The following is an essay I wrote for a class on satire, taking up the question of whether Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire counts as satire and, if so, what kind.
Despite its tidy arrangement, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire has left critics with a mess of questions and a mop of inadequate terms. The question of form and genre alone produces discordant responses: whodunit novel, parodic satire, poetic or biographic commentary, to name a few. For the “combinational delight” of Hamlet’s Polonius, we may add novel-satire, satire-commentary, novel-commentary, or novel-satire-commentary to the list. These terms can only be shorthand, crude approximations for a protean text that plays with form, language, and readers. As Richard Rorty observes in an introduction to the book, just when we think we have pinned it down, “we get an uncanny sense that the book is looking at us from a considerable distance, and chuckling.” The clues start at satire, which at length proves profitable, but whether Pale Fire is in itself a satire depends on where you look, who you laugh at, and what other genres you think are at play.
In Pope’s Shadow
Possible points of departure for thinking about Pale Fire as satire abound, but Alexander Pope presents the most promising choice. Nabokov leaves a trail of allusions and references to satirists like François Rabelais, Samuel Johnson, Jonathan Swift, and T. S. Eliot that motivates the search for satire, but a passing reference to Rabelais here and Eliot there is not enough to see how it plays out. On the other hand, Pope’s influence on Shade runs deep.
In fact, the latter makes his admiration public. A professor of English, Shade published scholarly work on Pope: “this work which can be found in any college library is Supremely Blest … The book is concerned mainly with Pope’s technique but also contains pithy observations on ‘the stylized morals of his age’” (Nabokov, page 151). Facts derived from Kinbote’s notes demand scrutiny and skepticism, but these are credible. The book exists since Shade tells us about it, its ubiquity in college libraries is explained by his status as a distinguished poet, and his focus on Pope’s technique, style, and morals is in character. The title Supremely Blest comes from Pope’s Essay on Man, a poem that, like Shade’s ‘Pale Fire,’ asks about man’s place in the world. Kinbote also reports that soon after recovering from his heart attack, Shade “was again speaking of his favorite Pope” (page 191) to a group of students at a round table. Kinbote’s description with “again” and “favorite” makes Shade’s discussions of Pope almost an identifiable personality trait, the means by which he can tell Shade has recuperated.
Shade also puts Pope into poetic practice. One of Shade’s drafts amounts to a confession as such:
I have a certain liking, I admit,
For Parody, that last resort of wit:
‘In nature’s strife when fortitude prevails
The victim falters and the victor fails.’
Yes, reader, Pope [some day I must set free] (lines 895-99)
The five lines contain some rapid turns. Shade excuses himself for indulging in Parody, capitalized to give it ironic importance. As a “last resort of wit,” he must think it unbecoming or a failure of creativity as a poet, but a couplet in the style of Pope ensues. Then he expresses to us his need to liberate Pope. The direct address to the reader gives the last line a regretful or apologetic tone as the distinguished poet wants us to know he is trying to find his own voice. The irony is that one expects Shade under Pope’s sway so that Shade is the one in need of release, not vice versa. The sense must be that Shade holds Pope captive insofar as he hinders the expression or progression of Pope’s technique and style, which Shade shows he has mastered in the couplet. It is a perfect imitation of Pope’s tone, vocabulary, rhythm, every aspect but meaning. If both victim and victor fall, how does fortitude prevail? The intentional illogic of the lines impedes sense but not sound. Pope’s heroic verse strikes the ear as witty and quotable, if tedious, because he writes in closed couplets, where the two end-stopped lines form a complete grammatical or logical thought. Shade, whose habit is to flout closed couplets by enjambing lines, returns to them to produce a potent parody of Pope.
