Review: Pale Fire

I don't have any education in literature or poetry outside what we learned in English class in high school, so my experience with Pale Fire is restricted to that of someone who likes to read books, and doesn't think too hard about it.

Vladimirovich did an excellent job of making Kinbote easy to poke fun at; he's under delusions of grandeur, is profoundly self-centered, and his commentary is the vast majority of the time completely unrelated to Pale Fire itself, with tangents on how to commit suicide, an ongoing migraine, noises outside his window, and of course, an impossibly detail retelling of Grey's every reaper step towards Shade's end. When he does address the poem itself, it's typically to lament Shade not talking about him, be a pedant, hawk his own philosophy/religion, or in a few hilarious instances, explicitely state that he doesn't feel like properly commenting on some verse. No wonder everyone else in John's vicinity was horrified to discover his final work in the madman's claws! I derive no small pleasure from the king's discovery that his overly-indulgent description of Zembla and his escape did not make it into Pale Fire.

Moving from Kinbote's deranged commentary to the poem itself, I was shocked, having read through three hundred lines of word vomit about Zembla and Vinogradus, to find a surprisingly tender and genuine poem. Again, I'm not much for poetry, but I really enjoyed reading it, and may need to seek out more of its ilk. I especially appreciated the contrast in treatment Kinbote and Shade give Sybil; she is made out to be a petty, selfish, whippish woman by the former, whereas her husband has nothing but love and admiration for her. The tone shift was shocking, but I suppose not surprising given the delusions of our annotator. Likewise, I found a particular passage about the death of a loved one and decay of mind (lines 547-458).

Overall, Pale Fire was a very pleasant read, with plenty of opportunities to laugh at the narrator, and a lovely poem to close off the demented ramblings.

As seems to be the trend in my reviews, I've noted a collection of excerpts that tickled my fancy below. There is one early draft stanza that gives me the giggles which I would be remiss not to directly quote:

The light is good; the reading lamps, long-necked;

All doors have keys. Your modern architect

Is in collusion with psychoanalysts:

When planning parents' bedrooms, he insists

On lockless doors so that, when looking back,

The future patient of the future quack

May find, all set for him, the Primal Scene.

Likewise, I enjoyed how quickly our dear king Charles gave up on some basic math, and immediately went back to talking about Gradus:

Lines 120-121: five minutes were equal to forty ounces, etc.

In the left margin and parallel to it: "In the Middle Ages an hour was equal to 480 ounces of fine sand or 22,560 atoms."

I am unable to check either this statement or the poet's calculations in regard to five minutes, i.e., three hundred seconds, since I do not see how 480 can be divided by 300 or vice versa, but perhaps I am only tired. On the day (July 4) John Shade wrote this, Gradus the Gunman was getting ready to leave Zembla for his steady blunderings through two hemispheres (see note to line 181).

Forty ounces times twelve is 480 ounces, and five minutes times twelve is an hour.

Or interesting note to line 149.

I had to look up his note to line 137:

Line 137: lemniscate

"A unicursal bicircular quartic" says my weary old dictionary. I cannot understand what this has to do with bicycling and suspect that Shade's phrase has no real meaning. As other poets before him, he seems to have fallen here under the spell of misleading euphony.

A quick search with a modern dictionnary defines a lemniscate as a figure eight, so the line seems to be refering to doing figure eights in the sand on a bike. In this one instance, I offer Kinbote an olive branch, for he was deceived by a most deceptive and obfuscatorial dictionary.

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 shadow twins of the Karlists and indeed several had cousins or even brothers among the followers of the King. No doubt, the origin of either group could be traced to various reckless rituals in student fraternities and military clubs, and their development examined in terms of fads and anti-fads; but, whereas an objective historian associates a romantic and noble glamor with Karlism, its shadow group must strike one as something definitely Gothic and nasty.

Objective historians indeed.

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. Such a dislike should have deserved praise had it not been a by-product of the man's hopeless stupidity. He called unjust and deceitful everything that surpassed his understanding. He worshiped general ideas and did so with pedantic aplomb. The generality was godly, the specific diabolical. If one person was poor and the other wealthy it did not matter what precisely had ruined one or made the other rich; the difference itself was unfair, and the poor man who did not denounce it was as wicked as the rich one who ignored it: People who knew too much, scientists, writers, mathematicians, crystallographers and so forth, were no better than kings or priests: they all held an unfair share of power of which others were cheated. A plain decent fellow should constantly be on the watch for some piece of clever knavery on the part of nature and neighbor.

.

"Speaking of novels," I said, "you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust's rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and a colossal farce, the vocabulary of genius and its poetry, but no more, impossibly rude hostesses, please let me speak, and even ruder guests, mechanical Dostoevskian rows and Tolstoian nuances of snobbishness repeated and expanded to an unsufferable length, adorable seascapes, melting avenues, no, do not interrupt me, light and shade effects rivaling those of the greatest English poets, a flora of metaphors, described - by Cocteau, I think - as 'a mirage of suspended gardens,' and, I have not yet finished, an absurd, rubber-and-wire romance between a blond young blackguard (the fictitious Marcel), and an improbable jeune fille who has a pasted-on bosom, Vronski's (and Lyovin's) thick neck, and a cupid's buttocks for cheeks; but - and now let me finish sweetly - we were wrong, Sybil, we were wrong in denying our little beau ténébreux the capacity of evoking 'human interest': it is there, it is there - maybe a rather eighteenth-centuryish, or even seventeenthcenturyish, brand, but it is there. Please, dip or redip, spider, into this book (offering it), you will find a pretty marker in it bought in France, I want John to keep it. Au revoir, Sybil, I must go now. I think my telephone is ringing."

My poor dear Sybil, I would not wish Kinobote against my worst enemy.

My own opinion, which I would like the doctor to confirm, is that the French sandwich was engaged in an intestinal internecine war with the "French" fries.

.

Because of these machinations I was confronted with nightmare problems in my endeavors to make people calmly see - without having them immediately scream and hustle me - the truth of the tragedy - a tragedy in which I had been not a "chance witness" but the protagonist, and the main, if only potential, victim.