What does Kinbote express at the end of his note to line 1000 (=
Line1...???????)
" 'And you, what will you be doing with yourself, poor
King...?'
God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire
to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall
continue to exist...I may cook up..an old-fashioned melodrama with three
principles: a lunatic..., another lunatic...and a distinguished old
poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes
in the clash between the two figments ... but whatever
happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set
out... a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus."
Cocteau wrote a variant of a theme to which VN constantly returns.
" La vie est une chute horizontale" ( we drop not
in space but in time).
Dealing with "chronophobia" and "memory" Nabokov
created the unforgettable image about our cradle-tumb balancing-act
over two eternities of darkness. When
the advance of the assassin, Gradus,
is synchronized to "Pale Fire" on the day of it's author's, John
Shade's, birthday, this might be considered
as still another rendering of the same metaphor.
Shade is a famous poet in New Wye ( fiction) and
also in the "world" ( fiction inside fiction), for he is read in
Zembla.
Nabokov ( non-fiction poet, commentator,
writer) considers Shade to be the greatest fictional poet and
this assessment creates, at least, another involuted world ( is only one of them real?).
Just like in the story of the poet in the play "The Enchanted
Hunters" we find a poet at the vortex of a convolution... Fictional
Kinbote describes another fictional poet who has to be distinguished
from two fictional fictions ("poet" versus "figments", but Kinbote who
tells us that story about poet and figments is also one of the
latter...).
Nabokov, if we consider him to be the
unmentioned Earth of "Pale Fire", might have made his reflective
appearance (an "ashen-glow") in the novel by revealing the real contours of
a waxing or crescent moon, together with the motion of the sun on
Earth whereas, as the Earth itself, Nabokov holds his
ground as the locus in which everything
else is taking place.