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C.Kunin: “But the only error I can see in calling the three main characters S, K and G is that, if as Matt says it is the poem and not the novel that is being indexed, the three main characters should by J, S and H (the Shades). hmm - J,K; G,H; and S.”
Jansy Mello: For me, in the long run of arguments, it became quite obvious that it’s not the poem that’s being indexed, but “the commentary” ( which is “the work,” lovingly presented by a “writer”, C.K).[ ] C.Kinbote’s emblematic signature using a chess “horse” (the Knight that cannot use the K for his algebraic notation because the K serves the King) confirms this “secondary” role in a royal court. This implies in that he is twice an usurper: of a King’s place (there’s something in this line in “Solus Rex” discussing the rightful heirs of a dying king) and of Shade’s poem.
M. Couturier: My feeling about who are the main characters in "Pale Fire" hasn't changed in close to forty years, in fact since the first article, written in English, that I published on Nabokov: I consider the author as a key character. It is even more the case, I think, than in "LATH". "Pale Fire" has greatly helped me articulate my theory of "the figure of the author" (see "La Figure de l'auteur", Paris, Seuil, 1995)
Jansy Mello: I had been puzzled by the notation for the “Knight” as “N” and, while investigating about it, I discovered there are games called “fairy chess” where “N” represents a fairy “nightrider.”
I made a mistake in a former posting by associating this “nightrider” to the Erlkönig proper, since in the lines, recited by C.Kinbote over and over again during his flight and later reproduced in a commentary, it is a father carrying a sick child the figure that rides in the night and wind. This mistake, however, doesn’t annul the connection between C.K, the nightrider and Goethe’s verses.
Maurice Couturier’s vision places the author, N, as a key character in the novel: an interesting hypothesis to add to this mysterious imaginary figure related to the King, to the Knight and to Fairy Chess.
When I googled after “Vladimir Nabokov Fairy Chess” I came to a very interesting article relating the tactics of fairy chess problems to “Pale Fire.” I’ll only bring up an excerpt and a link to the 1996 paper: CHESS AS TEXT: NABOKOV'S PALE FIRE by Berndt-Peter Lange*
“Biographically, the composition of chess problems, more than tournament play, was one of Nabokov's serious extra-literary occupations, to be rivalled only by the study of butterflies. In his fictionalized autobiography Speak, Memory, the author put the art of chess problem composition on a level with his own poetry, and he deliberately placed the two arts side by side int one book (in Poems and Problems).”
[ ] Life is here seen in terms of a game of chess between unknown players indulging in another one of its special forms, fairy chess, whose rules allow imaginary pieces to make irregular moves:
“.... but there they were, aloof and mute,
Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns
To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns;
Kindling a long life here, extinguishing
A short one there; killing a Balkan king;
[ ]…Making ornaments
Of accidents and possibilities. (II. 818-829)”
Along the same lines, Shade the poet eventually arrives at a view of the intelligibility of life's "correlated patterns" through art - like his poetry - "in terms of combinational delight" (971). As has been shown, the combination in his own narrative concerns the conversion (as in pawn promotion of chess) of the public event into private life - however futile this might turn out to be. Like all of Nabokov's stories, Shade's is a self-reflexive, skeptical one:
“How ludicrous these efforts to translate
Into one's private tongue a public fate!
Instead of poetry divinely terse,
Disjointed notes, Insomnia's mean verse! (11. 231-234)”
[ ]…..
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………
* -SBORNfK PRACf FILOZOFICKE FAKULTY BRNENSKE UNIVERZITY
STUDIA MINORA FACULTATIS PHILOSOPHICAE UNIVERSITATIS BRUNENSIS
S 2, 1996 — BRNO STUDIES IN ENGLISH 22
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