SOURCE: "The Self-Annihilating Artists of 'Pale Fire'," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 31, No. 4, Winter, 1985, pp. 421-37.

The self-reflexive quality of Nabokov's Pale Fire, a fictional creation governed by its fictional creator, applies not only to the structure but also to the characters. As a group, they are self-referential, appearing as shadows, twins, and inverted images of one another. Though one may assign a central position to Kinbote as the author or manipulator, the source of his art remains in question. Critical suggestions for tracing the real Kinbote are numerous: Kinbote as a merging of Shade's artistic vision and Gradus' urge toward destruction; Kinbote as Shade's aggrandizer, with Gradus as foreshadowed doom.¹ In the scholarly scuffle, not enough attention has been paid to a humbler figure, the character of Hazel Shade, the poet's daughter who commits suicide. Hazel functions as an interpretive key, revealing much about Kinbote and his grand extrapolation. In her cameo role, she represents the book's confabulation in miniature, the mixed success of art and annihilation.

As a character, Hazel appears only as a shadow across the work, an evoked memory. Though Shade never mentions his daughter's name in the cantos, her name is significant and provides a literary reference, a line from Scott's The Lady of the Lake; a stag who "deep his midnight lair had made / in lone Glenartney's hazel shade."² The romance of the Western Highlands serves as an ironic commentary on the real Hazel Shade, who is utterly devoid of dark beauty. Shade's descriptions, from the anxious parents' point of view, are both sorrowful and telling:

Nature chose me so as to wrench and rend
Your heart and mine. At first we'd smile and say:
"All little girls are plump" or "Jim McVey
(The family oculist) will cure that slight
Squint in no time." And later: "She'll be quite
Pretty, you know"; and, trying to assuage
The swelling torment: "That's the awkward age."³

The picture is clear enough: Hazel is obese and unattractive, saddled moreover with a disfiguring squint. The little parental lies soon give way to Shade's confession, "It was no use, no use" (p. 44). Left out of most social activities, Hazel becomes moody and introspective, a bookish type by default. In one particularly wrenching passage, Shade relates:

while children of her age
Where cast as elves and fairies on the stage
That she 'd helped paint for the school pantomime,
My gentle girl appeared as Mother Time,
A bent charwoman with slop pail and broom. .. .

(p. 44)

The image directly invokes Hardy's Father Time, another child wise and soured beyond his years, also doomed to die. In Hazel's situation, the ugly appearance of life extends unforgivably to herself.

Escape into books affords a temporary solace. Academia even offers a chance to excel, albeit to the exclusion of social life:

The prizes won
In French and history, no doubt, were fun;
At Christmas parties games were rough, no doubt,
And one shy little guest might be left out.

(p. 44)

Inevitably, the scholastic seclusion becomes its own prison. She reads alone in her bedroom and the words themselves become emblematic of isolation: she pronounces grimpen as "Grim Pen" (p. 46), the four walls of her world.

The brief summation of Hazel's adolescence affords the same dismal view: "Alas, the dingy cygnet never turned / Into a wood duck" (p. 44). Teen-age romance is forever denied her, and the telephone remains silent. Since Hazel has become her own plaguesome reality, a change of scenery does her no good, and a trip to France only occasions more unhappiness:

And she returned in tears, with new defeats,
New miseries. On days when all the streets
Of College Town led to the game, she'd sit
On the library steps, and read or knit. . . .

(p. 45)

She has gradually withdrawn from society but can take no comfort from her isolation. Since the world remains alienating and unchangeable, she tries to create a world of her own.

As Shade points out in his description, Hazel "might have been you, me, or some quaint blend" (p. 43), but she becomes perverse: "She had strange fears, strange fantasies, strange force / Of character . . ." (p. 45). Her father represents an edifying contrast. By his own admission, in his childhood he was "lame, asthmatic, fat" (p. 37), but was able to turn outward reality into art. Nabokov presents no clear source for the creation of good art. Hazel grows stunted from nurturing parents, while John Shade, orphaned early in life and brought up by "dear bizarre Aunt Maud" (p. 36), produces viable (there is no other word) art. If Nabokov does put forth a statement regarding art, it is concerned with the importance of connections. Aunt Maud, for instance, may have a taste for "realistic objects interlaced / With grotesque growths and images of doom," but she also lives "to hear the next babe cry" (p. 36). Morbid associations are fine, provided they are connected to life at one end.

