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Rosenbaum on Pale Fire and Brian Boyd's New Book
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From THE NEW YORK OBSERVER, Dec. 3:
The Novel of the Century: Nabokovs Pale Fire
by Ron Rosenbaum
O.K., Ill play. You know, the Century-Slash-Millennium List Game. I
admit I was
reluctant to get into the whole Man -of-the-Century,
Movie-of-the-Millennium
enterprise. But a couple of things changed my mind: calls from two
networks and a
newsmagazine on the Hitler questionwas he the "most evil" man of the
century?
should he be Man of the Century, period?started me thinking in those
terms. And
then the arrival of a book Id long been looking forward to, a book
which suggested
my first Edgy Enthusiast End-of-Century Award, the one for Novel of
the Century.
The book that prompted these reflections and confirmed me in my choice
for Novel
of the Century was Brian Boyds remarkable, obsessive, delirious,
devotional study, Nabokovs Pale Fire
(Princeton University Press). And (insert 21-gun salute here) my award
for Novel of the Century goes to
Nabokovs Pale Fire, with Ulysses and Shadows on the Hudson taking the
silver and the bronze.
The Judges Rationale: Pale Fire is the most Shakespearean work of art
the 20th century has produced, the
only prose fiction that offers Shakespearean levels of depth and
complexity, of beauty, tragedy and inexhaustible
mystery.
One of the achievements of Brian Boyds book is that he makes explicit
the profound way in which Pale Fire
is a Shakespearean novelnot just in its global vision and the infinite
local reflections in a global eye it offers, but
also in the profound way in which Pale Fire is haunted by specific
works of Shakespeare, and by Shakespeare
himself as Creator. If, as Michael Woods (author of The Magicians
Doubts) argues, Pale Fire offers "a
theology for skeptics," Brian Boyd makes explicit the ways in which it
is a theology of Shakespeare.
Before I pay further tribute to Pale Fire, I want to pay further
tribute to Brian Boyd. Yes, I already saluted his
courage and scrupulousness as a scholar for renouncing his previous
position on the Pale Fire narrator
question at the Nabokov Centennial Night last April (see The Edgy
Enthusiast, "Nabokovs Pale Ghost: A
Scholar Retracts," April 26).
But he deserves new accolades for this new book-length examination of
Pale Fire. An investigation notable
less for his new theory of the controversial narrator question (with
which I respectfully disagree) but for the way
his pursuit of the narrator question has deepened the vista of
delights in the novel andmost
importantlydisclosed an even deeper level of Shakespearean affinity
and signification in Pale Fire.
If Charles Kinbote is the ostensible narrative voice of Pale Fire, the
one who writes the footnoted commentary
to the poem that opens the novel, deliriously mad commentary that
forms the bulk of the book, Brian Boyd has
becomeand I mean this as the highest complimentKinbotes finest
Kinbote.
Before venturing further into the depths and delights of Pale Fire
theories, I want to pause here for the benefit
of those who have not yet tasted the pleasures of Pale Fire. Pause to
emphasize just how much pure reading
pleasure it offers despite its apparently unconventional form.
Following a brief foreword, the novel opens with a
999-line poem in rhymed heroic couplets formally reminiscent of
Alexander Pope, but written in accessible
American colloquial language at least on the surface. Please dont be
intimidated by the poems length or
formality; its a pleasure to read: sad, funny, thoughtful, digressive,
discursive, filled with heart-stopping
moments of tenderness and beauty.
Following the poem (entitled "Pale Fire") which is identified in the
foreword as the last work of John Shade, a
fictional Frost-like American poet, another voice takes over: the
commentator Charles Kinbote. A delightful,
deluded, more than a bit demented voice whose 200 pages of commentary
and annotations on the poem
constitute the remainder of the novel. Kinbotes voice is completely
madhe is the ultimate unreliable narrator,
the mad scholar colonizing the poem with his own baroque delusionbut
also completely irresistible. Kinbote
weaves into his footnoted annotations on the poem the story of his own
relationship with the poet, John Shade.
