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From: Brian Boyd <b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz>
New York Observer, 26 April 1999, p. 39 (observer.com/index.html):
Nabokov's Pale Ghost: A Scholar Retracts
by Ron Rosenbaum
Something rare and beautiful happened the other evening
at the Nabokov celebration at Town Hall. Actually, the
whole evening was quite lovely for word lovers, a
commemoration of the centenary of Nabokov's birth (sponsored by PEN, The
New Yorker and Vintage Books) with remarks by admirers such as Elizabeth
Hardwick, Martin Amis and David Remnick, by Nabokov's son Dmitri, and
commentary by scholars such as Alfred Appel and Brian Boyd.
But the beautiful moment*actually, for those Nabokov aficionados who
caught its significance, a stunning, world-altering moment*was a remark
toward the close of the program by Mr. Boyd, the author of the monumental
two-volume literary biography of Nabokov. He was speaking of Pale Fire,
which he called Nabokov's "most perfect book," and of Zembla, the
imaginary Northern Kingdom apparently invented by the ostensible narrator of
much of Pale Fire, Charles Kinbote, who claimed to have been King of
Zembla before ending up a sad, mad dream-haunted exile in an American
college town.
Mr. Boyd was speaking of "Kinbote's beautiful Zembla" and the 999-line
poem that opens Pale Fire, a poem by a murdered poet, John Shade, whose
final manuscript Kinbote has stolen. He was speaking of "the exhilarating
discoveries" one makes in rereading Pale Fire, "as we gradually detect a
dozen concealed patterns * each pattern with its far-reaching implications
that have nothing to do with what I wrongly proposed in the biography*that
Shade invents Kinbote."
Wait a minute here! Stop the presses! This was the rare and beautiful
moment: A scholar has had the courage and humility to admit he was wrong.
Wrong not about a detail, but about a fundamental conjecture he made, in this
case a conjecture at the heart of his vision of Pale Fire. A conjecture which
has had a profound influence in the past decade on the way subsequent
scholars, critics and readers have looked at that radiant and luminescent
novel*one that is, I would argue, not only his "most perfect," as Mr. Boyd has
it, but his most seductive, mesmerizing and maddening, one that can become,
as it has for me, the pleasurable obsession of a lifetime. A conjecture that, on
the evening of April 15, Mr. Boyd simply pulled the rug out from under.
Town Hall was packed that evening, packed to the rafters with Nabokov
admirers, but I'm not sure how many caught the stunning significance of Mr.
Boyd's retraction, which he didn't elaborate upon. But I was surprised there
weren't some audible gasps from the audience. I, for one, couldn't believe my
ears until I replayed the tape I'd made. It was a dreamlike moment, indeed
almost a dream come true for me, since I'd written several columns in these
pages disputing the conjecture about Pale Fire Mr. Boyd had just, like a bolt
from the blue, retracted. [See, for instance, "Homage to V. Botkin (and Mary
McCarthy)," June 24, 1996.]
It's not a mere academic question, the narrator enigma in Pale Fire, it's not a
quibble. It goes to the heart of the mystery within the fathomlessly refractive
mirror-world of the novel, a question about the nature of its design, of the
design of creation itself.
And there's more to the story of Mr. Boyd's retraction, as I discovered the
next morning when I reached Mr. Boyd at his room at the Algonquin and he
disclosed to me in an absolutely fascinating conversation the remarkable new
conjecture he'd devised to replace the one he'd retracted. A new conjecture
that involves revisiting the issue of the Afterlife in Pale Fire, one that invokes
communication from the dead, from the pale ghost of the girl who haunts Pale
Fire.
But before getting into the new solution Mr. Boyd proposes for the most
deeply divisive controversy over Pale Fire, a solution whose outlines are
disclosed in print here for what I believe is the first time, one that Mr. Boyd
will elaborate upon in a new book on Pale Fire due out from Princeton
University Press next fall, let's review the evolution of the Pale Fire narrator
enigma: Who wrote the commentary? The novel opens (following a brief
forward) with a 999-line poem in rhymed heroic couplets, a poem called "Pale
Fire," a poem that, in the discursive, digressive style of Pope's Essay on Man,
circles around a personal tragedy, the drowning-suicide of the poet John
Shade's daughter Hazel.