Hazel's vision eventually turns inward, the imploded art of fantasy. The first indications are harmless enough, reversals of normal vision through palindromes: "She twisted words: pot, top, / Spider, redips. And 'powder' was 'red wop'" (p. 45). In her games with the lexicon of everyday life, she resembles her father, who enjoys the permutations of Word Golf. When words fail to transform reality to her satisfaction, however, she reaches beyond reality.

One of the words associated with Hazel is chtonic [sic] (p. 46),⁴ a key to her developing interest. Forsaking the world which has forsaken her, she finds some romance in the creation of a private spirit world. As with Eliot in Four Quartets, from which the words chthonic, grimpen, and sempiternal are borrowed, she wants to go beyond mortal experience. Unlike Eliot or her father, however, she cannot write verse but can engage only in eidolism. Taking her cue from the recent death of her great-aunt Maud, she makes havoc in the name of the returned spirit; she tries to bend natural law. A dog basket flies through the air; a scrapbook perambulates itself. Throwing things about is insufficiently arousing, however, and she succumbs to artistic elaboration. Kinbote narrates:

But soon the poltergeist ran out of ideas in connection with Aunt Maud and became, as it were, more eclectic. All the banal motions that objects are limited to in such cases were gone through in this one. Saucepans crashed in the kitchen; a snowball was found (perhaps, prematurely) in the icebox; once or twice Sybil saw a plate sail by like a discus and land safely on the sofa; lamps kept lighting up in various parts of the house; chairs waddled away to assemble in the impassable pantry; mysterious bits of string were found on the floor; invisible revelers staggered down the staircase in the middle of the night; and one winter morning Shade, upon rising and taking a look at the weather, saw that the little table from his study upon which he kept a Bible-like Webster open at M was standing in a state of shock outdoors, on the snow. . . .

(pp. 165-66)

As the parents quickly realize, Hazel is the instigator rather than the observer of these phenomena, the author of a private world of signs and images. What one may term an artistic universe, however, Shade's former typist Jane Dean labels "'an outward extension or expulsion of insanity'" (p. 166). The appraisal is not far from the truth. Where creation ceases to have any relevance to outward reality, it borders on madness. When art loses the vital connection to a world outside the artist, it becomes bound up with death. Art and obsession can become dangerously, fatally mixed.

True artistic obsession does not consume itself at once; it first expands its scope. Hazel's exploration of the spirit world resurfaces in a night vigil in an old barn, as she listens for personal messages. The barn episode is briefly mentioned in lines 345-47 of the poem and enlarged upon in Kinbote's commentary. Kinbote even goes so far as to create a mock scenario entitled "THE HAUNTED BARN" (p. 190), in which Hazel cannot bear the homey, deflating common sense of her parents. Her contact with the spirit world is moot; her hope of abstracting a pattern from what she envisions remains just a wish:

The jumble of broken words and meaningless syllables which she managed at last to collect came out in her dutiful notes as a short line of simple letter-groups. I transcribe:

pada ata lane pad not ogo old wart alan ther take feur far rant lant tal told

(p. 188)

In "'The Viewer and the View,'" David Walker tries to piece together the bits to form a vague prophecy of Shade's death, but the analysis seems more wishful thinking than solid scholarship.⁵ The meaning of Hazel's recopied farrago lies rather in the process itself, as Shade notes in Canto Two: ""Life is a message scribbled in the dark"" (p. 41). The allusion is nonetheless sympathetic. If Hazel looks for meaning in a patternless existence or attempts to impose her own meaning, at least she cannot be blamed. As Nabokov has Kinbote relate at the close of "THE HAUNTED BARN," "Life is hopeless, afterlife heartless" (p. 192). Nabokov's tone, filtered through Kinbote, is that of a practicing artist: Hazel's necrotic vision is a perversion of art; hence, her art is a jumble. The sympathy is not for the artistic failure, but for the suffering of another human being. Significantly, John Shade later makes a poem from the incident, showing that art can be derived from any materials, provided it does not lose its attention to life. Mad art deals too much with death.

By the time of her sad blind date, Hazel has come near to madness. Reality is once more impinging upon her, forcing her half out of this world:

She hardly ever smiled, and when she did
It was a sign of pain. She'd criticize
Ferociously our projects, and with eyes
Expressionless sit on her tumbled bed
Spreading her swollen feet, scratching her head
With psoriatic fingernails, and moan,
Murmuring dreadful words in monotone.