How he befriended him during the last months of his life while Shade
was composing "Pale Fire." How hed
disclosed to Shade, a colleague at the college where they both taught
literature, the fantastic story of his
(Kinbotes) supposed secret identity: that he was not really Charles
Kinbote, but rather the exiled King of
Zembla, a "northern land" where he once ruled as Charles the Beloved
until he was deposed by evil
revolutionaries from whom he fled into exile. Revolutionaries who sent
an assassin to hunt him down, an
assassin whose bullet, meant for Kinbote, mistakenly killed John Shade
instead.
And now, having absconded with the dead poets manuscript of "Pale
Fire," holed up in a cheap motel in the
mountains, Kinbote attempts to demonstrate with his commentary that
Shades last masterpiece is really about
him, about Kinbote, about his own tragic and romantic life as King of
Zembla, his flight and exile. All this
despite the fact that, on the surface, neither Kinbote nor Zembla
appears anywhere in "Pale Fire," despite the
fact that the poem seems on the surface to be John Shades attempt to
come to terms with his own tragedy, the
suicide of his beloved daughter Hazel Shadeand his efforts to explore
the possibility of contacting her in the
Afterlife, across the border between life and death which has exiled
her from him.
As I said, it only seems complicated and cerebral. In fact, reading
Pale Fire, both novel and poem, is an
almost obscenely sensual pleasure. I guarantee it.
Nor should the pleasures of reading Brian Boyds book be
underestimated, even though I believe hes reading
into Pale Fire a ghost story as fanciful as the one Kinbote reads into
John Shades poem. Boyds ghost story
is his new revised solution to the Pale Fire Narrator-Commentator
Question: Who is Commentator Charles
Kinbote? If we believe he invented an imaginary past as Charles the
Beloved of Zembla, did he also invent John
Shade the poet hes purportedly reading his Zemblan story into? Or did
Shade invent Kinbote?
For some three decades following the 1962 publication of Pale Fire,
most critics and readers have followed
the ingenious solution to this mystery offered by Mary McCarthy in a
famous New Republic essay entitled "A
Bolt From the Blue." McCarthy argued from submerged clues in the
Commentary that the "real" author of the
Commentary and Foreword (and Index) in Pale Fire, the real Zemblan
fantasist, was a figure barely
mentioned in the Commentary, an academic colleague of Shade and
Kinbote called, anagrammatically, V.
Botkin.
I wont go into the details of her dazzling conjecture here, suffice it
to say its powerfully persuasive and held
sway until the early 1990s when Brian Boyd unveiled his first (and now
abandoned) Pale Fire theory. Based
on Mr. Boyds interpretation of a discarded epigraph from a revised
manuscript of a Nabokov autobiography,
Mr. Boyd argued that Kinbote did not exist as Botkin, or as a separate
entity of any kind: that Kinbote was
invented by John Shade who not only wrote the poem called "Pale Fire"
but invented a mad Russian
scholar-commentator to write a Commentary that massively misread
Shades own poem as a Zemblan fantasy.
O.K., Im not doing justice to Boyds conjecture perhaps because Ive
never found it convincing: It always
seemed needlessly reductive to collapse the voices in the novel from
two to one. But Mr. Boyds theory did
attract a considerable number of believers who called themselves
"Shadeans"even after Mr. Boyd pulled the
rug out from under them a couple years ago by retreating to an
intermediate position that said, Well, no, Shade
did its more than a pastiche for Kinbote to prey on with his parasitic
exegesis.
In fact, let me take a real leap here, let me go out on a limb few
would venture forth upon, let me
make the following assertion: Not only is Pale Fire the
(English-Language) Novel of the Century,
but "Pale Fire" the poem within the novel may well come to be looked
upon as the Poem of the
Century in its own right.
