Regular readers of Vladimir Nabokov are aware that his books are full of what I call “verbal acrobatics” as he is one of the few non-native English speakers who have mastered the language and can use it at a very high-level. He’s not only building exquisite plots but he also sets up lots of puzzles, challenges and games for the readers in his books.
However, Pale Fire goes to the very extreme in this aspect, since the whole book is an elaborate puzzle, to be solved by the reader and after more than 60 years since the book was first published, not all puzzles have been solved.
Structurally, it is an interesting book. There is a Foreword written by a Charles Kinbote, allegedly a visiting professor from the faraway country of Zembla, narrating how he came by with publishing a poem of 999 lines by the esteemed scholar John Shade, recently deceased.
The poem is fully included in the text, followed by around 180 pages of commentary and the book ends with extensive footnotes.
When you start reading the Foreword by Kinbote, the text steers you towards an implication that Charles Kinbote is actually the exiled King of Zembla. However, as you continue reading the text, something strange happens. It all depends on how you read the book. To understand what I really mean here, we have to visit one of the most enlightening books in this topic, namely Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery by Brian Boyd.
There are lots of academic papers about Pale Fire, but the book I mention here provides one of the most robust and extensive explanations of the book. Brian Boyd shows that there are various ways to read the book.
One can read the book sequentially, namely can read the Foreword, the Poem, the commentary and the footnotes in the order they are printed in the book. Following this route means that you will not immediately get the hints and information embedded in the Foreword and the commentary, but you get a holistic view of the book and slowly get a total understanding.
Another alternative is to start reading the foreword and jump to the relevant section whenever there is a reference. It should also be noted that Nabokov has set up traps for readers who follow this route, namely when you do this for certain references, you go back and forth and end up in the passage you started from.
I must say that I preferred the first approach.
This is not the only complication in reading the book. Boyd shows that there are at least three levels the story could be read. The first level is the casual reading, where you take for granted what Kinbote first implies and later explicitly mentions. However, when you read the full commentary, you get the idea that Kinbote might be mentally ill and the whole story is his re-imagination of the desperate situation he is in). Thus this becomes the unreliable narrator concept in its extreme implementation. The third level covers the concept of life-after-death and covers messages from beyond the grave.
Another theme you find extensively in the book is the use of butterflies, mainly in the poem. Remembering Nabokov’s passion of Lepidoptera and his work in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, this is not very surprising.
Another book that gives you an interesting approach to all of Nabokov’s works is The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov by Andrea Pitzer. In this book Pitzer shows that Nabokov has embedded some of the pains he or his relatives or people in general have lived through in some kind of coding throughout his books. Pale Fire covers a chapter in this book and Pitzer suggests that there could be a different interpretation on why Kinbote might have come up with an elaborate story about his identity and his country, namely this could be as a result of all the problems a typical Russian emigré might have gone through during the Russian Revolution or what people might have gone through in the Soviet or Nazi regimes.
These are all valid approaches, but the important point is not what the real truth is, but the fact that Nabokov has built an immense structure through which he is telling us an intricate story, sometimes embedding or encrypting the facts through multiple layers of symbols.
If you intend to read the book, do it in a period where you can spare a lot of time and of course take whatever route you find most appealing to actually read it (sequentially or following multiple threads, according to your reading preferences).
·
89 Gösterim
Yorumlar
Lütfen giriş yapınız.