(p. 45)

The urge for creation and the will to hate have reached a terrifying balance. The same madness which reduces her days to misery, however, also keeps her alive. She continues to believe, in the face of all opposing evidence, that somehow circumstances may change. As Shade notes, "I think she always nursed a small mad hope" (p. 46).⁶ The failure of the date with Pete Dean kills that last hope, turning hate into self-destruction and creative evasion into the ultimate escape.

Hazel's last evening is actually her attempt to rub out her old identity. Images of blurriness and blankness pervade the scene, particularly during the fateful bus ride:

More headlights in the fog. There was no senseIn window-rubbing: only some white fenceAnd the reflector poles passed by unmasked.

.....

"I think, " she said,"I'll get off here. " "It's only Lochanhead. ""Yes, that's okay. " Gripping the stang, she peeredAt ghostly trees. Bus stopped. Bus disappeared.

(p. 49)

The ghostly landscape of Lochanhead is evocative of Scott's Glenartney, but in a dreary, spiritually effacing enclosure. In this white, nonreflecting scene, Father Time patrols the lake, an adumbration of death. Hazel meets no one, however; in her last act of retreat, she is in perfect isolation: "The lake lay in the mist, its ice half drowned. / A blurry shape stepped off the reedy bank / Into a crackling, gulping swamp, and sank" (p. 51). The lake, elsewhere in the work a great reflective body, has become an opaque surface. If mirrors are reflecting surfaces elsewhere in Pale Fire, they are even there no substitute for life. Mirrors, rather, represent art, and both, when blurred, are an attenuation of life. Hazel herself, a "blurry shape" halfway to evisceration, has lost the contours of her appearance. In an odd sense, by submerging herself, she has become Scott's "lady of the lake." Her final remove from reality is permanent. In a last irony that Hazel might have appreciated, she remains in her parents' memory as "a domestic ghost" (p. 41), a spirit at last.

In comparison to Hazel Shade, Charles Kinbote is a far grander artist, and a work of art in his own right. In his need to transform base reality, he creates the entire kingdom of Zembla through his bizarre annotation. Moreover, the true conundrum of Pale Fire revolves around Kinbote, since his warped commentary creates not only new facts and characters, but also "the monstrous semblance of a novel" (p. 86), the text itself. Nonetheless, Kinbote—be he Charles II or demented Botkin—suffers the same fate as Hazel. Based on a labyrinthine structure of false mirrors and props, his fantasy world eventually encloses him, leaving him in darkness.

Through Kinbote's magniloquent self-revelations, one learns a good deal more about him than about Hazel, but without the same objectivity. One may speculate about the change in Hazel's story if she had related it herself; the fact remains mat Kinbote cannot bide his madness, since it is inexorably linked with his Zemblan creation. Delusions of grandeur and attendant paranoia shine through the most glittering passages describing his royal past:

A group of especially devout Extremists calling themselves the Shadows had got together and swore to hunt down the King and kill him wherever he might be. They were, in a sense, the shadowy twins of the Karlists and indeed several had cousins or even brothers among the followers of the King.

(p. 150)

Kinbote's use of the third person, rather than serving as modesty's cloak, only allows the conceits of Zembla and King Charles II full exposure. Where Hazel's art is solipsistic, Kinbote's creation is megalomaniac. Hazel, for example, shuns real mirrors, whereas Kinbote glories in them, from using "a fop's hand mirror" (p. 121) to gazing at his multiple reflection in "a triptych of bottomless light, a really fantastic mirror, signed with a diamond . . ." (p. 111). As in Nabokov's art, Kinbote's images collect and reflect endlessly.

If the magnitude of Kinbote's creation dwarfs Hazel's, the etiology is the same: an aesthetic retreat from reality. On the most pedestrian level, Kinbote is a boringly tenacious pedant with homosexual urgencies, a lonely expatriate in America whose one claim to fame is a book on surnames. Though one cannot judge how far back Kinbote began to construct his imaginary kingdom, the conditions for its creation are well established by the time he settles in New Wye:

Often, almost nightly, throughout the spring of 1959, I had feared for my life. Solitude is the playfield of Satan. I cannot describe the depths of my loneliness and distress. There was naturally my famous neighbor just across the lane, and at one time I took in a dissipated young roomer (who generally came home long after midnight). Yet I wish to stress that cold hard core of loneliness which is not good for a displaced soul.

