern

Pale Fire
was the first Nabokov novel I read with rapture, in 1969, in my last year in high school. In
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years
, I made an emphatic case for reading the whole novel as the invention of John Shade, an interpretation strongly influenced by Andrew Field’s 1967
Nabokov: His Life in Art
(which I read at an impressionable seventeen, in 1970) and by Julia Bader’s 1972
Crystal Land
. When the subject of the “Shadean” reading of
Pale Fire
rose again on the Nabokov listserv at the end of 1997, I found what I took to be additional evidence to support my Shadean reading and was asked by Zoran Kuzmanovich, the editor of
Nabokov Studies
, to expand this into an article. As I began to do so, I realized in pursuing clues that not only was a Shadean reading of the novel wrong but so were the terms of the debate. I found myself led by the evidence to a new interpretation that took me by surprise and exploded into
Nabokov’s
Pale Fire
: The Magic of Artistic Discovery
(1999), which I wrote in six weeks of concentration that jarred my nerves and wrecked my back. In keeping with the strategy of that book, I will disclose nothing of the interpretation until readers work through a first reading and then a first rereading response to
Pale Fire
. I have since written a couple more pieces on the novel, extending the interpretation offered in my book. But I had never written on the poem “Pale Fire” by itself.

Early in 2007 Jean Holabird, the artist of
AlphaBet in Color
(2005), a painter’s rendering of the colors letters had in Nabokov’s synesthetic mind’s eye, proposed to Gingko Press another novel book idea: an edition of John Shade’s 999-line poem, “Pale Fire,” as if handwritten on index cards—the very index cards that, according to the fiction of
Pale Fire
, his neighbor Charles Kinbote takes from him at his death, “annotates,” and publishes. I was delighted to be asked to edit the volume and by the opportunity to focus intently on the poem, which I have loved for forty years, rather than to consider it within the mesmerizingly distracting context of Kinbote’s commentary, which I have also loved for forty years. Shade takes the title of his poem from Shakespeare. I compare the intensity of patterning in “Pale Fire” to what we find in Shakespeare’s sonnets.

“Pale Fire,” John Shade’s verse autobiography, credo, manifesto, and magnum opus, written in three weeks of sustained inspiration in July 1959, offers a clear retrospect on his quiet life and a confident prospect of a future in life and death that he knows he cannot know.

Pale Fire
, Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, written in a year of sustained inspiration from late November 1960 to early December 1961, discloses that “Pale Fire” is also Shade’s unwitting last testament and the tragic target of a scholarly outrage perpetrated by his first editor, campus-town neighbor, and would-be friend K. Cruelly, the commentary continues to divert attention from the poem. Our edition returns the poem to readers as Shade left it, in his own hand, before unspeakable others intervened.

Writers as diverse as Penelope Lively, Edmund White, Orhan Pamuk, Martin Amis, and Zadie Smith have come to consider Nabokov the last of the great novelists, the most fertile fictionist of the last century. Many Nabokov admirers think
Pale Fire
his greatest novel—but there agreement ends, for the novel has spawned notoriously divergent and irreconcilable interpretations.

Nabokov as poet has earned much less acclaim. Indeed, because his Russian poetry was regularly dismissed by the leading Russian émigré critic, Georgy Adamovich, Nabokov adopted the pseudonym Vasily Shishkov for two poems that Adamovich then hailed as works of genius—until he discovered their true author. “Pale Fire” is not only Shade’s but also Nabokov’s longest poem, and in part, like the lyrics he wrote under that other nonce nom de plume, Nabokov’s attempt to stake his patch on Parnassus.
Pale Fire
has sparked high praise but little critical agreement. “Pale Fire,” by contrast, has earned radical evaluative disagreement—some think it a great poem, even “perhaps the finest single American poem of the past century”;
¹
some think it a great example of either intentionally or unintentionally poor poetry—but everyone seems to agree about how we
interpret
it.

I admire
Pale Fire
above all Nabokov’s other work, which is saying something, but the greatness of the novel and its interpretive challenge have obscured both the greatness of the poem and
its
interpretive challenges. We have not paid Shade and his poem the respect, the care in reading, they deserve.

Let me quote from the opening of “Pale Fire” and from the opening of my discussion of the poem in my book about the novel:

John Shade’s “Pale Fire” opens with an extraordinary series of images whose initial impact lingers in the mind as it expands in implication throughout the poem:

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.

