FROM WALTER MIALE:

I’ve returned to Dowling’s essay several times over the years. But although I admire it if only for detecting the “I” at the WUL looking over the shoulder--of Gradus presumably--at the NYTimes, I’ve never been able to make it come together in a satisfactory way. Because the essay, perhaps rightly, continues to charm people, I’ll try to say what I think is wrong with it. In doing this I’ll be expanding on  some ideas that were expressed, briefly and without fanfare, by Tim Henderson and Jansy Mello in March 2009. Dowling is also mentioned, that same month, by Jerry Friedman in a response to Joseph Aisenberg and, in October 2007, in a response to R.S. Gwynn. Jerry also added a note about Dowling in his revised Pale Fire Timeline, available at the Zembla site.

My first objection to Dowling has to do with fictive levels. He mentions Pnin as a novel in which the Nabokov-like narrator is on the same fictive level as Pnin and the various other characters. He is right about this, surely. He then goes on to say that in Pale Fire, “the Nabokov-like narrator is telling the story as a voice that, if it survives, will have exactly the same status as John Shade and Kinbote.” Here, it seems to me, he is either wrong or his point is trivial. 

That’s because in Pale Fire as most of us read it, Shade, Kinbote, and Jack Grey are on the same fictive level. Gradus, however--as both Jansy and Tim pointed out in March 2009--is not on this level. Gradus is a character within Kinbote’s story. It therefore makes no sense to suppose that the Nabokov-like Narrator (N-LN) is looking over Gradus’s shoulder. He could not, of course, have been looking over Grey’s shoulder either. 

Who then is this “I,” this N-LN that Dowling has spotted? I can think of a couple of possibilities. 

The first is that the N-LN is sane and a true Nabokov stand-in who, within the world of Pale Fire, has created the whole kaboodle--Kinbote, Shade, the poem, the Commentary, the Index. In that case, he enjoys all the rights that narrators have, including the right to invent situations to suit his needs. Having created Kinbote and the Commentary, there’s no reason, as Dowling seems to think, for him actually to be in the WUL on July 21, 1959. You might as well imagine that Nabokov himself had to be in the Cornell University Library during the time he was writing Pale Fire--which is patently absurd. And if the N-LN were in the WUL, on this date or any other, he could not have seen Gradus because Gradus is his own creation (twice removed, so to speak) and exists only in his own telling. Nor, for that matter, could he have seen Kinbote, who is also his own creation (once removed). If the N-LN’s sole function is to be Nabokov’s stand-in as creator of the novel, this is only slightly more interesting than Hitchcock strolling into one of his own movies. It might be cute and it might be clever, but structurally it is trivial. All it does is push Kinbote, Shade, Grey, and Gradus up one notch on the fictive scale. All the old questions remain untouched.

The second possibility is that the N-LN and Kinbote are one and the same. In this version, the N-LN is the ground-level personality whose insanity lies in thinking he’s Charles the Beloved, the deposed king of Zembla. It is the N-LN, so conceived, who comes into view when the Kinbote mask slips. The dilemma for Dowling is that if Kinbote is in Cedarn, so is the N-LN, and if the N-LN is in the WUL, Kinbote can’t be in Cedarn. 

Furthermore, Dowling is selective in choosing which slip of the mask to fasten on. He fails to consider, for example, the places farther down (in the notes to line 949) where Kinbote, after mentioning a doctor and then referring to the doctor, finally addresses a doctor directly--suggesting, perhaps, that he is not in a cabin in Cedarn but rather in an asylum. The Cedarn story, on this reading, may be as fictional as the Zembla story. It is at this point that almost everything in the Commentary, much of which (quite apart from the Zembla story) is hard to accept anyway, begins to crumble. It’s not clear to me that any of it--including the message in the old barn, the farfetched business about a publisher, and the supposed lengthy interview with Gradus/Grey--would stand up to a truly thorough rereading. Doubts about these matters have, as I recall, been brought up on the List from time to time.

In her famous early review of Pale Fire, Mary McCarthy identified the man wearing the Kinbote mask as Botkin. In Worlds in Regression (1985), D. Barton Johnson leans toward this view as well. It is the view that, after many years of reading many accounts of the book, still makes the most sense to me. It is, of course, a two-narrator view. Although I can appreciate Carolyn’s version of the single-narrator idea, and although I greatly admire Matt and Tiffany’s working through the details of a similar idea, I still cling to the two-narrator version of the book. I share with Gary the idea that Shade is falling apart in Canto Four, but I have trouble with the idea of Shade morphing into Kinbote right before my eyes. 

One reason we’re taken in by Dowling’s N-LN thesis is the newspaper. A real paper with a real date, a paper that can be tracked down and checked against the contents described by the N-LN, gives a feel of solidarity to the scene. If the paper is real, the WUL must be real too, mustn’t it? Well, no. Any writer can incorporate such items into any story. What we have in this case is one of  Nabokov’s mocking nods in the direction of “realism.” It is in the same vein as earlier nods, in Shade’s poem, to some real TV shows and movies and people, and it’s a neat reversal of the trick he plays with Chapman’s Homer (real book, real ballplayer, fake headline).

Another reason we’re seduced by Dowling is that he connects, or promises to connect, his narrator thesis to views about consciousness and its possible existence separately from matter. Perhaps Nabokov did have something like the transfer of consciousness from Shade to Kinbote in mind as he wrote. But the fact that Nabokov entertained such an idea is no argument for its truth. Nor does Dowling offer any such argument. What he does do is make a metaphysical mountain out of an empirical molehill--the molehill being the fact that all normally endowed human beings are conscious, can make up stories, can play parts, and the like. If a four-year-old child hands me a story she’s written, it would be terribly pretentious to describe this as a passing of consciousness from her to me. Whether the child dies in the process is beside the point. The same is true of the passing of Shade’s poem from his grasp to Kinbote’s.

What I’ve always admired most about Pale Fire is that Nabokov is fair to the skepticism expressed by Lichtenberg in this aphorism: “There is a sort of transcendental ventriloquy through which men can be made to believe that something which was said on earth came from heaven.”

Jim Twiggs