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• W221398051 abstract "THIS SPRING I SAW my second book published. This was a great and lucky thing and I have enough gratitude stored up to last me a long time. It was also a queasy thing. To be observed, to be judged, to be discussed in small but permanent corners of the Internet. It's weird to go from pajamaed word-fusser to extremely minor public figure (I do mean extremely--the moustachioed lawyer in my home state who sues drunk drivers is more famous than I am). But suffice it to say that I was feeling protective and exposed when I began work on this essay by looking for the original New York Times review of Pale Fire. The review struck me as being nitpicky and small-minded. For example, the critic takes issue with some of Nabokov's verbs, which is like being critical of Picasso's brush strokes. It's true that Pale Fire is a difficult book with complicated goals, a discussion of which is called for, but when the reviewer writes, Even [Nabokov's] prose sounds insecure, my reaction was, Screw the critic. All my allegiance goes to Team Art. Make writing that's hard and weird and puzzling and vital. Make work that's too big for those critical little brains to grasp. A problem quickly arose with this position: the book tested me, too. It's Nabokov, so there is much to be admired, but, like the critic, I didn't always feel like living in the no-man's-land of this story. Pale Fire is novel. Sort of. It's a discussion of a poem. Sort of. Or it's a story told by a fallen king, trying to seed a poet's work with the tale of his own exile. Or the speaker isn't actually the king. Or he isn't even the speaker. Maybe everything is a delusion. Ostensibly, the book is a discussion by Charles Kinbote, an academic and critic, of a poem also called Pale Fire by the Frost-like poet John Shade. In the foreword Kinbote explains the role of the artist, whose efforts are meager and vain until the critic shows up to bring them to life: Let me state that without my notes Shade's text simply has no human reality at all since the human reality of such a 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. To this statement my dear poet would probably not have subscribed, but, for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word. In other words, ten points for Team Art, negative one zillion for Team Critic. Kinbote, the ultimate unreliable narrator, believes that he is the king of a Northern European country called Zembla, and is now exiled after having been deposed by evil revolutionaries. In New England he meets the poet John Shade and they fall into a deep friendship (according to him, disputed by pretty much all other evidence). During the course of several months before Shade's untimely and accidental death (supposedly by an assassin sent from Zembla to kill the hero king), Kinbote reveals his tale. Kinbote then absconds with the poet's manuscript and holes up in a hotel room to write his two-hundred-plus-page commentary in which he tries to show that, though the poem seems to be about coming to terms with the suicide of Shade's daughter Hazel, the poem is really and truly about none other than he himself, Charles the Beloved, King of Zembla. More than a few scholars have spent their careers theorizing about the identity of the book's narrator--there are clues that it isn't actually Charles Kinbote at all. For decades, most critics subscribed to the theory that the actual narrator is a barely mentioned colleague of Shade and Kinbote's named V. Botkin. In the 1990s, another professor unveiled his theory that Shade was the real voice, and that he penned both the poem and the fictional commentary (and that Kinbote did not even exist). Those who believe this theory are called Shadeans. …" @default.
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• W221398051 date "2013-09-22" @default.
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• W221398051 title "The Last Word: On Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov" @default.
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