But let me return briefly to the afterlife. As I said, it is not so
much Mr. Boyds far-fetched
argument that Hazel Shades ghost is the afterlife muse of "Pale Fire"
that makes his book so
illuminating as it is his exploration of the afterlife of Shakespeare
in Pale Fire. In particular, the
afterlife of Hamlet, the ghost in Hamlet, and Hamlet as the ghost that
haunts Pale Fire.
Early in Kinbotes commentary on the poem, he cries out against his
supposed enemies: "Such
hearts, such brains, would be unable to comprehend that ones
attachment to a masterpiece may
be utterly overwhelming, especially when it is the underside of the
weave that entrances the
beholder and only begetter, whose own past intercoils there with the
fate of the innocent author."
When I reread this passage, I initially thought of it as a kind of
allegory of Brian Boyds own
obsessive "attachment to a masterpiece," especially to the "underside
of the weave" of Pale
Fireof the way Mr. Boyd has become Kinbotes Kinbote. But submerged in
the coils of that
passage I think there is an expression of the way Vladimir Nabokov had
himself become
Shakespeares Kinbote: ecstatic commentator on his own overwhelming
attachment to a kindred
creator, William Shakespeare.
When Kinbote speaks of the weave that entrances," he speaks of the
entranced as "the only
begetter," which is the mysterious phrase for the shadowy figure
evoked in the dedication of
Shakespeares sonnets to their "onlie begetter."
Scholars have argued for centuries over the identity and significance
of "onlie begetter," but there
can be little doubt that the only begetter passage in Pale Fire is one
more instance of the way "the
underside of the weave" of Pale Fire is shot through with a web of
Shakespearean references, the
way Pale Fire is dedicated to, haunted by, a work of Shakespeareand
not the most obvious one.
The obvious one is Timon of Athens, since it seems at first that Pale
Fire takes its title from this
amazing passage in Timon, a bitter denunciation of a cosmos of
Universal Theft:
Ill example you with thievery:
The suns a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moons an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;
The seas a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears.
God is that great! That last liquid surge that resolves the moon into
salt tears: the image, of course,
of flickering moonlight dissolved (reflected) on the surface of the
waves, dissolved into the
gleaming golden teardrops of light. And, of course, the theme of
theft, all Creation as theft from a
greater Creator, is shot through the book and may reflect Nabokovs
theft fromat the very least
his debt toShakespeare.
But Brian Boyd has come up with a less obvious but perhaps more
crucial Shakespearean origin for
the title of Pale Fire: the pale ghost in Hamlet who speaks of his
haste at dawn to return to the
purgatorial fires of the underworld in these terms:
Fare thee well at once!
The glow worm shows the matin to be near,
And gins to pale his uneffectual fire
Boyd makes a brilliant link between that passage in Hamlet about the
ghost and the glow worm
and a fragment of a poem in the Commentary to Pale Fire, lines in
which John Shade conjures up
Shakespeare as the ghost of electricity, a fantastic glow worm,
illuminating the contemporary
landscape from beyond:
The dead, the gentle deadwho knows?
In tungsten filaments abide,
And on my bedside table glows
Another mans departed bride.
And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights.
Shades poem (which of course is Nabokovs composition) is called "The
Nature of Electricity," and
it is, in fact, metaphorically electrifying in its suggestion that a
current from the afterlife
illuminates contemporary creation, that Shakespeares ghost illuminates
Nabokovs creation.
I think Mr. Boyd is at his most astute when he comments upon this
passage: "The evocation of
Shakespeare flooding a whole town with light [suggests] something
particularly pervasive and
haunting about Shakespeares creative energy From start to finish of
Pale Fire Shakespeare
recurs as an image of stupendous fecundity." And he adduces a further
instance of Shakespeare as
the ghost of electricity in Kinbotes Commentary when the mad annotator
avers: "Science tells us,
by the way, that the Earth would not merely fall apart but vanish like
a ghost, if Electricity were
suddenly removed from the world."
