Final Paper

A Game of Worlds

Vladimir Nabokov is notorious for infusing his novels with intricately placed literary allusions as well as employing complex and confusing measures in order to create an ever evolving work of literature. His reoccurring use of themes such as memory, death, love and reality has amounted to a body of work that is both universally relevant and deliciously controversial. Although Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire is significantly less shockingly offensive than some of his other novels, it by no means lacks substance or thought provoking scenarios. The novel includes John Shades beautiful poem recollecting the death of his dear daughter as well as a forward, commentary and index written by Charles Kinbote. It is a story of love, betrayal, persecution, death and friendship among other things. Throughout the novel, various characters find themselves caught up in a game of worlds, a complex web of reality and imagination.

Although not the predominant theme of the novel as a whole, death plays a significant role both in Shade’s poem and Kinbote’s commentary. It is at times characterized as a source of anxiety, a seemingly finite form of escape, a tragic ending to the beautiful thing called life, as well as new beginning in a mysterious and curious world. Shade opens his poem “Pale Fire” with the image of a bird that has accidently flown into a window, resulting in its death. The lines proceed as follows, “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” (33). Although the bird has ceased to live in the tangible world, it continues to exist in an alternate world, a world of reflection. Death, in this sense, is therefore not definite. Although it may entail a change in physical state, the soul continues to soar long after it has left the body.

By conveying Hazel Shade’s story through poetry, John Shade creates a similar continuation of life after death for his daughter. “Pale Fire” is a literary reflection of the Shades’ life before Hazel’s suicide, and although she is no longer with them in body, her spirit lives on through his writing. Shade eternalizes the existence of his daughter by creating a new world for her to live through, and as long as the poem exists, so will she. His wife, although not yet deceased, is eternalized in the same way. Shade wrote, “And all the time, and all the time, my love,/ You too are there, beneath the word, above/ The syllable, to underscore and stress vital rhythm […]/ And all in you is youth, and you make a new, / By quoting them, old things I made for you” (68). The family’s legacy will live on, frozen in time, long after their bodies have become one with nature.

An alternative form of life after death is represented by the poltergeist, assumed to be the ghost of Aunt Maud, in the Shade’s barn. Although excluded from the poem, Kinbote informs the reader that a significant amount of paranormal activity took place within the barn as well as within the Shades’ house itself. While out in the barn alone one night, Hazel witnesses an eerie sight. A light, with no visible source, played on the wall of the barn and even rushed towards her. Hazel asked the light questions, and it would respond with certain movements. At one point it disappears, but then reappears shortly after with a new found eagerness to “resume the game” (188). Although such activity would indicate a form of life after death, it is much different than that created by Shade through his writing. It would seem that one’s spirit continues to live on in the same world as it had before, but in a different form. It represents death in a more solemn and less hopeful light. The spirit’s participation is such games might indicate a loneliness or discontentment in the afterlife.

After having a near death experience in which he gleans a white fountain, John Shade begins to more thoroughly contemplate death and his own existence. As an atheist he is void of the relief and assurance that some take from the notion of God. The “helpful” exercises provided by the Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter (IPH) were considered by him to be a waste of time. His hope to find truth within his deathly vision is destroyed due to a misprint in an article, but it leads him to another realization: “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” (63). Life, he seems to imply, is just a game to be played. There is a beginning and an ending, and the in between is filled with “topsy-turvical coincidence” (63) and premeditated moves confused by other players. He wrote, “I feel I understand/ Existence, or at least a minute part/ Of my existence, only through my art,/ In terms of combinational delight;/ And if my private universe scans right,/ So does the verse of galaxies divine/ Which I suspect is an iambic line” (69). Literature is therefore not only a means to escape death, but a method of finding meaning in life. He seems to find solace in this notion and devoted himself to writing.

Kinbote utilizes literature to not only make sense of his own existence, but to create a new and fantastical story to replace it. Through manipulation of Shade’s poem, he creates a fantasy world, complete with heroes and villains. Although the northern country of Zembla is a figment of Kinbote’s imagination, fragments of various authors’ alternate realities can be found strewn throughout the world he has constructed. The most obvious contributor to Kinbote’s story is, of course, John Shade. Because Kinbote is claiming to simply provide a commentary for Shade’s poem, he is forced to incorporate at least some of Shade’s ideas into his own narrative. Kinbote even admits to this when he says, “I have reread, not without pleasure, my comments to his lines, and in many cases have caught myself borrowing a kind of opalescent light from my poet’s fiery orb”(81). Just as the moon reflects the dazzling rays of the sun, Kinbote’s story contains elements of Shade’s genius.