His pastiche, however, plays second fiddle. In the second canto, Shade depicts a scene on the television, a cosmetics commercial, in the manner of the first canto of The Rape of the Lock:
A nymph came pirouetting, under white
Rotating petals, in a vernal rite
To kneel before an altar in a wood
Where various articles of toilet stood. (lines 413-6)
Shade duplicates the nymph, the altar, the toilet, and the comparison between Belinda’s toilette and a mystic ritual (“vernal rite”). However, The Rape of the Lock’s satirical tone comes from the contrast between epic language used to describe quotidian routines. Shade’s diction is more elevated than colloquial speech but not epic. Not that he has to match the tone or style to use the image, but without them, the joke is lost and the reference left dangling. One could well read the lines as a pleasant aesthetic description, never detecting its original jest and exaggeration. And so Kinbote captures something of Shade with his phrase “neo-Popian prosodic style” (page 226). An immediate flaw with the description is that Pope imprints his style on Shade beyond prosody, but the incisive prefix is neo, marking the revival and advancement of a position fallen out of favor. There is a sense in which the old-fashioned Shade, a man who crosses back and forth between life and death, is trying to bring back the yet more old-fashioned Pope. But he seems not to innovate on Pope’s parody as much as repeat it sotto voce.
The one place where Shade comes close to innovating on Pope has nothing to do with satire, hinges on a misunderstanding, and ends with his reverting to Pope’s argument. A few lines after the nymph pastiche, we see Shade reviewing a galley copy of Supremely Blest when he observes that Pope’s line “‘See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing’ / Has unmistakably the vulgar ring of its preposterous age” (lines 419-20). The draft phrase in Kinbote’s comments, “smacks of their heartless age” (page 156) keeps the meaning more or less the same. Either way, he disapproves of Pope’s ostensible cruelty to the unfortunate. In Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play, Thomas Karshan notes that Shade has misread the line. Pope is not laughing at their misery. Pope is a humanist who in An Essay on Man celebrates that humans have both self-love and reason, counterbalances for each other. Self-love pushes the human on where reason would hold them back. In his heart, Shade agrees. He knows that people’s instincts shield themselves from truth that hurts. Looking at the sky while reflecting on the absurdity of death, he posits
The regular vulgarian, I daresay,
Is happier: he sees the Milky Way
Only when making water. (lines 125-7)
Shade’s vulgarian plays the same role as Pope’s blind beggar or the cripple, the difference being the tone of contempt — vulgarian can only have a negative connotation — the melancholy mood from an existential meditation, and Shade’s comparative “happier” with respect to himself where the corresponding lines in Pope use the absolute “happy.” Where the speaker of Pope’s poem looks down on the world from above, Shade shifts the logic to his own point of view. Like the pastiche, he changes the formula, but not in a way that improves upon Pope so much as falls under his shadow.
Ultimately, Shade’s interest in Pope lies in the claims of An Essay on Man and the aesthetic of The Rape of the Lock, separated from its original mock-heroic context, and not in exaggeration or scatology or any of the other techniques in Pope’s extensive satiric repertoire. Still, one sees a sliver of satire in Shade’s “In nature’s strife” couplet of faux wit or his ending a contemplation on life and death with a man urinating. Shade lowers the volume of his satire to a background buzz which piques but does not satisfy ears attentive to the satirical undertones.
Nor can it. Consider the word vulgar and its variants, which Shade uses three times in his poem. From Latin vulgus meaning crowd, vulgar lies inside a semantic triangle bounded by “obscene,” “low,” and “common.” Ancient Roman satirists like Horace and Juvenal used vulgus to disparage popular beliefs in their verse, using a public persona, as if they spoke in the forum. The tradition of the satirist in public passes down to Pope and Swift of the Scriblerus Club, which poked fun at writers of their time like Lewis Theobald. Likewise, The Dunciad, the exemplar of Pope’s satire and notably not well capitalized by Shade, uses “vulgar” to disparage just as Horace did. Against this topos, Shade’s vulgarian is abstract, existent only for a few lines, because he is less interested in the forum and the crowds than in his own experiences. After his heart attack, Shade meets a Mrs. Z who had the same near-death experience, but she derails the conversation: “She plied | me with | fruit cake, | turning | it all / Into | an id | i ot | ic so | cial call” (lines 779-80). This is Shade at his most social, thus most satirical. “Idiotic” does most of the work, but the specificity of fruit cake makes the scene both vivid and frivolous. We imagine a garrulous woman unable to read Shade’s expression of impatience and disgust. “Plies” depicts the woman as an automaton, mechanically plating up food and handing it to a bemused Shades, who takes his leave, cutting the joke short.