The poem is followed by some 250 pages of commentary, keyed by line
numbers to passages in the poem, commentary (followed by an index) which
makes up the bulk of the novel. The writer of the commentary identifies
himself as one Charles Kinbote, as an exile from a kingdom called Zembla in
which he was, until deposed, the reigning monarch Charles Xavier Vseslav.
An exile who escapes and takes up residence incognito in a small Appalachian
college town where he teaches languages and befriends a famous American
poet, John Shade, who is also his next-door neighbor.
When Shade is murdered, in a case of mistaken identity, the man calling
himself Kinbote makes off with the manuscript of his last work, the poem
"Pale Fire," and flees across America to a motel cabin in the West, where he
writes his commentary while growing ever more mad. A commentary in which
he attempts to prove that the poem, which on the surface bears no evidence of
his existence, was*when properly deciphered* really inspired by and secretly
about him. About his lost kingdom, his flight and the assassin sent by the new
regime to seek him out and murder him (and who, he claims, mistakenly
murders Shade with a bullet meant for him).
This summary in no way comes close to capturing what makes Pale Fire such
a unique literary entity. It falsely suggests that what makes Pale Fire so
obsessively intriguing, in a league with Lolita on a level above, I believe, all
other Nabokov works, is some intricate, self-reflective, cold and glittering
literary game. To the contrary, in certain ways Pale Fire is Nabokov's most
tender, earnest, readable and humorous book.
The controversy over the commentary began almost as soon as the 1962
publication of Pale Fire, with a now-famous New Republic essay by Mary
McCarthy about the novel (an essay entitled "A Bolt From the Blue") which
called it "one of the very great works of art of the 20th century," and which
advanced a strikingly ingenious conjecture about the identity of the mad
commentator, Charles Kinbote: "The real, real story" of Pale Fire, she
argued, is that Kinbote and his Zemblan Kingdom are both the invention of a
barely mentioned figure in the novel, a fellow faculty member of Kinbote and
Shade, a fellow identified in the commentary only as "V. Botkin." Although V.
Botkin is referred to only briefly, he occupies a disproportionate amount of
space in the index "Kinbote" has appended to his commentary. And from
clues in the index and elsewhere, Mary McCarthy argued that Kinbote was a
fictive persona created anagrammatically by V. Botkin (a name enclasped,
I've just noticed, by the initials V.N.).
It was a brilliant conjecture which was adopted by most readers and critics for
nearly three decades until Brian Boyd sought to overturn it. It was a
conjecture which Mr. Boyd's own research in the Nabokov archives seemed
to confirm. According to a footnote in Mr. Boyd's second volume of his
Nabokov biography, "At the end of his 1962 diary, Nabokov drafted some
phrases for possible interviews: 'I wonder if any reader will notice the
following details: 1) that the nasty commentator is not an ex-King and not
even Dr. Kinbote but Prof. Vseslav Botkin, a Russian and a madman *'"
There is a detail in that diary entry which Mr. Boyd doesn't pick up on, and
which Mary McCarthy could not have known: Vseslav, the first name of V.
Botkin does not occur, as far as I can see, in the text of Pale Fire, not as
applied to V. Botkin himself. But it does occur in the index, as the surname of
the King of Zembla: Charles Xavier Vseslav. For this and other reasons I've
always thought Mary McCarthy's conjecture was a strong one, a delightful
one, one that didn't close off speculation about the reflective properties of the
novel but further opened them up.
And so there the matter and the consensus stood until 29 years later, when
Mr. Boyd, a professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand,
published Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, the second volume of his
deservedly acclaimed biography. Mr. Boyd claimed to have discovered in
Nabokov's papers a suggestive clue that overturned Mary McCarthy's V.
Botkin conjecture: "Four years after Pale Fire, when he drafted the foreword
to the revised Speak, Memory, Nabokov concluded with a comment on the
new index to his autobiography. He added an envoi:
As John Shade says somewhere:
Nobody will heed my index,
I suppose,
But through it a gentle wind ex
Ponto blows.
In other words, in Mr. Boyd's interpretation of this passage (which Nabokov
decided not to include in the revision of Speak, Memory), Shade is claiming
authorship of the index to Pale Fire, an index supposedly written (after
Shade's death) by the commentator who claims to be Kinbote. Therefore
Shade equals Kinbote, Shade wrote Kinbote's commentary.