Electricity, as a ghost that creates the world, doesnt merely haunt it
but holds it together, gives it
coherence; Shakespeare as the ghost that gives Pale Fire its
astonishing holographic
coherencethe way each particle reflects the whole like a jewel, the
way the whole haunts each
particle like a ghost of coherence. But in Mr. Boyds elucidation of
the theme it is not just the
ghost of Shakespeare, but a specific ghost in Shakespeare: the ghost
of Hamlet, which is the
spirit that electrifies Pale Fire.
Isnt it curious that the two novels that are to my mind chief rivals
for greatest fictional
achievement of the century, Ulysses and Pale Fire, are both haunted by
Hamlets ghost? Joyce,
as Im sure you know, devoted an entire chapter of Ulysses, the pivotal
"Scylla and Charybdis"
chapter, to an eccentric theory of the special relationship between
Shakespeare and the ghost in
Hamlet. To the apocryphal (but not utterly improbable) anecdotal
tradition that one of the roles
Shakespeare played as actor was that of the Ghost in Hamlet. And that,
in crying out on stage to
his son (his namesake, the young Prince Hamlet) across the divide
between life and afterlife,
Shakespeare was himselfthe theory goessomehow crying out to the
departed spirit of his own
son, the twin called Hamnet, who died at age 11, not long before
Shakespeare wrote or at least
played in Hamlet.
In the thicket of Joyces speculation about ghostly fathers and sons,
Hamlets and Shakespeares,
one can sense Shakespeare emerging as the ghostly father of Joyce. And
similarly in Nabokov as
the ghostly father of Pale Fire.
Nabokov, Mr. Boyd reminds us, once called Hamlet "the greatest miracle
in literature." What
makes Pale Fire Novel of the Century is that it, almost alone, has
that absolutely miraculous "bolt
from the blue" quality. Pale Fire is as startling, as stunning, as
life-changing as the sudden
heart-stopping appearance of a real ghost. And the real ghost that
inspires Pale Fire from beyond
the grave, the real shade that haunts its reflected sky is not Hazel
Shades, but Shakespeares
Hamlet.
The Novel of the Century: Nabokovs Pale Fire
by Ron Rosenbaum
O.K., Ill play. You know, the Century-Slash-Millennium List Game. I
admit I was
reluctant to get into the whole Man -of-the-Century,
Movie-of-the-Millennium
enterprise. But a couple of things changed my mind: calls from two
networks and a
newsmagazine on the Hitler questionwas he the "most evil" man of the
century?
should he be Man of the Century, period?started me thinking in those
terms. And
then the arrival of a book Id long been looking forward to, a book
which suggested
my first Edgy Enthusiast End-of-Century Award, the one for Novel of
the Century.
The book that prompted these reflections and confirmed me in my choice
for Novel
of the Century was Brian Boyds remarkable, obsessive, delirious,
devotional study, Nabokovs Pale Fire
(Princeton University Press). And (insert 21-gun salute here) my award
for Novel of the Century goes to
Nabokovs Pale Fire, with Ulysses and Shadows on the Hudson taking the
silver and the bronze.
The Judges Rationale: Pale Fire is the most Shakespearean work of art
the 20th century has produced, the
only prose fiction that offers Shakespearean levels of depth and
complexity, of beauty, tragedy and inexhaustible
mystery.
One of the achievements of Brian Boyds book is that he makes explicit
the profound way in which Pale Fire
is a Shakespearean novelnot just in its global vision and the infinite
local reflections in a global eye it offers, but
also in the profound way in which Pale Fire is haunted by specific
works of Shakespeare, and by Shakespeare
himself as Creator. If, as Michael Woods (author of The Magicians
Doubts) argues, Pale Fire offers "a
theology for skeptics," Brian Boyd makes explicit the ways in which it
is a theology of Shakespeare.
