Pale fire

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Pale Fire (English: Pale Fire ) is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov . It was published in 1962. The novel consists of the poem Pale Fire by the fictional poet and university scholar John Shade and an introduction, commentaries and a register by the likewise fictional literary scholar Charles Kinbote. These commentaries are about seven times as long as the poem and mostly concern the adventurous past of the author, who claims to be the exiled king of the northern European country of Zembla.

The novel's unusual composition attracted a lot of attention and is often cited as a major example of metafiction . Nabokov expert Brian Boyd described the book as "Nabokov's most perfect novel".

content

Pale Fire begins with a 999-line poem in four cantos by the American poet John Shade. The poem describes many aspects of Shade's life. The first Canto is dedicated to his early encounters with death and the supernatural. Canto 2 deals with his family and the suicide of his daughter Hazel. In the third Canto, Shade reflects on the afterlife, while Canto 4 finally contains personal memories from Shade's life and poetics .

The poem is preceded by a foreword and followed by a detailed commentary, plus a register, compiled by Shade's self-appointed editor, Charles Kinbote. This homosexual literary scholar, who taught Zemblan at college in the small university town of New Wye, had recently become Shade's neighbor. According to Kinbote, Shade was murdered by an assassin who wanted to kill him. Kinbote came into possession of the manuscript and some of its variants and took over the publication against the opposition of both Shade's widow and his publisher. He also informs the reader that the poem is still missing a verse to complete, and suspects that this verse in the sense of a rondo structure is identical to the first: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain” - “I was the one Shadow of the waxwing , slain ”.

Kinbote's commentary is made in notes on individual lines, often just individual words of the poem. In this critical apparatus , however, he hardly goes into the poem, but instead spreads parts of the previous events. He does not proceed chronologically, leaving behind many cross references, so that the narration is not linear. In 2009 a scientific paper compared the novel with a hypertext . Kinbote primarily tells his version of events, which also includes his friendship with Shade (which he portrays as close). He also reports on Charles Xavier Vseslav, also known as Charles II, "the much-beloved", the likewise homosexual deposed king of a "distant northern country" called "Zembla". He just managed to escape his captivity by revolutionaries supported by the Soviet Union . With the arrival of the exiled king in the United States, Kinbote used the first-person form, which made it clear that he was talking about himself. Kinbote repeatedly claims that Shade's poem was inspired by his tales from Zembla and is full of allusions to Charles II and Zembla - especially in the rejected drafts. However, there is no direct reference to Charles II and his fate revealed to the reader. The name Zembla only occurs once in the poem, as a quote from the works of Alexander Pope , on which Shade has worked scientifically. The third story, which Kinbote synchronizes exactly with the writing of Shade's poem, is about Jakob Gradus, a Zemblan assassin who was commissioned by the new rulers of Zemblas to kill the exiled King Charles. He travels to the United States via Copenhagen, Geneva and Nice, and the closer he gets, the clearer his figure becomes, until Kinbote can almost see him from within. In a final note - on the missing thousandth line of the poem - Kinbote reports how Shade accidentally falls victim to the murderer who actually wanted to shoot him, the Zemblan king in exile.

Kinbote is a decidedly unreliable narrator . Several comments are blatantly erroneous because Kinbote is not a native American and has no scientific literature available at the time of writing - according to the preface, he is writing it to Shade at a motel in Cedarn, Utana, where he has booked a room and being close to his wife during their vacation. It soon becomes clear that the Kingdom of Zembla cannot be so real. This is indicated by the name of the capital Onhava: Onhava-onhava is Zemblan and means "far, far away" in this supposedly North Germanic national language . A "kingdom far, far away" is a typical fairy tale motif . It soon becomes clear to the reader that the friendship with Shade is far from being as mutual as Kinbote portrays it. So one reads that Shade only half-heartedly defends him against his wife's accusations that the intrusive new neighbor is “a kingsized bot-fly”, a giant botfly , that is, a parasite . On closer inspection, the background to Shade's murder turns out not to be the revolutionary politics of the Zemblas, but rather a mistake: Kinbote rented the house of a judge who is on a trip to Europe, and Jack Gray, who had sprung from a mental hospital , didn't want Kinbote at all, but the owner of the Shoot house. The repeated mention of the literary scholar Vseslav Botkin, an exiled Russian, to whom Kinbote dedicates a strikingly detailed entry in the register, suggests that he is the actual author of the strange comment: his name is a syllable anagram of Kinbote, and that the name of Kinbote's fictional kingdom is a Russian word (Земля Zemlya is Russian and means "country"), points in the same direction. In a 1962 interview, Nabokov stated that the real narrator was not Kinbote, but Botkin, "a Russian and a madman."

