Secret Communions

This is the third installment in Emma Garman’s series about found documents, fiction, and history. Read the first and second installments in the series.

Before Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov hit American shelves in April 1962, its publisher, Walter J. Minter, had some concerns. After all, to quote Mary McCarthy’s glowing New Republic review, the book is “a Jack-in-the-box, a Faberge gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers, a cat-and-mouse game, a do-it-yourself novel.” Minter, then president of G.P. Putnam’s Sons (which in 1958 had risked obscenity charges to publish Lolita), suggested printing a cast of characters and information about Zembla, the professed Northern European homeland of Pale Fire’s egomaniacal antihero, Dr. Charles Kinbote. Absolutely not, Nabokov said. At stake was the integrity of his metatextual premise, whereby a murdered poet’s magnum opus is introduced, annotated, indexed, and given extensive (very extensive) commentary by his neighbor and university colleague, Kinbote. The very embodiment of main character energy, Kinbote has stolen the sole copy of the poem and fled town, convinced he was the killer’s real target. “The entire book,” Nabokov pointed out, “is supposed to be the production, without any editorial interference” of Kinbote. Therefore “he would hardly be likely to introduce such a cast of characters.” As for Zembla, “nobody should know — even Kinbote hardly knows — if Zembla really exists.” 

So Pale Fire masquerades as an account written by Kinbote, an “author” whose status is pointedly ambiguous. The line between history/reality and literature/imagination ripples through its pages like an electric current, placing any extra-textual corroboration of his “production” at odds with Nabokov’s playful author-reader compact. Embarking on Kinbote’s foreword, we accept him as an intimate of the late poet-genius John Shade and a sincere editor of “Pale Fire,” Professor Shade’s 999-line poem in heroic couplets. (“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane,” are the opening lines, now as immortal as any famous poem’s.) Signs soon point, of course, to our commentator’s alarming detachment from reality. Having purloined Shade’s manuscript of “Pale Fire,” he transfers it to “a safe spot even before his body had reached the grave.” Kinbote’s sense of ownership is unequivocal: the poem is surely a paean to Zembla, his kingdom lost to republican revolution, all the glorious details of which he “pressed upon” Shade “with a drunkard’s wild generosity” during their short acquaintance.

When “Pale Fire” turns out to be nothing of the kind, Kinbote is disappointed but undeterred. With deranged intuition — and hilariously propelled by his pathological narcissism — he can illuminate the poem’s “many subliminal debts to me.” Sequestered in a remote cabin, Kinbote wrestles the “theme” from Shade’s moving introspection on love, grief, and transcendence, whose obvious (to us) emotional wellspring is the suicide of his daughter, Hazel. Dutybound to describe this tragedy, Kinbote is exasperated by the poem’s focus on it “to the detriment of other richer and rarer matters.” Those rarer matters? The stranger-than-fiction account of a pederastic king forced into exile, living incognito as a university professor in an American college town, whose international pursuit by a political assassin culminated in Shade’s accidental murder. King Charles the Beloved of Zembla, in Kinbote’s mind, is “the beholder and only begetter” of “Pale Fire,” as one can see from the very first line. The Zemblan “silktail” bird closely resembles a waxwing, he muses, and “is the model of one of the three heraldic creatures … in the armorial bearings of the Zemblan king.”

We, too, must apply almost Kinbote-levels of literary divination if we’re to appreciate the historical framework of Pale Fire — much of it so subliminal that, despite a veritable industry of debate around the novel’s various allegorical dimensions, it stayed that way until the 21st century. As scholars such as Steven Belletto and Andrea Pitzer have observed, a specific mention of the New York Times in Kinbote’s narrative is a tacit but long unheeded instruction to readers. Sure enough, the newspaper’s reportage is illuminating on Zembla’s nearest real-world analogue: the Northern Russian archipelago of Novaya Zemlya (“New Land”). In the 1950s, Novaya Zemlya was an atomic test site, where more than 40 nuclear bombs were detonated. It was also a Soviet slave camp and Gulag outpost; John Noble, an American prisoner of the Russians for 10 years, wrote in the New York Times on April 5, 1955, that the most hardened criminals “were shipped to the Arctic Ocean island of Novaya Zemlya, from which there is no return.” Kinbote, the purported blue blood tells us, was affronted to be mistaken for “some refugee from Nova Zembla.” But might he be, Pitzer wonders, “an avatar of the real-world prisoners of the Gulag?” 

Toward the end of the Pale Fire, Kinbote remembers Shade gently upbraiding a woman at a party who calls someone (Kinbote, we surmise) a loony: “That is the wrong word … One should not apply it to a person who deliberately peels off a drab and unhappy past and replaces it with a brilliant invention.” If Kinbote’s fantastical account of his marvelous kingdom and American exile is a strategy for surviving the horrors of history, he may be one of the “fellow dreamers” Nabokov described in a 1941 lecture, whose creative inner worlds persist “during the darkest and most dazzling hours of physical danger, pain, dust, death.” Art can bear witness to history, but it can also overwrite it. Regarding his marvelous Zemblan yarn, Kinbote claims he told a skeptical Shade: “My dear John … Once transmuted by you into poetry, the stuff will be true, and the people will come alive.” The hauntings of history animate literature, while literature saves those ghosts from purgatory.

