Through Kinbote’s description of his rented “chateau,” we find that his landlord, Judge Hugh Warren Goldsworth, is fond of order, alphabetical and otherwise, with instructive notes all around, and the systematic arranging of furniture by the path of the sun. Why is this judge, this absent character, worth gold? Why is he so meticulous? Why does he care about the path of the sun? Why, in fact is he a judge?
We first encounter his name in Shade’s poem: “the frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith” (Lines 47-48), which Kinbote then explains in his commentary as a “witty exchange of syllables invoking the two masters of the heroic couplet" (64). The conflated poets are, of course, Oliver Goldsmith and William Wordsworth. This much is clear. “Wordsmith,” the name of the university in New Wye suggests “writer,” which Shade, Kinbote and Nabokov all are. “Goldsworth,” however, requires a little more esoteric digging to extract levels of meaning in the name.
Goldsmith and Wordsworth had more in common than heroic couplets. The two poets, like many of the luminaries alluded to in Pale Fire, were of the Romantic period, and like their brethren were influenced by the movement’s interest in the occult. Goldsmith, in fact, was an “apothecary’s assistant,” i.e., “alchemist.” Pale Fire is rife with esoterica, especially alchemy (cf. Lindy Abraham, DQR, 20(2), 102-119)), but also alchemy’s allied fields of astrology and Tarot. It is in these mystical realms that we will find the sober judge.
The Judge in his arcane aspect may be found hiding out in lines 183-4 of the poem. As Shade contemplates his nails, he writes “The little scissors I am holding are/A dazzling synthesis of sun and star.” These two lines were discussed in a 2010 Nabokov List-serve post. Elemental and astronomical suggestions were made: Gary Lipon and Brian Boyd mention that the metallic elements of the scissors originate in the stardust of the Universe (0020615). Carolyn Kunin noted that “Saturn[s]” is an anagram (synthesis) of sun and star. The significance of the little scissors was not satisfactorily resolved in the discussion. It is his birthday as Shade looks out his window. That evening a bright “star” would be rising in the east–Saturn returning to its celestial position of 61 years ago. The import of this can be discovered, not in astronomy or chemistry, but in their arcane antecedents, astrology and alchemy.
Mary McCarthy mentions astrological implications in her famous 1962 “Bolt from the Blue” essay. She notes, “The moves of Gradus also hint some astrological progression. The magnum opus of old John Shade is begun July 1, 1959, at the dead center of the year. The poem is completed (except for the last line) the day of Gradus' arrival, July 21, on the cusp between Cancer and Leo.” Although McCarthy’s was the first review of Pale Fire, an astrological line of inquiry, to my knowledge, has not been further pursued. There are numerous mentions in Pale Fire of stars and galaxies, as well as fatidic dates. The mysterious Starover Blue is an astrologist as well as astronomer and lectures at the esoteric IPH.
There is ample evidence of Tarot’s influence in Pale Fire: the Major Arcana especially links to many of the images in the novel (Sun, Moon, Star, Tower, Fool, Magus, Hermaphrodite, Justice, etc.). Here the focus will be on how the arcane arts of alchemy, astrology and Tarot reveal Judge Goldsworth’s purport in the overall mystical, mythical mystery of Pale Fire.
Turning base metals into gold was the quest of alchemy. The metals used were usually mercury or lead. Once subjected to the alchemic process, the base metal transformed into the “philosopher’s stone”—not a literal, but a philosophic, gold. The true alchemists were seeking personal spiritual transformation through projecting their psychic (i.e. the lead) processes into the alchemic process; the end result, as in Jungian psychotherapy, is spiritual (i.e. gold). The end product of the transformation of the base mercury or lead was considered to be a philosophic “gold” as the dark aspects of the psyche became purified. There is a paronomastic import in Judge Goldsworth’s name to the value the alchemists put on the transformed lead.
Saturn was the mythic name the alchemists gave to lead, because, like the god, it was both beneficent and maleficent. That is, Saturn had chthonic as well as celestial connotations. “Lead being the equivalent of Saturn, having a definite androgynous nature, is both malefic, and the worst events can be expected, and a purifier.”(https://www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/~alchemy/lead.html) Carl Jung, the preeminent proponent of alchemy as psychological transformation, wrote of Saturn/Lead, “…Saturn is hermaphrodidic. Saturn is an old man on a mountain, and in him the natures are bound with their complement…”(C.G. Jung, CW, Vol. 13, p.227)
Recall that Judge Goldsworth appears hermaphrodidic; he resembles a “medusa-locked hag” (p.64), and he and his wife appear to have swapped genders. The union of opposites was a central idea of alchemy. We can now link the judge alchemically to the dual-natured lead/Saturn. Lead, the alchemists believed, had the qualities of cold and damp—which Kinbote discovers, to his chagrin, in the Goldsworth house, whose furnace, as Lyndy Abraham notes, is akin to an alchemist’s. The alchemist’s furnace was called a “tower,” which suggests a link with the Tarot card of that name. Alchemy is correlated to astrology and the Tarot; the qualities attributed to Saturn in all three of these arcane arts are: “... focus, precision, nobility, ethics, civility, ... karma (reaping what you have sowed or divine cosmic justice), but also with limitations, restrictions, boundaries, anxiety, tests, practicality, reality, and time...The Return of Saturnis said to mark significant events in each person's life.”(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planets_in_astrology#Saturn)
These attributes of the Roman god would seem to fit the worthy “Judge of Roman Law” who, as it happens, has been away and is soon to return. He has been on sabbatical, the original name for Saturday (Saturn’s day). John Shade is about to celebrate his 61st birthday and has thus been undergoing his Saturn Return for the last year. Considered a major astrological event that recurs about every 30 years, the planet Saturn, after its long trip around the Sun, returns to its original place in an individual’s natal chart. This explains Goldworth’s fixation with the progression of the sun. This also explains Kinbote’s discovery in Goldsworth’s desk drawer of a “pocket diary optimistically maturing there until its calendric correspondences came around again” (65). The Saturn Return is said to have life-transforming implications; how one navigates the transitional year determines one’s course of the next 30 years. This significant event is therefore associated with a time of questioning and re-evaluating one’s life and with karma, all of which of course has lately been John Shade’s preoccupation and the theme of his poem.
In the Tarot, the first Major Arcanum, numbered “0,” is The Fool, which may seem to point to crazy Kinbote, but in this case relates to staid Shade. John Shade is on a quest for the meaning of life and death. The fool is emblematic of the querant (seeker) and all the subsequent arcana of the Tarot are emblematic of The Fool’s journey towards enlightenment. The Tarot card associated specifically with Saturn, however, is The World, the final card of the twenty-two Major Arcana and the end of the line, so to speak. That card points to Shade—it is symbolic of the completion of the journey and the beginning of a new. For John Shade this is transcendence from life to the hereafter.
The enigma of the brief slice of time between the two abysses on either side of life is the theme that beset Nabokov through all his writing.(“...Infinite foretime and/Infinite aftertime: above your head/They close like giant wings, and you are dead” in John Shade’s poem [Lines 122-124]). Judge Goldsworth’s imminent return coincides with the fatidic dates leading to John Shade’s death. Saturn, also known as Chronos, “Father Time,” is the inescapable overlord of change and cycles. Saturn is the landlord in whose rented house one lives for only a limited time.
Mary Ross