Nabokov mentioned in an interview that Kinbote committed suicide shortly before completing his work. In fact, there is a not erased correction note to the typesetter in the text of the foreword and the last entry in the register: “Zembla, a distant country in the north” does not have any page numbers. The critic Michael Wood defended himself by pointing out that Nabokov's testimony was "unauthorized access by the author", while Brian Boyd argued that the book itself points to Kinbote's suicide.

title

As Nabokov explains, the title of John Shade's poem is taken from a passage from Shakespeare's drama Timon of Athens . In it, Timon declares theft and robbery to be legitimate, since it is a basic principle in nature too. The sun, the earth, the sea, all are ultimately thieves;

"The moon's an arrant thief
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun."

"The moon is an arch thief
because it snaps away its pale fire from the sun."

This line has often been interpreted as a metaphor for creativity or inspiration. Kinbote quotes the passage but does not explain it because - as he claims - he only has access to an imprecise Zemblan translation of the piece. On another note, he curses the practice of using quotations as titles. Some performers have also suggested a reference to Hamlet : In the play, the ghost of Hamlet's father notices, like the firefly (in the original :) "'gins to pale his uneffectual fire" (act I, scene 5).

expenditure

  • Nabokov, Vladimir: Pale fire. Collected Works, Volume 10. Rowohlt 2008

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Brian Boyd : Nabokov: A Centennial Toast . In: Jane Grayson, Arnold McMillin, and Priscilla Meyer (eds.) (Eds.): Nabokov's World. Volume 2: Reading Nabokov . Palgrave, 2002, ISBN 0-333-96417-9 , p. 11.
  2. ↑ Annalisa Volpone: 'See the Web of the World': The (Hyper) Textual Plagiarism in Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Nabokov's Pale Fire (pdf) In: Nabokov Online Journal, Volume III . 2009. Retrieved April 27, 2009.
  3. ↑ Lucy Maddox: Nabokov's Novels in English . University of Georgia Press, Athens 1983, p. 25.
  4. ↑ Vladimir E. Alexandrov: Nabokov's Otherworld . Princeton University Press 1991, p. 189.
  5. ↑ New York Herald Tribune of June 17, 1962, quoted in: Vladimir Nabokov: Pale Fire. Novel. From the English by Uwe Friesel and Dieter E. Zimmer (= Vladimir Nabokov: Collected Works, Vol. X). Rowohlt, Reinbek 2008, p. 588.
  6. ↑ Vladimir Nabokov: Strong Opinions . McGraw-Hill, New York 1973, ISBN 0-679-72609-8 (Vintage reissue, 1990), p. 74.
  7. ↑ Michael Wood: The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction . Princeton University Press, 1994, ISBN 0-691-00632-6 , p. 186 (accessed September 28, 2006).
  8. ^ Brian Boyd: Nabokov's "Pale Fire": The Magic of Artistic Discovery . Princeton University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-691-08957-4 .
  9. ^ Maurice Dolbier: Books and Authors: Nabokov's Plums . In: The New York Herald Tribune , June 17, 1962, p. 5. 
  10. ^ William Shakespeare: Timon of Athens, 4th act, 3rd scene.
  11. ^ Herbert Grabes: Nabokov and Shakespeare: The English Works . In: Vladimir Alexandrov (ed.) (Ed.): The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov . Garland Publishing, Inc, 1995, ISBN 0-8153-0354-8 , pp. 509-510. See also references therein.