(p. 95)

The same embittered isolation that encompassed Hazel surrounds Kinbote. As an expatriate, he is far from home; as a homosexual in staid New Wye, he leads an inverted life; as a social misfit, he alienates everyone. As he relates in his foreword, a clubwoman "said to me in the middle of a grocery store, 'You are a remarkably disagreeable person. I fail to see how John and Sybil can stand you,' and, exasperated by my polite smile, she added: 'What's more, you are insane'" (p. 25).

Apparently, Kinbote gets along with almost no one, and his endless sexual trysts are probably more than half-imaginary. If one adds up all the people in his claimed liaisons, the figure might total half of New Wye. More revealing is the betrayal by a roomer named Bob, who brings in "a fiery-haired whore from Exton who had left her combings and reek in all three bathrooms" (pp. 26-27). Most of Kinbote's sexual escapades seem to stem from bribes on his part, and one is even led to question the handsome physiognomy with which he credits himself. A fellow faculty member, Gerald Emerald, refers to him as "the Great Beaver" (p. 24). The discrepancy between Kinbote's imagined life and his real circumstances may be greater than many critics assume. David Walker has suggested that Kinbote's motel room is actually the padded room of an asylum.⁷ One cannot rule out this possibility; in any event, Kinbote's alienation is incontrovertible.

All the factors which circumscribe Kinbote in his own little hell do not, of course, make him an artist; they merely provide the impetus for escape, Kinbote's resemblances, or Zemblances, to Hazel do not apply only to mental anguish, though. The transformations they ring on reality are also of the same mind. Discussing Hazel's fascination with palindromes, Kinbote mentions his own predilection for turning things backward: "But then it is also true that Hazel Shade resembled me in certain respects" (p. 193). Playing with words leads inevitably to playing with worlds in a Joycean mode.⁸ As always, Kinbote's efforts eclipse Hazel's. Where she is content with "red wop" from "powder," Kinbote changes Jacob Gradus into d'Argus, Jacques de Grey, Jack Grey, all reflections in "a really fantastic mirror, signed with a diamond by its maker, Sudarg of Bokay" (p. 111). The obnoxious faculty member Gerald Emerald becomes, through a Russian twist, Izumrudov, "of the emerald." Nodo and Odon, two of the Shadows, are half-brothers and reversals of one another. The shades and reflections become ubiquitous. What turns up in Shade's poem may be enfolded into Kinbote's gossip anent New Wye, or triply folded into his chronicle of Zembla. The pair of Soviet spies who appear in one incarnation as Andronikov and Niagara and in another as Andron and Niagarushka (pp. 244, 255) may just be a transformation that gets out of control. The point is that while Hazel synthesizes a mirror level of meaning through words, Kinbote develops an entire world around such principles, an exegetical edifice of words. The kingdom of Zembla and Kinbote's role in it grow to include a deposed king, secret passages, crown jewels, and its own Shadows. Kinbote, though mad to think that Shade would write a poem about such an unbelievable landscape, is right in one respect: his Zembla is a work of art. Nabokov has stated, in a typically Nabokovian manner, "art, at its greatest, is fantastically deceitful and complex."⁹ In this respect, at least, he accords Kinbote an accolade.

Kinbote's dealings with reality are another matter altogether. The result of Kinbote's exegesis on Shade's poem, for instance, is deranged poetry. He consistently warps everything around him into reflections of himself, his own type of art. Fortunately for the text, Nabokov has endowed Kinbote with a brilliant imagination, in many ways more inventive and lexically interesting than Shade's. In describing a process as mundane as the ventilation of a house, he can be absolutely coruscating: "The heating system was a farce, depending as it did on registers on the floor where from the tepid exhalations of a throbbing and groaning basement furnace were transmitted to the rooms with the faintness of a moribund's last breath" (p. 19).

He is a verbal prestidigitator, not unsurprisingly in the Nabokovian vein, capable of turning dross into flowers like the conjurer mentioned in the foreword. Shade, too, is capable of artistic transformation—Kinbote uses the conjurer analogy to apply to the poet, not himself—but his art remains grounded in the mundanities of everyday life. He does deal with life, art, and death, but his approach is the opposite of Kinbote's reading public events out of his private fantasy. As Lucy Maddox points out, "Shade attempts to translate public fate into private significance. . . . "¹⁰ Kinbote, on the other hand, moves toward structures as vaporous as Hazel's spirits.