Even so, Kinbote has a tendency to manipulate the words employed by Shade to serve his own needs. For example, Kinbote takes two words, on from line 17 and the other from line 29, and unites them to come up with “gradual, gray” (77). From this pairing, Kinbote extracts the name Jakob Gradus. Not only were these lines not originally referring to a male, but they were 12 lines apart and had completely different contexts. Numerous other “notes” are comprised of one to two sentences discussing Shade’s words followed by one or more pages discussing something completely extraneous to the poem. It is through this method that Kinbote tells his own story since Shade did not.

Another author who has an obvious influence on Kinbote’s, and Shade’s, story is the infamous William Shakespeare. Not only does Kinbote carry around a copy of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, but his own story is comparable to that of Timon. Like Timon, Charles the Beloved, aka Charles Kinbote, begins as loved man of high social status and then experiences a fall and rejection from his people. Both men succumb to rather solitary lives and then find a treasure (John Shade’s poem in Kinbote’s case), and in the end both leave a written document behind (Kinbote leaves writes his commentary and Timon leaves his epitaph. Another allusion to Shakespeare can be found in the names of the streets of Zembla: Timon Alley, Academy Boulevard and Coriolanus Lane (126). His utilization of components such as these from other authors’ works simply serve to complicate and enrich his own creation.

Kinbote incorporats aspects of his surroundings into his story as well. Perhaps the most obvious instance of this is his creation of Jakob Gradus, aka Jack Degree, Jacques de Grey, James de Gray, Raventstone, Ravus and d’Argus (77). Although Kinbote claims that Gradus “makes his way through the entire length of the poem, following the road of the rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, […] hiding between two words, reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, […] and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night” (78), he is not a real person. That is to say that Gradus, the Shadow searching for the Zemblan king, is not a real person. In fact, his character is based on Jack Grey, the real revenge seeking man that Judge Goldsworth had put away years ago. Contrary to what Kinbote claims, Gradus did not exist before Grey shot Shade. He was a figment of the imagination of a creative, and perhaps slightly psychotic, man brought forth by an actual occurance.

Throughout the novel, the question begs to be asked: What is reality? Is it something that is universally true or tangible? Can it be portrayed objectively through art, or is there even such a thing as an objective reality? Nabokov plays with the notion of “reality” within many of his novels, and Pale Fire is no exception. From Kinbote’s crazed rantings regarding a king on the run, to Shade’s representation of her daughter, the concept of reality is brought into play. Although it becomes clear after reading the book that Kinbote’s tale does not hold true to fact, he states, "Without my notes Shade’s text simply has no human reality at all since the human reality of such 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" (29). Yet when question about the veracity of his story he also says, “Once transmuted by you into poetry, the stuff will be true, and the people will come alive” (214). On the one hand, he states that that which Shade has written does not adhere to reality, but on the other he claims that once he has written something it becomes true. I am not one to presume that I know what Nabokov believed about reality, but in my opinion, it is kind of a mixture of both of the claims that Kinbote made.

In writing their stories, both Shade and Kinbote created alternate realities, or invented worlds based somewhat on that which is “real” and somewhat on that which they wished was “real.” Kinbote says that “‘reality’ is neither the subject nor the object of the true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average ‘reality’ perceived by the communal eye” (130). Reality is subjective and therefore different for everyone. A piece of art or literature is a reflection of one’s perceived reality. It is composed of bits and pieces from one’s own life and experiences and those of others. It is a miniature world built upon thousands of other worlds constructed by other people.

Kinbote’s reverence for Shade can be seen when he says, “I am witnessing a unique physiological moment: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse” (27). Composing a piece of literature is like a game of chess. At the beginning the playing board is filled with numerous pieces that have the potential to overpower their opponents. Over extended periods of time during which different options are thoroughly mulled over, the pieces are moved around, resulting in the removal of certain ideas/pieces from the playing field. It is the combination of the remaining pieces at the end that make up amazing compositions such as those written by Vladimir Nabokov.

Like Shade and Kinbote, both figments of his own imagination, Nabokov breaks everything down into their very basic molecules and then builds something completely different from them. His unique worlds/novels are composed of bits and pieces of hundreds of other worlds, and each piece has its own designated place and specific meaning. When reading his novels, one thing that is crucial to understand is that when we as readers go over his writing we bring new meaning to it. Like Kinbote, we create our own worlds based upon that which has been presented to us because reality and interpretation are subjective. It is for this reason that Nabokov’s works will forever evolve, and with each reading there will always be new treasures to be discovered.