Where Shade adopts the letter of Pope’s satire and none of the Horatian or Juvenalian mode, Kinbote’s commentary inherits both the spirit of Pope and Swift and the Menippean mode. As we have seen, Shade’s interest in himself prevents him from taking up the mantle of the public satirist. As a narcissist, the same applies doubly for Kinbote. He cannot take up Horace or Juvenal pointing our attention to people in the city. If Pale Fire is a satire, it must be a Menippean satire, which tends to look at a wider range of fantastical, ludicrous, or ridiculous philosophies and attitudes. A classic example is Petronius’ Satyricon, especially the gaudy dinner scene with Trimalchio. The Menippean mode also brings out the origin of the word satire from Latin satura, a dish composed of a variety of ingredients, in that it includes a combination of literary forms, techniques, and influences. Kinbote’s commentary puts prose of various lengths next to snippets of Shade’s drafts, full poems in different rhyme schemes and meters, and lines from other authors in (made-up) languages, not to mention letters and dramatic dialogues typeset like plays. Given the allusions to Pope and Swift, one could read the long, digressive footnotes as an inheritance from Tale of a Tub and Dunciad Variorum, an expanded edition with prefaces, footnotes, errata, and appendices, replicated here in an overlong foreword and a meticulous index. And incidentally, Zembla, Kinbote’s supposed native land, appears in both Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books and Pope’s second epistle of Essay on Man — evidence that Kinbote might be hallucinating his whole backstory and making him a likely candidate for the locus of satire.
Joke, Mystery, Life, Commentary
The two main places of satire, Shade’s light parody and Kinbote’s Menippean and prolix commentary, do not gel together nor do they point to a clear purpose. Except for the fruit cake scene, one has to read Shade with a discerning eye to detect mockery, so the effect is small. As for Kinbote, the joke seems to be the number of ways in which his mind wanders or the fact that he is a pedantic, unreliable commentator. Neither of these give us a complete or satisfactory reading of Pale Fire. In addition, when Kinbote pulls us into the narrative of the life of Charles the Beloved or pauses for serious reflection, as in his note to line 493 about suicide, the pedantry fades away. It is an awkward satire if Kinbote attracts mockery only for us to forget about it or pardon him at intervals. Perhaps the problem is that we expected to find satire in close reading in the first place. Perhaps by Nabokov’s design, we would never find it that way. If that is the case, let us start anew.
The beginning of Pale Fire proposes substituting commentary for satire. We have already suggested Kinbote’s commentary as satire, but it may only be a special case. The epigraph of Pale Fire comes from Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, a biography compiled from anecdotes and conversations Boswell had with his friend the distinguished writer, not unlike the relationship between Kinbote and Shade. It may be too reductive to say all biography is commentary, but both Pale Fire and Boswell’s Life raise the question of how much one can trust a narrative from a biographer’s biased reconstruction of events that perforce contains commentary. The other angle is the detective novel since the first reference in the poem is to Sherlock Holmes:
Reading from left to right in winter’s code:
A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat:
Dot, arrow pointing back … A pheasant’s feet!
Torquated beauty, sublimated grouse
Finding your China right behind my house.
Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose
Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes? (lines 22-28)
Shade figures spooring a bird as both reading and mystery-solving. The ground is a blank page, containing written symbols (code from left to right) written with dots and arrows, but the speaker sees they are not dots and arrows. They are tracks. The ellipses and the exclamation mark mimic the way puzzle-solving happens in the mind: a brief pause to consider the evidence before an epiphany, a flash of genius. Or, to emphasize the aspect of reading, it mimics the way a child sounds out the phonemes of a word before recognizing the gestalt. The joy of discovering the solution elevates the whole activity; the grouse isn’t sublimated, rather the speaker. The lines even have a way of inviting the reader to become a detective since Shade asks for verification about a Sherlock Holmes story and Kinbote admits ignorance (the answer is that Holmes explains why he did not reverse his own shoes in “The Adventure of the Empty House”). Detectives, as the curious reader discovers, are commentators who reconstruct crime scenes by examination, searching for more evidence, and ignoring red herrings. The detective, like the satirist or the biographer, is always one step away from the action.