Kinbote's commentary on his word-creations is elucidating if somewhat skewed. He sees himself as an appropriator of patterns, a thief with artistic tendencies, but his language belies the statement:

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.

(p. 289)

Kinbote's art is as beautiful as it is otherworldly, but by now one must be wary of his pronunciamentos. His evaluation of the package he carries—"I was holding all Zembla pressed to my heart" (p. 289)—is a fantastic importation to the scene, having no basis in reality. Rather, all of Zembla resides in his head. The references to charmed fireflies or a Myotis sublatus writing messages hearken back to Hazel and her private world of signs. Shade's art is solid in its reassuring weight of index cards. Kinbote's and Hazel's arts, while not inferior conceptions, represent ethereal, escapist visions.

One may view the emerging parallels between Kinbote and Hazel as just that: not exact equivalencies but correspondences between the characters. Nabokov puts it more strongly: "There are no 'real' doubles in my novels."¹¹ In the absence of outright doppelgängers, then, the suicide-daughter is a hazel shade of Kinbote. The affiliation between the two even helps explain certain phenomena outside their mad art. Shade's infinite patience with Kinbote, for example, makes perfect sense when one realizes that Shade sees his deranged daughter again in his next-door neighbor. If Shade is overly tolerant to Kinbote through an Oedipal link, the relationship also works in reverse. As Phyllis Roth notes in her analysis: "The evidence of the Oedipal situation in the novel is extensive. To begin, Kinbote sees himself as the child of Sybil and John, The most apparent manifestation of this is his rivalry with their deceased daughter Hazel Shade."¹² In fact, Kinbote's constant desire to see Shade represents more than collaring the nearest available neighbor; it is a childish bid for attention. Similarly, Hazel's attempts to subvert her parents' reality with her own fantasy are monstrously realized in Kinbote's perversion of Shade's poem. The danger lies in the fantasy taking over the artist, as well as reality.

Kinbote and Hazel suffer ultimately from a lack of relevance to their surroundings. If, as June Perry Levine suggests for a reading of the novel, "Significance is achieved by interconnection,"¹³ betrayal arises through a loss of connection. The relation between the made-up image and the self is blanked out, as if one looked into a mirror and saw no reflection. Rejected by Pete Dean, Hazel becomes hazier, as others simply ignore her presence. Wrapped in her spiritual fancies, she has become a wraith even before her death. Kinbote encounters a similar betrayal when reality excludes him. Attaching his entire identity to Shade's presumed exposition of Zembla, he becomes mentally disjointed when he finds nothing of himself there:

I started to read the poem. I read faster and faster. I sped through it, snarling, as a furious young heir through an old deceiver's testament. Where were the battlements of my sunset castle? Where was Zembla the Fair? Where her spine of mountains? Where her long thrill through the mist? And my lovely flower boys, and the spectrum of the stained windows, and the Black Rose Paladins, and the whole marvelous tale? Nothing of it was there! The complex contribution I had been pressing upon him with a hypnotist's patience and a lover's urge was simply not there. Oh, but I cannot express the agony!

(p. 296)

Apart from his personal myth, he is less than real; he is nonexistent. Accordingly, he attempts to re-create the entire structure of Zembla in a lonely motel room in Cedarn, Utana. Here, Kinbote shows greater imaginative force than Hazel, trying once more to resurrect himself through art. The burden of maintaining such a fantasy is too heavy, though. Not only does it exhaust the creator, but it also drags him down, further and further away from any connection with the real world. In his lucid moments, he dreams of the end of the farce he has created, the extinction of himself.

In a self-reflexive fiction, even the end is internally generated. If Hazel engineers her own finish, Kinbote creates a character for that purpose, a destructive anti-force named Gradus lurking in the Zemblan terrain. Though in some senses a mere construct, Gradus has a motivation, the act of regicide, and a personality which stands for all that Kinbote detests:

Mere springs and coils produced the inward movements of our clockwork man. He might be termed a Puritan. One essential dislike, formidable in its simplicity, pervaded his dull soul: he disliked injustice and deception. He disliked their union—they were always together—with a wooden passion that neither had, nor needed, words to express itself.

(p. 152)

Gradus is against deception, Kinbote's delight; he cannot use words, Kinbote's stock-in-trade. Nonetheless, Kinbote works upon him as with all his other creations, granting him a half-dozen aliases and a woefully inept record of assassinations. As the idea of creation blooms in Kinbote's brain, so does the idea of annihilation.

