[4.ii] Challenging Authority... and my patience: Pale Fire.
I won’t say that I loved or hated Nabokov’s Pale Fire. What I will say, is that I could relate to it. In case I haven’t mentioned it before I’m A creATive wRitiNg STudEnt, and so Pale Fire feels a little bit close to home when we have a narrator trying to push his own narrative on top of that of the original author. I think a lot of people claim they hate this text, I simply hated Kinbote.
Some might call me a hypocrite for this stance: I love the idea of mouvance and the concept of texts being manipulated and varied by the outside world. However, what I don’t like is the concept of someone overwriting one story to begin telling another. Nabokov is undoubtedly intelligent in laying this text out as he does: a meta-text which moonlights as a critical edition of a poem. The familiarity of a text like this is a red herring for what occurs inside, and it just FRUSTRATES ME SO MUCH because you buy into the world of the fake poem, and consequently I get irritated that someone is taking away from this poem by making it all about them.
And then the worst part about me getting frustrated about Kinbote telling his own story instead of giving criticism on the original poem: is that I’m doing the same thing as Kinbote right now by giving personal anecdote of how much the text frustrates me as a writer instead of attempting to analyse it. It’s an eternal cycle, and Nabokov is a sick genius for creating it.
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What I will say of Pale Fire is that it is an extremely intelligent use of textual expectation. Nabokov takes a familiar form, and intercepts it with a new style of writing and I can really appreciate this from a writing perspective as it challenges how we look at texts and what we come to expect of them. McGann suggests:
“ A critical edition is a kind of text which does not seek to reproduce a particular past text, but rather to reconstitute for the reader, in a single text, the entire history of the work as it has emerged into the present.” (93)
Therefore, the reader makes an assumption about this text: it is going to be analytical and make reference to the text’s origins and interpretations. Books become performative, and thus we attribute certain signifiers or tropes to appear within them. Nabokov then challenges this through creating a narrative, where we expect to see analysis: which thus changes how we interact with this strange combination of the two styles.
This is an important aspect of the texts during this module: they challenge the norm. I love the concept of texts with authority and whilst Pale Fire might not have the same immediately identifiable authority found in Nox, House of Leaves or Pry. It certainly forces a reader to engage with a new way of reading a familiar style of text. Even the mere authority the text has in making its reader flick between the poem and the commentary is impressive and shows a challenge to the linearity a story like Kinbote’s would usually be told in.
Whilst I don’t know if it was a pleasant read, I certainly enjoy what Nabokov is trying to challenge in Pale Fire. He creates a frustrating predicament with analysing the text though: as the whole thing is criticising the concept of criticism and so by adding my own analysis on top of this: I become the critic that Nabokov is trying to make fun of... this irritated me a little, which I’m sure would make Nabokov only more smug.
Bibliography:
McGann, Jerome J. A Critique of modern textual criticism. London: University Press of Virginia, 1992.
Nabokov, Vadimir. Pale Fire. London: Penguin Books, 1962.