Pale Fire

Despite the fact that it's one of the greatest 'novels' ever, it's actually pretty hard to know what to say about Nabokov's masterpiece.  In fact, since it's not really a novel in any conventional sense, it's hard to even summarize what the plot is.  Nevertheless, it's a brilliant, funny, moving, puzzling, and always dazzlingly written sort of wild goose chase through Nabokov's imagination.  As with Infinite Jest, part of the fun of Reading Pale Fire is figuring out what the fuck is going on.  So if you follow my advice and really plan to read it, you might want to stop here with the ...

SPOILER ALERT

I started Pale Fire about 5 times before I really got into it.  This is only partially due to the fact that the poetic density of the language doesn't make for good bedtime reading.  For example, early on we get The Best Sentence in English®:

As a rule, Shade destroyed drafts the moment he ceased to need them: well do I recall seeing him from my porch, on a brilliant
morning, burning a whole stack of them in the pale fire of the incinerator before which he stood with bent head like an official mourner among the wind-borne black butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fé.

The novel at first repulses any attempt to enter its world, paradoxically because there seem to be too many points of entrance.  Of course, you start at the beginning, with a genre you think you understand -- Professor Charles Kinbote writing a foreword for a critical edition of his late friend John Shade's final poem.  Right away though you are put off by strange interruptions in the text that turn what appears to be a standard, overly literate academic foreword into something more bizarre and auto-biographical.  Professor Kinbote seems to have a strange agenda connected with the poem, but at first you can't really piece together what's going on.  Nevermind though, the foreword is relatively short, so you plough on into the poem and the copious accompanying footnotes ... only to get more confused.  Is the good Herr Doktor reading the same poem that you are?  The notes seem only dimly related to what's happening in the clever, but seemingly fairly light, lines of iambic pentameter.  The foreword actually suggested reading the notes first, which seems odd, but okay, so you try that for a while, perhaps flipping back and forth to the poem, until it's clear that the notes are gradually veering off into some other story about a place called Zembla that has nothing to do with the lines these notes refer to in the poem.  Hmmmm ... So you go back and just read the 999 line poem itself one time through.  It's actually quite a lovely and moving meditation on untimely mortality.  The language and images are beautiful and surprising and not infrequently funny, and the rhymed couplets in strict meter set up an interesting rhythmic game that reminds you of the creative power of constraints.  However, by the end, it's clear the this poem has nothing to do with Professor Kinbote's homeland of Zembla, nor with the story he has begun to unfold through the notes of its recently deposed and exiled king -- Charles Xavier the Beloved.  So, you just go all the way back to the beginning again and start over.  And this time you notice a conspicuous reference to the very last footnote right in the foreword.

I think of John N. R. Wayne, who would have won this year's WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father's head.

Of course, that's not really what it said.  But it reminded me of exactly the way DFW hid the secret of Infinite Jest in plain sight, but so early in the novel that you don't know how to make use of it.  It turns out that Kinbote's final footnote gives away the ending, where the attempted regicide of Gradus (aka Jack Grey) results in the accidental death of John Shade, author of his then nearly complete final masterpiece Pale Fire.  Suddenly you have learned that the disconnected strands of the poem Pale Fire and the exiled  Zemblan king are destined to intersect at this fateful climax.  With this structure in mind, the trajectory of the whole book begins to make sense.  

Though now as you begin again from the beginning, there are a whole new set of questions.  Is Zembla a real place?  Is Professor Charles Kinbote himself the exiled king?  And if so, why was he so convinced that Pale Fire would be a poem about his dramatic escape from the revolution?  Is the murderer really from Zembla?  Or just some deranged lunatic from a local asylum?  And, wait, is Prof. Kinbote himself a reliable narrator of events?  Is he sane?  Is he even real?  In fact, are John Shade and his poem even real then?  Hold on, what sense does a question like that even make in the context of a work of fiction that pretends not to be?  Perhaps we are only left with the miracle of fireflies and bats.

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students).  Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not verse - I am a miserable rhymester), I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do - pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web. Solemnly I weighed in my hand what I was carrying under my left armpit, and for a moment, I found myself enriched with an indescribable amazement as if informed that fireflies were making decodable signals on behalf of stranded spirits, or that a bat was writing a legible tale of torture in the bruised and branded sky.

#reread