Once Kinbote has created Gradus, the henchman assumes a seemingly independent existence. He leaves Zembla and follows the path of the exiled king through Europe. He even appears in Shade's poem—as noted by Kinbote—through the sinister permutations of "gradual," "gray," and the unused variant "Tanagra dust" (pp. 77, 231). Since Kinbote associates the gunman who kills Shade with Gradus, the death Gradus represents becomes paired with Shade:

His departure for Western Europe, with a sordid purpose in his heart and a loaded gun in his pocket, took place on the very day that an innocent poet was beginning Canto Two of Pale Fire. We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem, following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words (see note to line 596), reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night.

(p. 78)

The link between Shade's poetry and Gradus' journey toward America is based on Shade as the creator, yet Kinbote's own fiction is based on the poem. David Packman comments on the relation: "The novel measures its unfolding in relation to Gradus's trajectory. The road he covers is the text's narrative line. In his journey Gradus covers real roads that, in the representation, become lines of words upon the page."¹⁴ Words create the situation and its undoing, and therein lies the double nature of Kinbote's logorrhea. As with Hazel, his art is fatally tinged. Reading Gradus into Shade's poem, he sees beyond art into death: "we cannot help reading into these lines something more than mirrorplay and mirage shimmer. We feel doom . . ." (p. 135). The artistry which produced Gradus is flawed. It embraces and encompasses death as an alternative to reality.

Though Gradus begins as something of a nullity, he begins to achieve a larger-than-life quality, overshadowing the other Zemblan figures as the notes progress:

Gradus is now much nearer to us in space and time than he was in the preceding cantos. He has short upright black hair. We can fill in the bleak oblong of his face with most of its elements such as thick eyebrows and a wart on the chin. He has a ruddy but unhealthy complexion. We see, fairly in focus, the structure of his somewhat mesmeric organs of vision. We see his melancholy nose with its crooked ridge and grooved tip. We see the mineral blue of his jaw and the gravelly pointillé of his suppressed mustache.

(p. 277)

The physical closeness is startling, as if one were looking through a microscope. The personification to end the fiction has become of interest in himself as Kinbote focuses in. Nabokov, too, believes in the microscopic approach:

There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world, a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small things, that is intrinsically artistic.¹³

Nabokov, however, is capable of maintaining the proper proportion and distance. When Kinbote employs the same technique, he has fallen in love with his creation again, in this instance collaborating with his demise. He has assumed the role of a royal fugitive tracked by a gray assassin, all part of his intricate pattern. As always, the attempt is to dislocate reality, not that his friend Shade was killed by a criminal madman from the local asylum, but that the killing was the result of a continental web of intrigue and a tragicomically inept aim. In transforming Jack Gray into Jacob Gradus, though, Kinbote internalizes me figure as part of his creation. Kinbote's future promises "a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus" (p. 301), but since this new Gradus really sprang into being after Shade's death, he is present from the start of Kinbote's foreword. He has become part of Kinbote's art, a destructive force in the artist's mind.

Evidence of Kinbote's concomitant desire to murder and create occurs throughout his notes, usually adjacent to a particularly unpleasant reality. Describing his betrayal at the hands of his former roomer Bob, he posits a way to halt the memory:

At times I thought that only by self-destruction could I hope to cheat the relentlessly advancing assassins who were in me, in my eardrums, in my pulse, in my skull, rather than on that constant highway looping up over me and around my heart as I dozed off only to have my sleep shattered by that drunken, impossible, unforgettable Bob's return to Candida's or Dee's former bed.

(p. 97)

Self-destruction and self-aggrandizement meet in Kinbote's mind as twin evasions of circumstance. As his creation progresses, however, its poetry is insufficient to mask his drab hideaway, and the secondary solution poses an escape. The retreat into the dark, the vitiation of his creation, begins to have physical effects: "Whatever energy I possessed has quite ebbed away lately, and these excruciating headaches now make impossible the mnemonic effort and eye strain that the drawing of another such plan would demand" (p. 107). The plan referred to is the drawing of Onhava Palace, once an invention that Kinbote could have elaborated on endlessly. Now, elaboration in the face of dumb reality is draining him. When his creation draws to an end, his created existence may also flow away. In a not-to-be-missed parentheses, he hints "(see eventually my ultimate note)" (p. 101 ).¹⁶ In fact, as Hazel's failure at living is discernible from the start, Kinbote's end, too, begins with his introduction of himself. It is a portrait of a mind tearing itself to pieces, spewing out polychrome fragments for an imagined audience.