Mr. Boyd claims this "piece of evidence proves conclusively that Nabokov
had John Shade in mind as the author of Foreword, poem, commentary and
index" in Pale Fire. It's a conjecture that reduces the number of fictive voices
in the novel from three: Shade, "Kinbote" and Botkin, to one, Shade and
Shade alone, a poet who wrote a poem and then invented a mad Russian
commentator on it (and faked, or fantasized his own murder in the
commentary).
Mr. Boyd's theory has become the critical and scholarly consensus in the past
eight years. No less a personage than Princeton's Michael Wood, author of
the best recent book on Nabokov, The Magician's Doubts, says he finds Mr.
Boyd's Shade-created-Kinbote conjecture "persuasive," insofar as it may
"represent Nabokov's own secret sense of his novel, or of his novel's secret"
(although Mr. Wood goes on to say that he thinks the novel is better not
reduced to a single "authorized"*by the author*conjecture).
But Mr. Boyd's insistence that he has "conclusive evidence" ignores a couple
of problems which rendered it, to my mind, inconclusive long before Mr.
Boyd retracted it. What do we make of Nabokov's far less ambiguous diary
entry in which he appears unequivocally to identify Kinbote as a creation of V.
Botkin? And why did Nabokov reject publication of the lines in which John
Shade seems to claim authorship of Kinbote's index and Kinbote. Could V.N.
have considered publishing these lines merely to pull the rug out from under
Mary McCarthy because her pre-emptive "Bolt from the Blue" essay had
denied him the pleasure of disclosing "to interviewers" one of the novel's most
ingenious secrets (as I speculated in one of my essays on the question)? A
rug-pulling he considered but rejected because it would involve the sacrifice of
V. Botkin?
And if the evidence was so "conclusive," what suddenly caused Mr. Boyd to
conclude that he was wrong, as he announced to the Town Hall audience that
night? When I reached Mr. Boyd the next morning at the Algonquin he spoke
of a kind of epiphany which resulted in a six-week frenzy in which he poured
forth a book-length revision of his vision of Pale Fire, centering around a
brand-new conjecture for the creator of Zembla: Shade's dead daughter
Hazel. Here's how it came about: For the past two years, Mr. Boyd told me,
he'd abandoned Nabokov studies to focus on a biography of Karl Popper, the
great logician. But he found himself lured back to the Kinbote question by a
debate over it on an Internet discussion list of Nabokov scholars. He was
asked to prepare a response for the list to questions raised about his
Shade-Kinbote conjecture, and in the process of plunging once again into the
reflecting pool that is Pale Fire, he plucked from beneath the surface the
drowned body of Hazel Shade, the poet's daughter.
While at first I'd hoped that Mr. Boyd had abandoned his Kinbote-Shade
conjecture to return to, and resurrect V. Botkin as Kinbote's creator (my
position, and I believe V.N.'s) I found myself spellbound, listening to Mr.
Boyd's even more elaborate Hazel Shade conjecture, admiring his ecstatic
imaginative engagement with the novel, a sustained ecstasy I share, having
reread it perhaps 10 times since it came out.
Hazel Shade is an unfortunate ugly duckling who never grows into a swan.
Whose anger at the casual cruelties of her looks-obsessed young peers appears
to manifest itself in a psychokinetic fashion, including destructive poltergeist
phenomena. One night, after she's abandoned by a blind date, she stumbles
into a half-frozen lake and drowns herself, shattering John Shade's world. Mr.
Boyd's new conjecture argues that her father's poem "Pale Fire" is, in effect,
the ugly duckling's swan song. That Hazel has, from beyond the grave,
inspired in Charles Kinbote a grandiose fantasy that he is the exiled ruler of the
land of Zembla. A beautiful but demented fantasy which he imparts to the
poet John Shade, causing Shade to write the poem entitled "Pale Fire." Hazel
then is the pale ghost writer of "Pale Fire," a poem she inspires in part to warn
her father of the murderous fate that awaits him, but more, I think Mr. Boyd
is saying, as a kind of muselike gift from the Great Beyond.
Mr. Boyd pointed out to me that an earlier Nabokov story, "The Vane
Sisters," climaxed with an instance of communication from beyond the grave
inserted into a manuscript. But it's also true that in a note appended to a
volume in which "The Vane Sisters" was published, Nabokov remarked that
"in this story the narrator is supposed to be unaware that his last paragraph has
been used acrostically by two dead girls to assert their mysterious participation
in the story. This particular trick can be tried only once in a thousand years of
fiction." (I suppose this remark could be a bit of disinformation, but I doubt
it.)
