I admire people who can recite poetry from memory. The only lines of poetry that have ever stuck in my mind are a few fragments of wildly diverse origin. One such fragment is this couplet:
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure of the windowpane
These are the first two lines of a long poem called Pale Fire, which occupies 26 pages of Nabokov’s eponymous novel. That novel has four parts: a forward, the poem itself in four cantos, a 160-page section that purports to be commentary on the text of the poem, and a final index section. The author of the poem is named as John Shade; the writer of the forward, the commentary and the index is said to be one Charles Kinbote. The primary conceit of the novel is that Kinbote, while claiming to be a devoted friend of John Shade and promising to produce a definitive edition of the poem following Shade’s untimely death, is in fact a highly unreliable narrator who attempts to hijack Shade’s poem and Shade himself for his own purposes. Kinbote is a wonderful character–preposterously self-involved, laughably obtuse, and thoroughly unprincipled. He is also bright, fluent, and entertaining.
One of the charms of the novel is how well Nabokov reveals Kinbote’s unreliability, given that the only voice in the book is Kinbote’s own. Sometimes Kinbote’s convoluted attempts to convince us that he is telling the truth have the opposite effect. At other times he gives himself away by obliviously providing us with telling details whose significance he seems to miss. And sometimes, we just don’t know whether he is telling the truth or not. We know, for instance, that he is obsessed by a certain version of how he came to be a college instructor at Wordsmith College in New Wye, Appalachia, but we are free to decide how much we believe of what he says. Nabokov is a genius in making nested and interlocking puzzles, filled to overflowing with fascinating and stylish detail. Readers are challenged to to tease out what “really” happened; once we feel that we have done so, we also feel entitled to be proud of ourselves.
Pale Fire is a pyrotechnical entertainment, with bright bursts of ideas shooting off in all directions, disappearing into darkness, and then suddenly reappearing in varying patterns and hues. And the book is hilarious. Compared to this, the Nathanael West stories are shapeless, colorless, and slow. Dorothy Parker called The Day of the Locust “a truly good novel.” That sounds like she thinks it’s a good story, an illuminating sequence of events brilliantly described and narrated. Compare this to what Mary McCarthy said about Pale Fire, calling that book “one of the great works of art of this century.” A great work of art is not the same thing as a really good story. A “great work of art” seems stronger in a way, suggesting that Pale Fire is worthy of comparison to Picasso as well as to Virginia Woolf. But another effect of this characterization is to de-emphasize the novel as a story of what happened and inch it toward the category of beautiful creations, a category that might also include Faberge Eggs and Tiffany lamps. According to Kinbote, the truth of creative art is that “…‘reality’ is neither the subject nor the object of true art, which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average ‘reality’ perceived by the communal eye.” This is almost certainly a restatement of Nabokov’s own view. It is almost certainly not West’s view. I think West wants to describe what’s really there, what the communal eye either does see or damn well ought to be seeing.
Pale Fire, taken as a whole, is an assembled thing. The forward is short and serves to set up the main conceit, that Kinbote is committed to presenting a definitive edition of his friend’s last poem. The poem itself is competent but hardly inspired. I’ve read it three times and other than the first two lines, I remember none of it. But the poem serves excellently its real purpose, which is to act as a supporting framework for a variety of entertainments that are contained in Kinbote’s very extensive notes. It forms the stage upon which Kinbote/Nabokov can dance his dance. That’s the sense in which it is a great work of art rather than a great story. It is, of course, full of great little stories and does have one overarching narrative relating to “real” life and “real” death. Put all that together, and it will keep your attention.
The problem with the meta novel, though, is the same problem as with metaphysics. Once you stray very far beyond observable physics or beyond the presumed reality of the events described in a story, there’s no particular place to go, or more accurately, no particular place to stop. Once we realize Kinbote’s unreliability, we can ask all sorts of intriguing questions. The wonderful thing about Pale Fire is how we readers can’t help asking those questions and then making our judgments about the things Kinbote says. Is it the truth? Is it a deliberate lie? Or is it a delusion? But since this is all just a fiction, what does it matter? The answer can only be that Nabokov has sucked us into his game and we’re all having a grand old time playing it.
So Nabokov is a master, but while I have respect and admiration for Pale Fire, I do not love it. Lovely coloratura and trickery, but what else? My favorite Nabokov novel is Ada or Ardor: a Family Chronicle. (Mascodagama!) I no longer have a copy of it since my old one disintegrated. Maybe, if I keep on living, I’ll find another.