Before I pay further tribute to Pale Fire, I want to pay further
tribute to Brian Boyd. Yes, I already saluted his
courage and scrupulousness as a scholar for renouncing his previous
position on the Pale Fire narrator
question at the Nabokov Centennial Night last April (see The Edgy
Enthusiast, "Nabokovs Pale Ghost: A
Scholar Retracts," April 26).
But he deserves new accolades for this new book-length examination of
Pale Fire. An investigation notable
less for his new theory of the controversial narrator question (with
which I respectfully disagree) but for the way
his pursuit of the narrator question has deepened the vista of
delights in the novel andmost
importantlydisclosed an even deeper level of Shakespearean affinity
and signification in Pale Fire.
If Charles Kinbote is the ostensible narrative voice of Pale Fire, the
one who writes the footnoted commentary
to the poem that opens the novel, deliriously mad commentary that
forms the bulk of the book, Brian Boyd has
becomeand I mean this as the highest complimentKinbotes finest
Kinbote.
Before venturing further into the depths and delights of Pale Fire
theories, I want to pause here for the benefit
of those who have not yet tasted the pleasures of Pale Fire. Pause to
emphasize just how much pure reading
pleasure it offers despite its apparently unconventional form.
Following a brief foreword, the novel opens with a
999-line poem in rhymed heroic couplets formally reminiscent of
Alexander Pope, but written in accessible
American colloquial language at least on the surface. Please dont be
intimidated by the poems length or
formality; its a pleasure to read: sad, funny, thoughtful, digressive,
discursive, filled with heart-stopping
moments of tenderness and beauty.
Following the poem (entitled "Pale Fire") which is identified in the
foreword as the last work of John Shade, a
fictional Frost-like American poet, another voice takes over: the
commentator Charles Kinbote. A delightful,
deluded, more than a bit demented voice whose 200 pages of commentary
and annotations on the poem
constitute the remainder of the novel. Kinbotes voice is completely
madhe is the ultimate unreliable narrator,
the mad scholar colonizing the poem with his own baroque delusionbut
also completely irresistible. Kinbote
weaves into his footnoted annotations on the poem the story of his own
relationship with the poet, John Shade.
How he befriended him during the last months of his life while Shade
was composing "Pale Fire." How hed
disclosed to Shade, a colleague at the college where they both taught
literature, the fantastic story of his
(Kinbotes) supposed secret identity: that he was not really Charles
Kinbote, but rather the exiled King of
Zembla, a "northern land" where he once ruled as Charles the Beloved
until he was deposed by evil
revolutionaries from whom he fled into exile. Revolutionaries who sent
an assassin to hunt him down, an
assassin whose bullet, meant for Kinbote, mistakenly killed John Shade
instead.
And now, having absconded with the dead poets manuscript of "Pale
Fire," holed up in a cheap motel in the
mountains, Kinbote attempts to demonstrate with his commentary that
Shades last masterpiece is really about
him, about Kinbote, about his own tragic and romantic life as King of
Zembla, his flight and exile. All this
despite the fact that, on the surface, neither Kinbote nor Zembla
appears anywhere in "Pale Fire," despite the
fact that the poem seems on the surface to be John Shades attempt to
come to terms with his own tragedy, the
suicide of his beloved daughter Hazel Shadeand his efforts to explore
the possibility of contacting her in the
Afterlife, across the border between life and death which has exiled
her from him.
As I said, it only seems complicated and cerebral. In fact, reading
Pale Fire, both novel and poem, is an
almost obscenely sensual pleasure. I guarantee it.
Nor should the pleasures of reading Brian Boyds book be
underestimated, even though I believe hes reading
into Pale Fire a ghost story as fanciful as the one Kinbote reads into
John Shades poem. Boyds ghost story
is his new revised solution to the Pale Fire Narrator-Commentator
Question: Who is Commentator Charles
Kinbote? If we believe he invented an imaginary past as Charles the
Beloved of Zembla, did he also invent John
Shade the poet hes purportedly reading his Zemblan story into? Or did
Shade invent Kinbote?
