Laurence Hochard
unveils another of those eerie coincidences between poem and Commentary in Pale Fire. I think the idea that it
might be Nabokov’s “mistake”, a genuine oversight, can be ruled out. James
Ramey’s demonstration that so-called “mistakes” in Pale Fire are actually intentional and the result of careful
calculation is rather convincing (“Pale
Fire’s Black Crown.” Nabokov Online
Journal VI (2012).
I am not even
sure that the term “inconsistency” applies here. In fact, like other such
coincidences, it lends itself to two possible readings. Simplest of course is
to consider that, as Kinbote writes after
Shade, he can freely allude to the poem in his Commentary. His mention of the
“pale fire of the incinerator” in the Foreword would be another obvious example
of such tactics which occasionally engender the temporal “manipulation” that L.
Hochard observes.
Another interpretation, now as old as the hills (and the origin of the long internal authorship controversy), is that such coincidences are meant to alert the reader to the fact that poem and Commentary were written by the same author – or by two authors working together in close collaboration (if I may be so bold as to allude to my “theory” again).
René Alladaye