Waldman, Emmy. Who’s Speaking in Arcady?: The Voices of Death, Dementia, and Art in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. 2010

The essay considers Kinbote’s (mis)construal in his Commentary of the Latin motto Et in Arcadia ego [Even in Arcady am I], a well-known art historical theme popularized by French painter Nicolas Poussin. The paper proposes as Nabokov’s source-text a 1955 essay by Erwin Panofsky, “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition,” which traces the philological and pictorial evolution of the phrase through a cycle of seventeenth-century paintings and drawings. Taking this intertextual moment as a point of departure, Waldman’s article looks at the two mirroring references to the Arcadian trope in Nabokov’s own text, and asserts that while the first citation appears to express a conventional memento mori, its reprisal later in the novel admits a new shade of meaning: a penumbral hope in the possibility of life after death. It is suggested that Nabokov’s riffing on the Et in Arcadia ego tradition establishes shifting relations of identity – a common “I” – between the original poet, Shade, the crazed assassin, Gradus, and the literary-minded madman, Kinbote, all of whom may lay claim to the ego of the Latin epitaph. The paper examines Nabokov’s apparent transvaluation of madness as a quasi-artistic category and investigates the claim of art to transcend the tyranny of clockwork time through imaginative invention. The literary tagline from Shade’s poem, “not text but texture,” is applied to Nabokov’s aesthetic program, which privileges spatial over sequential thinking, and does violence to the conventions of a straight-forward, left-to-right reading so as to do justice to the contrapuntal orchestration of the total composition.