What is Pale Fire about? It’s about a poem. A murder. A mourning father. A fictional country. An exiled king. An international manhunt. A ghost. A stalker. With so much ridiculous stuff crammed into one book, I can see how someone might find it a little bit gimmicky. It probably is. But the way that Nabokov manages to cram so many wild ideas into Pale Fire makes it one of most enjoyable books I’ve read.
A few of my favorite things:
- The structure. The entire story is told through the terrible commentary to a decent poem. The totally insane narrator is holding hostage the only copy of a dead poet’s last work.
- “I have no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel.”
- “Oh yes, the final text of the poem is entirely his.”
- “A professional proofreader has carefully rechecked the printed text of the poem against the phototype of the manuscript, and has found a few trivial misprints I had missed.”
- “Let me state that without my notes Shade’s text simply has no human reality at all since the human reality of such a poem as his (being too skittish and reticent for an autobiographical work), with the omission of many pithy lines carelessly rejected by him, has to depend entirely on the reality of its author and his surroundings, attachments and so forth, a reality that only my notes can provide. To this statement my dear poet would probably not have subscribed, but, for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.”
- Kinbote’s self-obsession. I think we all know “that guy” who wants to make every story about himself. Pale Fire takes it to the next level. It’s a perfect portrait of megalomania.
- Kinbote, against all evidence, insists that he was Shade’s best friend. He thinks that he was Shade’s muse, that he inspired him with stories from the land of Zembla.
- “But, of course, the most striking characteristic of the little obituary is that it contains not one reference to the glorious friendship that brightened the last months of John’s life.”
- “[T]he reader cannot help feeling that it has been expanded and elaborated to the detriment of certain other richer and rarer matters ousted by it.”
- “(in accordance with what may be known some day as Kinbote’s Law)”
- The reveal that Kinbote is an obsessed stalker. At first, I thought the joke was just going to be that Kinbote was a terrible literary critic. As the story goes on, we learn more and more about this man’s delusional life.
- “Nevertheless the urge to find out what he was doing with all the live, glamorous, palpitating, shimmering material I had lavished upon him, the itching desire to see him at work (even if the fruit of his work was denied me), proved to be utterly agonizing and uncontrollable and led me to indulge in an orgy of spying which no considerations of pride could stop.”
- The digressions. You have no idea where Kinbote is going to take you next, and neither (apparently) does he.
- The narrator tells what seems to be the story of the first time he met Shade, writing a whole narrative down to the smallest detail, but then: “I am not sure either saw me.”
- In a note describing the location of Shade’s house, the narrator digresses from a discussion about the street being on a hill to (1) his experiences in church (2) his stalking of the Shade family, and (3) his belief that Shade’s wife was altering his poems. And then, as if nothing had ever happened: “higher up on the same wooden hill…”
- Kinbote’s social ineptitude.
- Kinbote, after pulling fruit out of his briefcase, telling everyone at the lunch table that he would never eat something even touched by another person, and comparing it to cannibalizing the waiter: “My free and simple demeanor set everybody at ease.”
- After forcing Shade to accept a ride home, he drops Shade off to his wife who is wondering what the hell happened. Kinbote tries to leave, “not wishing to listen to a marital scene” (forgetting that it was entirely his fault).
- Kinbote’s hatred of Shade’s wife. Sybil, a sane person, does not enjoy hanging out with Kimbote, and quite naturally pushes him away. So Kimbote takes every opportunity to hate on her.
- “She made him tone down or remove from his Fair Copy everything connected with the magnificent Zemblan theme”
- In the index, which includes long passages on foreign political movements and pages about Kimbote, Sybil is described as Shade’s wife, “passim.”
- Kinbote’s repeated misinterpretations of quotes and references.
- The words Pale Fire come from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens – which happens to be the only Shakespeare book that Kinbote has. Kinbote completely misses this, saying “But in which of the Bard’s works did our poet cull it? My readers must make their own research. All I have with me is a tiny vest pocket edition of Timon of Athens – in Zemblan! It certainly contains nothing that could be regarded as an equivalent of ‘pale fire’” (Earlier in the commentary, Kinbote had in fact mistranslated that exact line without noticing).
- I couldn’t help but laugh out loud every time Kimbote’s annotation completely ignored the text to jump into his own story. For example:
- “Line 62: often. Often, almost nightly, throughout the spring of 1959, I had feared for my life. …”
- The truly ridiculous phrases.
- “Could a dwarf in the police force pose as a pigtailed child?”
- A completely unexplained “maddening and embarrassing experience at the college indoor swimming pool.”
- Kinbote has to call his car “powerful” every single time he talks about it, for some reason.
- “Our Prince was fond of Fleur as of a sister but with no soft shadow of incest or secondary homosexual complications.”
The interpretation of the story that makes the most sense to me is: Kinbote was actually a delusion of Professor Botkin, living in a fantasy world. All of the stories were part of his delusions of grandeur. The murderer was an escaped convict trying to kill the judge.
But I still choose to believe the exiled-king story. It’s just so much fun. Sure, it’s crazy, but Kinbote’s self-obsession and social ineptitude would actually make a lot of sense if he had grown up as a crown prince. And if Charles Xavier were a fiction, why would Kinbote invent a persona that was so incredibly inept at everything? The small fact that makes me doubt this theory the most is actually Kinbote’s rant that he only eats food he has prepared himself – there’s no evidence of the king having this same strange quirk.
Nick Beachy 