The TLS October 21, 2005

Kinbote and Shade

Sir, - . . .

A larger question is how to evaluate John Shade's poem. One hopes that Nabokov composed "Pale Fire" in the same spirit that moved Chaucer to assign himself "The Tale of Sir Thopas" in The Canterbury Tales. "Pale Fire" is not a "major" poem on its own but a lengthy piece of light verse, heavy at times and wholly subsumed in the crazed narration of its fictitious annotator's commentary. It is crudely crafted in an often mechanical iambic pentameter -what Chaucer's Host calls "rym doggerel" - with sentences flying off and crashing against the invisible line ends:

I cannot understand why from the lake /

I could make out our front porch when I'd take /

Lake Road to school, whilst now, although no tree /

Has intervened, I look but fail to see /

Even the roof. (41-45)

Whether the "drasty rymyng" of "Pale Fire" is "worth a toord" or not, Professor Kinbote's droppings on it have fertilized the whole field of what Abraham Socher admires as "fantastically ingenious Pale Fire scholarship".

JOHN RIDLAND
1725 Hillcrest Road, Santa Barbara, California 93103.

I simply do not know what he means by “sentences flying off and crashing against the invisible line ends.” Shade’s lines quoted here are certainly not high intensity. Indeed, they are supremely relaxed conversational English, yet conform to strict heroic couplet form. That in itself is an achievement, especially as a contrast both to the high style of other parts of his poem (in other words, there is modulation between poetic pitches that seems to me a deliberate challenge to, and far subtler than, comparable effects in Eliot’s “Four Quartets”) and to the clogged poetic density that is the norm in so much modern verse.

These lines introduce the lake, a poignantly charged locus in the poem, in a seemingly casual way; they also introduce the fact that Shade has lived all his life in the same house, and that this is a central part of the identity that his poem will limn for us (and, within the novel as a whole, a striking contrast to his neighbor Kinbote, the exile in a rented house that helps him to invent Zembla as his childhood home); and they suggest that Shade is himself an exile from his past, that despite living his life in the same space, he cannot reenter its old time, since the failure to see the roof is most likely a consequence of the deterioration of his eyesight with age—although there is also a hint that there’s something more than that, a shimmer of mystery in the midst of the mundane.

Shade’s rhymes here are banal, make, take, tree, see. Yet elsewhere in the poem his rhymes are hardly pedestrian: “Rabelais / lay / (P) / we,” to take another four-line stretch; or an Englishman’s mispronounced French nourris and Nice; or complex patterns in –ain and –ane; or a wittily end- and internally-rhymed reflection on French and English rhyming (963-70); or the final line missing its matching rhyme until we return to the first line. In the four lines Ridland quotes, the rhymes are routine, in order to describe a regular routine—but a routine that nevertheless masks a disturbing shift in solid space or airy time.

Shade himself writes later in the poem “this was the real point, the contrapuntal theme,” and Kinbote refers, perfectly accurately, for once, in the midst of an otherwise insane sentence, to “the contrapuntal nature of Shade’s art.” Perhaps the clearest refutation of Ridland’s evaluation, in the very lines he quotes, is that beneath the low-dazzle surface lies the subtle syllabic counterpointing in the first 21 syllables (lake . . . make . . . take / Lake) and the transformation of the “lake . . . Lake” repetition framing that pattern into the “look” in the next line: first a series of repetitions, like the repeated walks along Lake Road, then a transformation along with the continuity, like the “quirk in space” that troubles Shade.