Still, farfetched as Mr. Boyd's new conjecture might seem at first, he says
that when he adumbrated it at length to other skeptics they professed
themselves won over. And so I will reserve judgment in the space remaining
this week (though I plan to return to a fuller discussion of it in a subsequent
column) on the arguments for and against it. I'll close instead by paying tribute
to Mr. Boyd for having the courage and humility to retract an earlier
conjecture and the imaginative daring to come up with one as provocative and
potentially fruitful as this one. As Mr. Boyd put it to me at the close of our
phone conversation, he was inspired by the spirit of Karl Popper to risk
reinventing his vision of Pale Fire, by Popper's belief that knowledge is
advanced only by the venturing of "falsifiable" propositions, hypotheses
coherent enough to be disproved. Whether Mr. Boyd's conjecture is in fact
"falsifiable" in theory or practice remains to be seen. But I would like to add
one detail he may already have adduced although he didn't mention it in our
conversation, one detail I can't believe someone else hasn't noticed, but one
I'd be delighted to get credit for noticing first: The ghost within the name
"Hazel," the ghost of Lolita.
It occurred to me as I was staring at the Hazel passages in Pale Fire (which
also makes sly reference to a fictive "Hurricane Lolita") that one could
repunctuate the name Hazel, as Haze, L. And if one did, then one would find
oneself staring at Lolita's name: Lolita Haze, daughter of Charlotte Haze (yes,
I know the official given name is Dolores). Coincidence? I don't think so.
More likely the product of the "plexed artistry," the "web of sense" John
Shade refers to in "Pale Fire," "some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind of
correlated pattern in the game." In fact, in truth, a correlated pattern in the
brain, in the mind of V.N., a mind which describes itself in the poem "Pale
Fire" as "making ornaments of accidents and possibilities." Brian Boyd has
once again made himself an ornament of the accidents and possibilities of
Nabokov scholarship and although I may continue to disagree with him (and
still believe V. Botkin deserves resurrection) I salute him for it.
New York Observer, 26 April 1999, p. 39 (observer.com/index.html):
Nabokov's Pale Ghost: A Scholar Retracts
by Ron Rosenbaum
Something rare and beautiful happened the other evening
at the Nabokov celebration at Town Hall. Actually, the
whole evening was quite lovely for word lovers, a
commemoration of the centenary of Nabokov's birth (sponsored by PEN, The
New Yorker and Vintage Books) with remarks by admirers such as Elizabeth
Hardwick, Martin Amis and David Remnick, by Nabokov's son Dmitri, and
commentary by scholars such as Alfred Appel and Brian Boyd.
But the beautiful moment*actually, for those Nabokov aficionados who
caught its significance, a stunning, world-altering moment*was a remark
toward the close of the program by Mr. Boyd, the author of the monumental
two-volume literary biography of Nabokov. He was speaking of Pale Fire,
which he called Nabokov's "most perfect book," and of Zembla, the
imaginary Northern Kingdom apparently invented by the ostensible narrator of
much of Pale Fire, Charles Kinbote, who claimed to have been King of
Zembla before ending up a sad, mad dream-haunted exile in an American
college town.
Mr. Boyd was speaking of "Kinbote's beautiful Zembla" and the 999-line
poem that opens Pale Fire, a poem by a murdered poet, John Shade, whose
final manuscript Kinbote has stolen. He was speaking of "the exhilarating
discoveries" one makes in rereading Pale Fire, "as we gradually detect a
dozen concealed patterns * each pattern with its far-reaching implications
that have nothing to do with what I wrongly proposed in the biography*that
Shade invents Kinbote."
Wait a minute here! Stop the presses! This was the rare and beautiful
moment: A scholar has had the courage and humility to admit he was wrong.
Wrong not about a detail, but about a fundamental conjecture he made, in this
case a conjecture at the heart of his vision of Pale Fire. A conjecture which
has had a profound influence in the past decade on the way subsequent
scholars, critics and readers have looked at that radiant and luminescent
novel*one that is, I would argue, not only his "most perfect," as Mr. Boyd has
it, but his most seductive, mesmerizing and maddening, one that can become,
as it has for me, the pleasurable obsession of a lifetime. A conjecture that, on
the evening of April 15, Mr. Boyd simply pulled the rug out from under.