For some three decades following the 1962 publication of Pale Fire,
most critics and readers have followed
the ingenious solution to this mystery offered by Mary McCarthy in a
famous New Republic essay entitled "A
Bolt From the Blue." McCarthy argued from submerged clues in the
Commentary that the "real" author of the
Commentary and Foreword (and Index) in Pale Fire, the real Zemblan
fantasist, was a figure barely
mentioned in the Commentary, an academic colleague of Shade and
Kinbote called, anagrammatically, V.
Botkin.
I wont go into the details of her dazzling conjecture here, suffice it
to say its powerfully persuasive and held
sway until the early 1990s when Brian Boyd unveiled his first (and now
abandoned) Pale Fire theory. Based
on Mr. Boyds interpretation of a discarded epigraph from a revised
manuscript of a Nabokov autobiography,
Mr. Boyd argued that Kinbote did not exist as Botkin, or as a separate
entity of any kind: that Kinbote was
invented by John Shade who not only wrote the poem called "Pale Fire"
but invented a mad Russian
scholar-commentator to write a Commentary that massively misread
Shades own poem as a Zemblan fantasy.
O.K., Im not doing justice to Boyds conjecture perhaps because Ive
never found it convincing: It always
seemed needlessly reductive to collapse the voices in the novel from
two to one. But Mr. Boyds theory did
attract a considerable number of believers who called themselves
"Shadeans"even after Mr. Boyd pulled the
rug out from under them a couple years ago by retreating to an
intermediate position that said, Well, no, Shade
did its more than a pastiche for Kinbote to prey on with his parasitic
exegesis.
In fact, let me take a real leap here, let me go out on a limb few
would venture forth upon, let me
make the following assertion: Not only is Pale Fire the
(English-Language) Novel of the Century,
but "Pale Fire" the poem within the novel may well come to be looked
upon as the Poem of the
Century in its own right.
But let me return briefly to the afterlife. As I said, it is not so
much Mr. Boyds far-fetched
argument that Hazel Shades ghost is the afterlife muse of "Pale Fire"
that makes his book so
illuminating as it is his exploration of the afterlife of Shakespeare
in Pale Fire. In particular, the
afterlife of Hamlet, the ghost in Hamlet, and Hamlet as the ghost that
haunts Pale Fire.
Early in Kinbotes commentary on the poem, he cries out against his
supposed enemies: "Such
hearts, such brains, would be unable to comprehend that ones
attachment to a masterpiece may
be utterly overwhelming, especially when it is the underside of the
weave that entrances the
beholder and only begetter, whose own past intercoils there with the
fate of the innocent author."
When I reread this passage, I initially thought of it as a kind of
allegory of Brian Boyds own
obsessive "attachment to a masterpiece," especially to the "underside
of the weave" of Pale
Fireof the way Mr. Boyd has become Kinbotes Kinbote. But submerged in
the coils of that
passage I think there is an expression of the way Vladimir Nabokov had
himself become
Shakespeares Kinbote: ecstatic commentator on his own overwhelming
attachment to a kindred
creator, William Shakespeare.
When Kinbote speaks of the weave that entrances," he speaks of the
entranced as "the only
begetter," which is the mysterious phrase for the shadowy figure
evoked in the dedication of
Shakespeares sonnets to their "onlie begetter."
Scholars have argued for centuries over the identity and significance
of "onlie begetter," but there
can be little doubt that the only begetter passage in Pale Fire is one
more instance of the way "the
underside of the weave" of Pale Fire is shot through with a web of
Shakespearean references, the
way Pale Fire is dedicated to, haunted by, a work of Shakespeareand
not the most obvious one.
The obvious one is Timon of Athens, since it seems at first that Pale
Fire takes its title from this
amazing passage in Timon, a bitter denunciation of a cosmos of
Universal Theft:
Ill example you with thievery:
The suns a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moons an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;
The seas a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears.