“Reality,” Nabokov said in a 1962 BBC interview, “is a subjective affair … You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak … but you can never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms and hence unquenchable, unattainable.” The reader’s struggle to get “nearer and nearer” to Pale Fire’s intended meanings, rather than undermining its pleasures (as Nabokov’s publisher had perhaps feared), is the entrancing artistic effect of Kinbote’s pronouncements diverging from our interpretation of events. When Kinbote describes surveilling Shade at home, often with binoculars, he sees nothing amiss in his own behavior — he is but a doting friend, whose company Shade values “above that of all other people” — while we recognize him as a sinister stalker. 

The literary theorist Wayne Booth, who coined the term unreliable narration in The Rhetoric of Fiction (published the year before Pale Fire), characterized this type of reading experience as a “secret communion” between author and reader, who are “in collusion, behind the speaker’s back, agreeing upon the standard by which he is found wanting.” In Pale Fire, this triangular set-up is girded by the metafictional architecture: we’re not simply in the narrator’s head but actually witnessing an act of writing meant (as all writing is) to persuade or mislead. Guided by Nabokov’s comedic sleight of hand, our active curiosity courted, we thwart Kinbote’s self-mythologizing and turn from passive readers into “begetters.” 

Nabokov wasn’t above exposing the secret communion — or committing authorial trespassing, to quote the disapproving critic Michael Wood — by lending his readers a helping hand. Pale Fire, Nabokov told the New York Herald Tribune a couple of months after the book’s publication, “is full of plums that I keep hoping somebody will find.” Kinbote, he said, killed himself before completing the index, which “no one has noted.” He isn’t the ex-King of Zembla, Nabokov continued, “nor is he Professor Kinbote. He is Professor Botkin, or Botkine, a Russian and a madman.” (Impressively, McCarthy had figured this out in her New Republic review, even though the character of Botkin is mentioned in passing only once, halfway through the book, and then features in the index.) Yet the author refrained from giving any extra-textual pointers to the real-life Nova Zemlya and its tragic significance. Nor did he directly allude to any autobiographical impulses, which scholars have also hypothesized. Nabokov’s father, for instance, was the mistaken but fatal target of an assassin’s bullet, just like Shade — who, in the novel, is killed on Nabokov senior’s birthday. The biographer Brian Boyd, in his 1991 volume Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, goes so far as to say “that at the center of this book in which every fact seems radiant with multiple meaning lies the most grotesquely tragic moment of Nabokov’s life.” 

The choose-your-own-adventure attractions of Pale Fire, to an extent that may exceed Nabokov’s expectations, add yet another layer to the book’s parabolizing of historical porosity, of the unattainability of reality. Shade transfigured his family’s history into poetry, Kinbote overwrote the poem with his own history, Nabokov apparently seeded the narrative with personal and national tragedies, while we as modern readers face a series of choices and ever-expanding range of interpretations. We can read biographies, literary scholarship, contemporaneous geopolitical reporting, astrological ephemerides (McCarthy saw planetary patterns in the plot), thereby playing detective in the manner of Swifties decoding lyrics, their rapt attention fueled and rewarded by Easter eggs in liner notes, Instagram captions, and interviews. Conversely, we could accept the principle that any fictional work is a self-contained universe, whose magic spell relies on the private intimacy between the text and the reader. An extension of this position would be to allow “Pale Fire” to exist as an independent aesthetic and physical object, sheared of Kinbote’s analysis (albeit, in the case of the 2011 Gingko Press edition, accompanied by essays from Boyd and the poet R. S. Gwynn). And in a way, Shade’s poem has always stood alone. No matter how endlessly Nabokov’s artistry is dissected, we will never learn more about Hazel Shade, who has no history outside “Pale Fire.” Only via our own subjectivity can we engage with her father’s poem and its poignant resonances.

Kinbote states, in breezy justification of his exegetical excesses, that “the human reality” of Shade’s masterpiece “has to depend entirely on the reality of its author and his surroundings.” Proponents of New Historicism, for whom a literary work’s meaning cannot be divorced from its cultural context, would likely concur. Would Nabokov concur in his own case? Or would he place the indefatigable efforts of Pale Fire scholars alongside Kinbote’s identification of a heraldic bird with Shade’s slain waxwing? In the memoir Speak, Memory, Nabokov tartly addresses “the future specialist of such dull literary lore as auto-plagiarism” — i.e., she who matches events in his life to those experienced by a protagonist — as though wishing to direct his audience onto higher, intellectually worthier interpretive planes. He also writes that “in a first-rate work of fiction, the real clash is not between the characters, but between the author and the world.” This is especially true of Pale Fire, whose abstruse-by-design metatextual puzzles ensure its survival as a dynamic historical organism, in unceasing interaction with its intrigued readers.

Read the previous pieces in this series on found documents, fiction, and history here: “A Kind of Historical Faith” and “Books That Speak of Books.”