Town Hall was packed that evening, packed to the rafters with Nabokov
admirers, but I'm not sure how many caught the stunning significance of Mr.
Boyd's retraction, which he didn't elaborate upon. But I was surprised there
weren't some audible gasps from the audience. I, for one, couldn't believe my
ears until I replayed the tape I'd made. It was a dreamlike moment, indeed
almost a dream come true for me, since I'd written several columns in these
pages disputing the conjecture about Pale Fire Mr. Boyd had just, like a bolt
from the blue, retracted. [See, for instance, "Homage to V. Botkin (and Mary
McCarthy)," June 24, 1996.]
It's not a mere academic question, the narrator enigma in Pale Fire, it's not a
quibble. It goes to the heart of the mystery within the fathomlessly refractive
mirror-world of the novel, a question about the nature of its design, of the
design of creation itself.
And there's more to the story of Mr. Boyd's retraction, as I discovered the
next morning when I reached Mr. Boyd at his room at the Algonquin and he
disclosed to me in an absolutely fascinating conversation the remarkable new
conjecture he'd devised to replace the one he'd retracted. A new conjecture
that involves revisiting the issue of the Afterlife in Pale Fire, one that invokes
communication from the dead, from the pale ghost of the girl who haunts Pale
Fire.
But before getting into the new solution Mr. Boyd proposes for the most
deeply divisive controversy over Pale Fire, a solution whose outlines are
disclosed in print here for what I believe is the first time, one that Mr. Boyd
will elaborate upon in a new book on Pale Fire due out from Princeton
University Press next fall, let's review the evolution of the Pale Fire narrator
enigma: Who wrote the commentary? The novel opens (following a brief
forward) with a 999-line poem in rhymed heroic couplets, a poem called "Pale
Fire," a poem that, in the discursive, digressive style of Pope's Essay on Man,
circles around a personal tragedy, the drowning-suicide of the poet John
Shade's daughter Hazel.
The poem is followed by some 250 pages of commentary, keyed by line
numbers to passages in the poem, commentary (followed by an index) which
makes up the bulk of the novel. The writer of the commentary identifies
himself as one Charles Kinbote, as an exile from a kingdom called Zembla in
which he was, until deposed, the reigning monarch Charles Xavier Vseslav.
An exile who escapes and takes up residence incognito in a small Appalachian
college town where he teaches languages and befriends a famous American
poet, John Shade, who is also his next-door neighbor.
When Shade is murdered, in a case of mistaken identity, the man calling
himself Kinbote makes off with the manuscript of his last work, the poem
"Pale Fire," and flees across America to a motel cabin in the West, where he
writes his commentary while growing ever more mad. A commentary in which
he attempts to prove that the poem, which on the surface bears no evidence of
his existence, was*when properly deciphered* really inspired by and secretly
about him. About his lost kingdom, his flight and the assassin sent by the new
regime to seek him out and murder him (and who, he claims, mistakenly
murders Shade with a bullet meant for him).
This summary in no way comes close to capturing what makes Pale Fire such
a unique literary entity. It falsely suggests that what makes Pale Fire so
obsessively intriguing, in a league with Lolita on a level above, I believe, all
other Nabokov works, is some intricate, self-reflective, cold and glittering
literary game. To the contrary, in certain ways Pale Fire is Nabokov's most
tender, earnest, readable and humorous book.
The controversy over the commentary began almost as soon as the 1962
publication of Pale Fire, with a now-famous New Republic essay by Mary
McCarthy about the novel (an essay entitled "A Bolt From the Blue") which
called it "one of the very great works of art of the 20th century," and which
advanced a strikingly ingenious conjecture about the identity of the mad
commentator, Charles Kinbote: "The real, real story" of Pale Fire, she
argued, is that Kinbote and his Zemblan Kingdom are both the invention of a
barely mentioned figure in the novel, a fellow faculty member of Kinbote and
Shade, a fellow identified in the commentary only as "V. Botkin." Although V.
Botkin is referred to only briefly, he occupies a disproportionate amount of
space in the index "Kinbote" has appended to his commentary. And from
clues in the index and elsewhere, Mary McCarthy argued that Kinbote was a
fictive persona created anagrammatically by V. Botkin (a name enclasped,
I've just noticed, by the initials V.N.).