The crucial difference between the three genres is their position relative to truth. When satire, whether Horatian, Juvenalian, or Menippean, pokes fun at someone or something, it expects the reader to understand what is reprehensible about them, to see past the exaggeration to the moral spirit of the situation. In mystery, however, the detective and the audience are still decoding and making sense of the evidence. In the interim, there can be no punchline and no sublimation because the mind is still working out what has happened. Put another way, when there’s an air of mystery, everything is up in the air. Unlike either satire or mystery, biography makes a commitment to tell the true, specific facts of someone’s life over an extended period of time. On paper, then, the genres are immiscible. The narrative is either telling the truth, concealing it, or stretching it, but not all three at once.
Herein lies Nabokov’s stroke of genius. When there is cause to trust parts of the text and doubt others, it becomes impossible to determine the model of truth in play at any moment. If one thinks Kinbote mad, everything he says becomes a distortion and the text takes on a satiric flavor. If one thinks he hides something, the overriding question is what, and the thrill of solving puzzles and crimes emerges. If one finds his life in Zembla compelling, then the text becomes a biography. The text then reflects what the reader thinks. Indeed, there is cause to doubt parts of Pale Fire, which invites us to doubt any text at all. This doubt hinges not on the perceived madness of characters but through the motif of single-letter spelling mistakes. An innocent example is Hazel mispronouncing “chthonic” as “chtonic.” Shade, whose occupation as scholar
and poet revolves around reading, rethinks reading all because Mrs. Z’s fountain was a mountain:
Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream
But topsy-turvical coincidence,
Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense. (808-10)
Spelling errors disrupt the text. They change word meanings, but it is not the text that matters. “Web” implies a larger network with connecting, interweaved parts. It has a spatial dimension and a vertical orientation (“topsy-turvical”) and a feel (“texture”), all of which give it more reality than words alone, which are “dreams” and “flimsy nonsense.” At the same time, reading is dangerous. Topsy-turvy can mean confused or disordered, and webs are traps for insects. The threat of misreading always looms — in his annotations, Kinbote himself will mistake the phrase “world games” that comes a few lines below the quoted passage for “word games” — but there is no other way than reading the texture, embracing coincidence, and grasping the sense if one suspects the text is corrupt.
It is no wonder critics have divided themselves into Shadeans and Kinboteans depending on who they read as the author of Pale Fire. For the standard method for making sense of a text is close reading. Nabokov himself enjoined his students to “notice and fondle details,” and the details do point to an intriguing mystery of stolen and constructed identity. But to focus on this mystery to the exclusion of the motifs of satire and commentary and biography is to miss the texture for the text. With its spelling mistakes, unstable commentator, and long digressions, Pale Fire wants to unsettle its reader, who might find comfort in the evidence that ties it all together, to be fair, a respectable approach. But if they are receptive to the satire, they can join the laughter, only just audible in Shade’s poem and a little clearer in Kinbote’s commentary, the echoes of Nabokov chuckling from a considerable distance. He’s laughing at us precisely because we cannot sift out exaggeration and distortion from truth and red herrings, because each of us constructs our own absurd reading. In the end, Polonius was not too far off the mark. After his nonsensical tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, he added another option, the poem unlimited. A phrase like that ought to apply to Pale Fire. For the reader who laughs at herself, Pale Fire is a satyricon unlimited.
Works Cited
Karshan, Thomas, Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play, Oxford English Monographs (Oxford, 2011; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 May 2011),
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199603985.001.0001, accessed 22 Dec. 2022.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. Everyman’s Library, 1992.