Kinbote heralds his mental decline from the start of his extravagant foreword. Unable to marshal his thoughts on the page, he complains of a competing reality: "There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings" (p. 13). Lunacy has bloomed in the third paragraph. Even before that non sequitur of non sequiturs, though, he talks of "Canto Two, your favorite" (p. 13), as if he were conversing with an invisible confidant. Actually, the work is as much a confession as it is an arrogation of the text. In the conclusion to his foreword, he claims, "without my notes Shade's text simply has no human reality at all" (p. 28), but even at this early juncture one is aware of inversions. Kinbote's own commentary is precisely the self-referential creation he claims Shade's poem is. He does have some realization of the truth, and his greatest moments of expatiation contain, as Nabokov would have considered anagramatically apt, some expiation.

As a master creator, Kinbote bows to an even greater creator, though in typically Kinbotian fashion he promulgates "our Zemblan brand of protestantism" (p. 224). Just as Hazel hung on a spirit world, Kinbote depends on an afterlife, which he views more and more as a welcome relief from "these dark evenings that are destroying my brain" (p. 123). As he develops the idea of religion in his notes, God provides the divine afflatus, the opposite of nihilistic despair. More important, God provides a comforting afterlife which Kinbote uses as a rationale for suicide:

With this divine mist of utter dependence permeating one's being, no wonder one is tempted, no wonder one weighs on one's palm with a dreamy smile the compact Firearm in its case of suede leather hardly bigger than a castlegate key or a boy's seamed purse, no wonder one peers over the parapet into an inviting abyss.

(p. 220)

Kinbote's interest in suicide corresponds to his tendency to fantasize. Ever the artist, he imbues the final act with a poetry of its own. Of the various means of divorcing soul from body, he prefers falling:

The ideal drop is from an aircraft, your muscles relaxed, your pilot puzzled, your packed parachute shuffled off, cast off, shrugged off—farewell, shootka (little chute)! Down you go, but all the while you feel suspended and buoyed as you somersault in slow motion like a somnolent tumbler pigeon, and sprawl supine on the eiderdown of the air, or lazily turn to embrace your pillow, enjoying every last minute of soft, deep, death-padded life, with the earth's green seesaw now above, now below, and the voluptuous crucifixion, as you stretch yourself in the growing rush, in the nearing swish, and then your loved body's obliteration in the Lap of the Lord.

(p. 221)

Seen in this light, self-murder becomes more a change of scenery than the onset of darkness. Life is a shootka ("little joke" in Russian). The phrase "death-padded life" shows an artistic merging of two extremes—but death precedes. As for the scenery around him, it has become repulsive: "We who burrow in filth every day may be forgiven perhaps the one sin that ends all sins" (p. 222). Kinbote's original fantasy was to occlude base reality, and the dream of death which supersedes it is another such attempt. What he cannot abide is a void, and once he has assured himself of a hereafter, he moves ineluctably toward it.

By the time of his last note, he has arrived at the same spiritual nadir as the suicidal Hazel. The final paragraphs have an uncanny valedictory note: "Yes, better stop. My notes and self are petering out. Gentlemen, I have suffered very much, and more than any of you can imagine" (p. 300). As to his future plans, he is hazy: other disguises, other semblances. The stage play he thinks of writing, however, shows his realization that he has invented himself: "a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments" (p. 301).

With the recognition that his existence has been a figment, he has little to do but end the game. His projections for continued existence are merely a last misdirection, an unwillingness to go out without the possibility of an encore. If, in this day and age, one can still trust the author's judgment of his work, one has only to go to Nabokov for the eschatology. In an interview, he refers to "the day on which Kinbote committed suicide (and he certainly did after putting the last touches to his edition of the poem). . . . "¹⁷ A consummate artist, with an emphasis on "consummate," Kinbote finishes first his commentary and then himself. As Hazel's headnote, so to speak, was "Life is a message scribbled in the dark" (p. 41), Shade's poem also provides an italicized tribute to Kinbote: "Man's life as commentary to abstruse / Unfinished poem" (p. 67). The twin epitaphs represent two existences almost irrelevant to reality, lived out rather through transmutation and fantasy. Final judgment, if not suspended, is at least moot. Nabokov obviously applauds consummate artistry, but when the vision consumes the artist, one can only laud the art and lament the means.