It was a brilliant conjecture which was adopted by most readers and critics for
nearly three decades until Brian Boyd sought to overturn it. It was a
conjecture which Mr. Boyd's own research in the Nabokov archives seemed
to confirm. According to a footnote in Mr. Boyd's second volume of his
Nabokov biography, "At the end of his 1962 diary, Nabokov drafted some
phrases for possible interviews: 'I wonder if any reader will notice the
following details: 1) that the nasty commentator is not an ex-King and not
even Dr. Kinbote but Prof. Vseslav Botkin, a Russian and a madman *'"
There is a detail in that diary entry which Mr. Boyd doesn't pick up on, and
which Mary McCarthy could not have known: Vseslav, the first name of V.
Botkin does not occur, as far as I can see, in the text of Pale Fire, not as
applied to V. Botkin himself. But it does occur in the index, as the surname of
the King of Zembla: Charles Xavier Vseslav. For this and other reasons I've
always thought Mary McCarthy's conjecture was a strong one, a delightful
one, one that didn't close off speculation about the reflective properties of the
novel but further opened them up.
And so there the matter and the consensus stood until 29 years later, when
Mr. Boyd, a professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand,
published Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, the second volume of his
deservedly acclaimed biography. Mr. Boyd claimed to have discovered in
Nabokov's papers a suggestive clue that overturned Mary McCarthy's V.
Botkin conjecture: "Four years after Pale Fire, when he drafted the foreword
to the revised Speak, Memory, Nabokov concluded with a comment on the
new index to his autobiography. He added an envoi:
As John Shade says somewhere:
Nobody will heed my index,
I suppose,
But through it a gentle wind ex
Ponto blows.
In other words, in Mr. Boyd's interpretation of this passage (which Nabokov
decided not to include in the revision of Speak, Memory), Shade is claiming
authorship of the index to Pale Fire, an index supposedly written (after
Shade's death) by the commentator who claims to be Kinbote. Therefore
Shade equals Kinbote, Shade wrote Kinbote's commentary.
Mr. Boyd claims this "piece of evidence proves conclusively that Nabokov
had John Shade in mind as the author of Foreword, poem, commentary and
index" in Pale Fire. It's a conjecture that reduces the number of fictive voices
in the novel from three: Shade, "Kinbote" and Botkin, to one, Shade and
Shade alone, a poet who wrote a poem and then invented a mad Russian
commentator on it (and faked, or fantasized his own murder in the
commentary).
Mr. Boyd's theory has become the critical and scholarly consensus in the past
eight years. No less a personage than Princeton's Michael Wood, author of
the best recent book on Nabokov, The Magician's Doubts, says he finds Mr.
Boyd's Shade-created-Kinbote conjecture "persuasive," insofar as it may
"represent Nabokov's own secret sense of his novel, or of his novel's secret"
(although Mr. Wood goes on to say that he thinks the novel is better not
reduced to a single "authorized"*by the author*conjecture).
But Mr. Boyd's insistence that he has "conclusive evidence" ignores a couple
of problems which rendered it, to my mind, inconclusive long before Mr.
Boyd retracted it. What do we make of Nabokov's far less ambiguous diary
entry in which he appears unequivocally to identify Kinbote as a creation of V.
Botkin? And why did Nabokov reject publication of the lines in which John
Shade seems to claim authorship of Kinbote's index and Kinbote. Could V.N.
have considered publishing these lines merely to pull the rug out from under
Mary McCarthy because her pre-emptive "Bolt from the Blue" essay had
denied him the pleasure of disclosing "to interviewers" one of the novel's most
ingenious secrets (as I speculated in one of my essays on the question)? A
rug-pulling he considered but rejected because it would involve the sacrifice of
V. Botkin?
And if the evidence was so "conclusive," what suddenly caused Mr. Boyd to
conclude that he was wrong, as he announced to the Town Hall audience that
night? When I reached Mr. Boyd the next morning at the Algonquin he spoke
of a kind of epiphany which resulted in a six-week frenzy in which he poured
forth a book-length revision of his vision of Pale Fire, centering around a
brand-new conjecture for the creator of Zembla: Shade's dead daughter
Hazel. Here's how it came about: For the past two years, Mr. Boyd told me,
he'd abandoned Nabokov studies to focus on a biography of Karl Popper, the
great logician. But he found himself lured back to the Kinbote question by a
debate over it on an Internet discussion list of Nabokov scholars. He was
asked to prepare a response for the list to questions raised about his
Shade-Kinbote conjecture, and in the process of plunging once again into the
reflecting pool that is Pale Fire, he plucked from beneath the surface the
drowned body of Hazel Shade, the poet's daughter.
