Pale Fire, A Supernatural Novel?

On The Guardian Books website Jeremy Sheldon (don't know who he is!) picks up his top 10 fiction books about ghosts and spirits. It is a very interesting list, all the more interesting because it comes amidst all the brouhaha about the latest Harry Potter book. Surely, future generations will see our collective and infantile fixation with the wizard as we see the crazy mania for tulip bulbs that gripped the Dutch people in the seventeenth century. If someone writes a new edition of "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds", Harry Potter mania along with Da Vinci Code tomfoolery will surely find a place there.

Anyway, what I found interesting about the list, other than the exclusion of the usual suspects, was the inclusion of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire in it. Pale Fire, at least on the surface, is not a supernatural story at all. At the center of the novel is the eponymous poem, which is identified in the foreword as the last work of the late American poet John Shade. The rest of the novel is in the form a commentary by someone called Charles Kinbote, who also wrote the foreword to the poem. What makes the commentary a delight to read is the peculiar voice of the commentator. Kinbote is the ultimate unreliable narrator - in fact, an unreliable narrator to end all unreliable narrators. Kinbote weaves into his footnoted annotations on the poem the story of his own relationship with the poet, John Shade. How he befriended him during the last months of his life while Shade was composing "Pale Fire." How he'd disclosed to Shade, a colleague at the college where they both taught literature, the fantastic story of his (Kinbote's) supposed secret identity: that he was not really Charles Kinbote, but rather the exiled King of Zembla, "the distant northern land" (yes, that's where the title of this blog comes from) where he once ruled as Charles the Beloved until he was deposed by evil revolutionaries from whom he fled into exile. Revolutionaries who sent an assassin to hunt him down, an assassin whose bullet, meant for Kinbote, mistakenly killed John Shade instead. And now, having absconded with the dead poet's manuscript of "Pale Fire," holed up in a cave in the mountains, Kinbote attempts to demonstrate with his commentary that Shade's last masterpiece is really about him, about Kinbote, about his own tragic and romantic life as King of Zembla, his flight and exile. All this despite the fact that, on the surface, neither Kinbote nor Zembla appear anywhere in Pale Fire, despite the fact that the poem seems on the surface to be John Shade's attempt to come to terms with his own tragedy, the suicide of his beloved daughter Hazel Shade-and his efforts to explore the possibility of contacting her in the Afterlife, across the border between life and death ("the foul inadmissible abyss") which has exiled her from him.

One of the most interesting and longest running mysteries of modern literature is the authorship question of the book. Who is the real "author" of Pale Fire? Mary McCarthy, the well known literary critic and wife of Edmund Wilson, Nabokov's estranged friend, conjectured in a review published at the time when the novel itself was published that the real author of both the poem and the commentary is V. Botkin, "an american scholar of Russian descent", who is mentioned only in the index. I haven't read the review (it's called "A Bolt from the Blue") so don't know much about how she reached that conclusion but this theory was later revised by Brian Boyd and other critics who called themselves "Shadeans" because they thought it was John Shade who wrote the poem and then invented a delusional literary critic to do an exegesis on his own work. There is also a group called "Kinboteans", although in minority, who think it is Charles Kinbote who invented the poet John Shade and not the vice versa. And then there are literalists, like me, who see the book as a satire on the lit-crit industry, a heart-felt meditation on what it means to live with a constant knowledge of death, of one's own and of everybody we love and of course that "undiscovered country from where no traveler returns" or "the foul, inadmissible abyss" as Nabokov calls it.

The "Shadean" theory held sway among majority of the Nabokov scholars for long, and it still does, but Brian Boyd (once again) muddied the waters a few years back by arguing, in a book length critical study, that the real source, the true inspiration for the land of Zembla and the poem, is not Kinbote or Shade or Shade-from-beyond-the-grave, but John Shade's dead daughter Hazel whose ghost indirectly insinuates Zemblan promptings into both John Shade's poem and Kinbote's beautifully mad commentary to it (making Zembla that elusive unknowable place of after-life). I haven't yet read the book, so I don't know much about it. But it seems Jeremy Sheldon (who put the book in his favourite supernatural books) has surely read Boyd's book. Supernatural or otherwise, Pale Fire is definitely a book which deserves to be read again and again to fathom its endlessly intricate mysteries. More posts about the book will follow. After all this is a dispatch from Zembla!