Though one may resent Kinbote's falsification of reality as opposed to Shade's poetic extension of life, the sympathy of the work seems to rest in the end with Kinbote. Against the arrogance of the artist, one detects a maundering vulnerability, Kinbote's recognition of himself as an aberration. "Imagine a soft, clumsy giant" (p. 17), he puts forth as a self-description in his foreword, and the evocation is apt. Here, the parallel with Hazel lends a useful perspective: both figures are freaks, in Nabokov's artistic conception and in their own artistic dreams. The author extends appreciation for their art, sympathy for their lives. This compassionate bond goes a long way toward refuting those critics who insist that Nabokov's vision is brilliant but cold. His sense of affection, though belittling at times, might almost amount to love. As Mary McCarthy wrote:

Love is the burden of Pale Fire, love and loss. Love is felt as a kind of homesickness, that yearning for union described by Plato, the pining for the other half of a once-whole body, the straining of the soul's black horse to unite with the white. The sense of loss in love, of separation . . . binds mortal men in a common pattern—the elderly couple watching TV in a lighted room, and the "queer" neighbor watching them from his window. But it is most poignant in the outsider: the homely daughter stood up by her date, the refugee. . .. .¹⁸

The fatal vision of a flawed artist is always of interest to the depicter, and not just as a cautionary tale, or for the setting up of a reflexive frame. One feels tenderness for one's creations, particularly those who seem too frail for life. As for the art produced by such figures, a distorting mirror has its own special reflection.

¹ Andrew Field, in Nabokov: His Life in Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), goes so far as to suggest that Kinbote is a creation of Shade's.

² Sir Walter Scott, The Complete Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, Cambridge ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900), p. 156. I am indebted to Mary McCarthy's article "A Bolt from the Blue" (New Republic, 4 June 1962, pp. 21-27) for this reference.

³ Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Putnam's, 1962), pp. 43-44. All subsequent references refer to this edition, and are cited parenthetically in the text.

⁴ Though this misspelling of chthonic may be only a typographical error, it appears that way in all editions of Pale Fire.

⁵ David Walker, '"The Viewer and the View': Chance and Choice in Pale Fire," Studies in American Fiction, 4: 213.

⁶ See William K. Wimsatt, ed., Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry and Prose, 2nd ed. (New York: Holt, 1972). "A small mad hope" is the modern, reduced equivalent of Pope's "Hope springs eternal in the human breast: / Man never Is, but always To be blest" (An Essay on Man, Epistle I, lines 95-96). Shade was a scholar of Pope and wrote his poem in Popeian couplets. The original reference to Zembla, "At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where," also stems from An Essay on Man: Epistle II, line 224.

⁷ Walker, "'The Viewer and the View,'" p. 219.

⁸ The comparison with Joyce is particularly salient with respect to a passage from Ulysses, where Martha writes a letter to Henry Flower, a.k.a. Bloom: "I called you naughty boy because I do not like that other world" (James Joyce, Ulysses [New York: Random House, 1961], p. 77). The overflow from words to worlds crops up continually in ensuing passages.

⁹ Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 33.

¹⁰ Lucy Maddox, Nabokov's Novels in English (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1983), p. 19.

¹¹ Alfred Appel, Jr., "An Interview with Vladimir Nabokov," in L. S. Dembo, ed., Nabokov: The Man and His Work (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1967), p. 37.

¹² Phyllis A. Roth, "The Psychology of the Double in Nabokov's Pale Fire," Essays in Literature (Western Illinois University), 2:222-23.

¹³ June Perry Levine, "Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire: 'The Method of Composition' as Hero," in International Fiction Review, 5:108.

¹⁴ David Packman, "Pale Fire: The Vertigo of Interpretation," in his Vladimir Nabokov: The Structure of Literary Desire (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1982), p. 83.

¹⁵ Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York: Putnam's, 1966), pp. 166-67.

¹⁶ Nabokov's use of parentheses would make a small study in itself. He is the only author I am aware of who regularly locates the most significant part of a sentence within real or tonal brackets.

¹⁷ Appel, "An Interview with Vladimir Nabokov," p. 29.

¹⁸ McCarthy, "A Bolt from the Blue," p. 26.