While at first I'd hoped that Mr. Boyd had abandoned his Kinbote-Shade
conjecture to return to, and resurrect V. Botkin as Kinbote's creator (my
position, and I believe V.N.'s) I found myself spellbound, listening to Mr.
Boyd's even more elaborate Hazel Shade conjecture, admiring his ecstatic
imaginative engagement with the novel, a sustained ecstasy I share, having
reread it perhaps 10 times since it came out.
Hazel Shade is an unfortunate ugly duckling who never grows into a swan.
Whose anger at the casual cruelties of her looks-obsessed young peers appears
to manifest itself in a psychokinetic fashion, including destructive poltergeist
phenomena. One night, after she's abandoned by a blind date, she stumbles
into a half-frozen lake and drowns herself, shattering John Shade's world. Mr.
Boyd's new conjecture argues that her father's poem "Pale Fire" is, in effect,
the ugly duckling's swan song. That Hazel has, from beyond the grave,
inspired in Charles Kinbote a grandiose fantasy that he is the exiled ruler of the
land of Zembla. A beautiful but demented fantasy which he imparts to the
poet John Shade, causing Shade to write the poem entitled "Pale Fire." Hazel
then is the pale ghost writer of "Pale Fire," a poem she inspires in part to warn
her father of the murderous fate that awaits him, but more, I think Mr. Boyd
is saying, as a kind of muselike gift from the Great Beyond.
Mr. Boyd pointed out to me that an earlier Nabokov story, "The Vane
Sisters," climaxed with an instance of communication from beyond the grave
inserted into a manuscript. But it's also true that in a note appended to a
volume in which "The Vane Sisters" was published, Nabokov remarked that
"in this story the narrator is supposed to be unaware that his last paragraph has
been used acrostically by two dead girls to assert their mysterious participation
in the story. This particular trick can be tried only once in a thousand years of
fiction." (I suppose this remark could be a bit of disinformation, but I doubt
it.)
Still, farfetched as Mr. Boyd's new conjecture might seem at first, he says
that when he adumbrated it at length to other skeptics they professed
themselves won over. And so I will reserve judgment in the space remaining
this week (though I plan to return to a fuller discussion of it in a subsequent
column) on the arguments for and against it. I'll close instead by paying tribute
to Mr. Boyd for having the courage and humility to retract an earlier
conjecture and the imaginative daring to come up with one as provocative and
potentially fruitful as this one. As Mr. Boyd put it to me at the close of our
phone conversation, he was inspired by the spirit of Karl Popper to risk
reinventing his vision of Pale Fire, by Popper's belief that knowledge is
advanced only by the venturing of "falsifiable" propositions, hypotheses
coherent enough to be disproved. Whether Mr. Boyd's conjecture is in fact
"falsifiable" in theory or practice remains to be seen. But I would like to add
one detail he may already have adduced although he didn't mention it in our
conversation, one detail I can't believe someone else hasn't noticed, but one
I'd be delighted to get credit for noticing first: The ghost within the name
"Hazel," the ghost of Lolita.
It occurred to me as I was staring at the Hazel passages in Pale Fire (which
also makes sly reference to a fictive "Hurricane Lolita") that one could
repunctuate the name Hazel, as Haze, L. And if one did, then one would find
oneself staring at Lolita's name: Lolita Haze, daughter of Charlotte Haze (yes,
I know the official given name is Dolores). Coincidence? I don't think so.
More likely the product of the "plexed artistry," the "web of sense" John
Shade refers to in "Pale Fire," "some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind of
correlated pattern in the game." In fact, in truth, a correlated pattern in the
brain, in the mind of V.N., a mind which describes itself in the poem "Pale
Fire" as "making ornaments of accidents and possibilities." Brian Boyd has
once again made himself an ornament of the accidents and possibilities of
Nabokov scholarship and although I may continue to disagree with him (and
still believe V. Botkin deserves resurrection) I salute him for it.