God is that great! That last liquid surge that resolves the moon into
salt tears: the image, of course,
of flickering moonlight dissolved (reflected) on the surface of the
waves, dissolved into the
gleaming golden teardrops of light. And, of course, the theme of
theft, all Creation as theft from a
greater Creator, is shot through the book and may reflect Nabokovs
theft fromat the very least
his debt toShakespeare.
But Brian Boyd has come up with a less obvious but perhaps more
crucial Shakespearean origin for
the title of Pale Fire: the pale ghost in Hamlet who speaks of his
haste at dawn to return to the
purgatorial fires of the underworld in these terms:
Fare thee well at once!
The glow worm shows the matin to be near,
And gins to pale his uneffectual fire
Boyd makes a brilliant link between that passage in Hamlet about the
ghost and the glow worm
and a fragment of a poem in the Commentary to Pale Fire, lines in
which John Shade conjures up
Shakespeare as the ghost of electricity, a fantastic glow worm,
illuminating the contemporary
landscape from beyond:
The dead, the gentle deadwho knows?
In tungsten filaments abide,
And on my bedside table glows
Another mans departed bride.
And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights.
Shades poem (which of course is Nabokovs composition) is called "The
Nature of Electricity," and
it is, in fact, metaphorically electrifying in its suggestion that a
current from the afterlife
illuminates contemporary creation, that Shakespeares ghost illuminates
Nabokovs creation.
I think Mr. Boyd is at his most astute when he comments upon this
passage: "The evocation of
Shakespeare flooding a whole town with light [suggests] something
particularly pervasive and
haunting about Shakespeares creative energy From start to finish of
Pale Fire Shakespeare
recurs as an image of stupendous fecundity." And he adduces a further
instance of Shakespeare as
the ghost of electricity in Kinbotes Commentary when the mad annotator
avers: "Science tells us,
by the way, that the Earth would not merely fall apart but vanish like
a ghost, if Electricity were
suddenly removed from the world."
Electricity, as a ghost that creates the world, doesnt merely haunt it
but holds it together, gives it
coherence; Shakespeare as the ghost that gives Pale Fire its
astonishing holographic
coherencethe way each particle reflects the whole like a jewel, the
way the whole haunts each
particle like a ghost of coherence. But in Mr. Boyds elucidation of
the theme it is not just the
ghost of Shakespeare, but a specific ghost in Shakespeare: the ghost
of Hamlet, which is the
spirit that electrifies Pale Fire.
Isnt it curious that the two novels that are to my mind chief rivals
for greatest fictional
achievement of the century, Ulysses and Pale Fire, are both haunted by
Hamlets ghost? Joyce,
as Im sure you know, devoted an entire chapter of Ulysses, the pivotal
"Scylla and Charybdis"
chapter, to an eccentric theory of the special relationship between
Shakespeare and the ghost in
Hamlet. To the apocryphal (but not utterly improbable) anecdotal
tradition that one of the roles
Shakespeare played as actor was that of the Ghost in Hamlet. And that,
in crying out on stage to
his son (his namesake, the young Prince Hamlet) across the divide
between life and afterlife,
Shakespeare was himselfthe theory goessomehow crying out to the
departed spirit of his own
son, the twin called Hamnet, who died at age 11, not long before
Shakespeare wrote or at least
played in Hamlet.
In the thicket of Joyces speculation about ghostly fathers and sons,
Hamlets and Shakespeares,
one can sense Shakespeare emerging as the ghostly father of Joyce. And
similarly in Nabokov as
the ghostly father of Pale Fire.
Nabokov, Mr. Boyd reminds us, once called Hamlet "the greatest miracle
in literature." What
makes Pale Fire Novel of the Century is that it, almost alone, has
that absolutely miraculous "bolt
from the blue" quality. Pale Fire is as startling, as stunning, as
life-changing as the sudden
heart-stopping appearance of a real ghost. And the real ghost that
inspires Pale Fire from beyond
the grave, the real shade that haunts its reflected sky is not Hazel
Shades, but Shakespeares
Hamlet.