As we learn more about Shade’s lifelong attempt to understand a world where life is surrounded by death, we realize the full resonance of these opening lines: that he projected himself in imagination into the waxwing, as if it were somehow still flying beyond death, and into the reflected azure of the window, as if that were the cloudlessness of some hereafter, even as he stood looking at “the smudge of ashen fluff” of the dead bird’s little body. Alvin Kernan comments that the bird “has died flying into the hard barrier of the image which promises freedom but only reflects the world it is already in,”
^[2]
and that irony persists:

And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate

Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:

Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass

Hang all the furniture above the grass,

And how delightful when a fall of snow

10    Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so

As to make chair and bed exactly stand

Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!

The contrast between the mundaneness of Shade’s room—“Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate”—and the magic of the reflection reflects in turn off those other contrasts already intimated between real and imagined, between life and the hint of something beyond life in the “reflected sky,” to create a tension sustained throughout the poem between the taken-for-granted, the freshly seen, the vividly projected, and the unseen beyond. This is major poetry, by any standard.

(
NPFMAD
25–26)

Because Shade, like Nabokov, hides much of his design right under our noses, I will keep returning to these and other passages—as I did with others in
Nabokov’s
Pale Fire
: The Magic of Artistic Discovery—
to show what we have missed.

Orhan Pamuk comments about his autobiography,
Istanbul—
perhaps the finest since Nabokov’s own
Speak, Memory—
that like metaphor, it conflates two things not hitherto brought together: in his case, a personal autobiography and a history of his home town.
³
“Pale Fire” has that kind of originality: part autobiography, part philosophical credo, part artistic manifesto, part author’s self-interview, it modulates between a narrative poem with a tragic drama at its center and a reflective lyric focused on space as much as time, on the poet’s immediate surrounds and his sense of the unknown beyond. It slips back and forth between the everyday and the eternal, between Shade’s paring his nails and his decision “to explore and fight / The foul, the inadmissible abyss” of death.

“Pale Fire” records Shade’s lifelong attempt to peer past the bars of mortality. Canto 1 begins with the waxwing and ends with the brief bout of boyhood seizures that he now sees as perhaps a foretaste of death or something beyond. Canto 2 opens with his decision to explore death’s abyss and closes, at the midpoint of the poem, with the harrowing account of his daughter Hazel’s suicide, just over two years before he pens “Pale Fire.” Canto 3 starts with wrong approaches to the hereafter, summed up in Shade’s wry reflections on the Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter, I.P.H., and its inept attempts to probe death’s “big if.” It finishes with his own near-death experience, less than a year before writing “Pale Fire,” the vision he had during that state, the futile attempt to corroborate that vision through another’s similar experience, and the conclusion that

Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;

Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream

But topsy-turvical coincidence,

810  Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense.

Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find

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.

(
PF
62–63)

Canto 4 begins with “Now,” especially the now of composition, and ends as the poem catches up with the poet’s present, with his serenity in the waning of the day and his life, and his affirmation that he feels he understands “Existence, or at least a minute part / Of my existence, only through my art, / In terms of combinational delight.” He understands the mystery of life and death not through explicit conclusions but through a confidence in the playful and endless pattern he finds in his world and recreates in his work.

Why, apart from the fact that it comes wrapped in a novel, has “Pale Fire” received so little attention as a poem? Why has it even seemed to some intentionally poor poetry?

First, both Shade’s stay-at-home life and his art seem too easy and too conventional for a century that often preferred its artists as tormented exiles or bohemians and its high art difficult and so new as to repudiate the art of the past.

Second, Shade’s ideas as expressed in the poem may seem at odds with themselves, with the poem they form part of, and with their context. After he chases down Mrs. Z.—who, like Shade, seems to have seen a fountain as she hovered near death—only to find that her reported
fountain
was a misprint for
mountain
, Shade returns deflated, then suddenly realizes that
this
is “the real point, the contrapuntal theme,” and concludes that he can understand his existence only through his art, through “combinational delight.” Yet he expresses these realizations lucidly as text rather than as texture, and if we
do
seek surprises of texture, we readily find a far more tumultuous and tantalizing texture in
Pale Fire
the novel, in the relationship between calm poem and hysterical commentary, than in “Pale Fire” the poem. If “Pale Fire” surprises, it does so first by its limpidity, not by its density of texture or design.

Third, even if “Pale Fire” can fascinate us by the quality of Shade’s imagery and imagination, the poignancy of his daughter’s death, and the tirelessness of his quest for something beyond loss and death, can Shade’s concluding confidence in design, in “some kind / Of correlated pattern in the game,” still remain possible in a century that has had to face the chaos of recent history and to recognize the randomness in our evolutionary past? Has Shade not retreated into the false refuge of his own art? Is the waxwing he projects onto that azure sky only a Dedalian delusion? Does not the rejection of easy order in modern poetry come closer to the truth?