Your Mind is an Arrant Thief

What does a Great Novel do? It creates a world that starts with some important aspect of humanity, isolates it, and creates a story which brings that aspect into sharp relief, allowing the Reader to see more clearly than would otherwise be possible. If you want to think deeply about X, you read novel Y. One of the many beautiful things about a Great Novel is you are never quite sure what it is you will learn. Truly Great Novels have the potential to show more than one thing, and the Greatest of the Great show new things on each rereading. So, if I told you I recently read a novel that illuminated things I never imagined could be illuminated in a novel, you are interested.

The books described in the last two paragraphs are obviously the same book. But the descriptions in the last two paragraphs are not the normal descriptions of Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

If you picked up and flipped through a copy of Pale Fire, you would not recognize it as a novel. It begins with a Foreword, which is not that uncommon. Then comes the poem. A 999 line poem divided into four cantos. The first and fourth cantos are 166 lines; Cantos 3 and 4 are 334 lines. (Is that fact important?) There then follows 173 pages (in the Library of America edition) of Commentary on the poem arranged by the line numbers. The book ends with an index, allowing you to easily find where a given reference is found.

Pale Fire looks identical to a critical commentary on a long poem entitled, you guessed it, “Pale Fire.” The only sign on first glance that things are not what they seem is Nabokov’s name on the cover of the book. A bold publisher would have left off Nabokov’s name. Pale Fire, by John Shade, edited with critical commentary by Charles Kinbote. Since the book was published in 1962, pre-internet, it would have been fascinating to see if the ruse would have worked.

But, we know it is fiction because we looked at the cover. How is it a novel? The editor, Kinbote, tells the story in the foreword. He is an academic who lives next door to the great poet John Shade. Kinbote tells Shade the story of how the king of Kinbote’s native Zembla (one of those tiny European countries that barely show up on a map) had to flee the country in the midst of a revolution. Shade sets out to write an epic poem about this story, and the result is “Pale Fire” (the poem). Sadly, Shade is murdered right after finishing the poem, but fortunately Kinbote rescued the Great Poem and was able to publish it with all the critical annotations necessary to fully understand this most magnificent poem. Between the poem and the commentary, we get a complete novel of Kinbote’s relationship with Shade as well as the whole history of the events in Zembla. So far, so good. Kinbote is a pleasant prose stylist; the commentary flows right along.

If you read the book and your brain stopped there, you have just read a nice little story and probably enjoyed it. There is nothing on the surface of this story that disturbs that nice little narrative. There is no grand revelation at the end that there is more to this book than meets the eye. But your mind, working away in the background, notices something before too long. Kinbote is the exiled king. The story of the exile is his story. And now you think this is a slightly more intriguing story of an exiled king who is trying to keep his identity hidden. Why does he need to hide his identity? Because those Zemblan revolutionaries have sent an assassin out to kill him. And, alas, you realize as the story moves along, Shade was accidentally killed by the assassin who was trying to kill Kinbote. Again, if your mind stopped there, you have a nice little story.

But, your mind doesn’t stop there either. The poem comes before the commentary. When you read the poem, you had no idea at all that it was about the fate of the King of Zembla. It is only when Kinbote tells you that certain lines are hidden references to Zembla that you would have any idea at all that Zembla is in any way relevant to this poem. The poem itself actually seems incredibly autobiographical; the poet is talking about his own life throughout. This makes you wonder as you read the commentary whether Kinbote is right that this poem was really about Zembla at all. Indeed, as Kinbote stretches the attempts to connect this poem you just read to the history of Zembla, it goes far beyond the breaking point.

The poem itself is a lot like something T.S. Eliot would have written in his “Waste Land” years. You read it and every now and then a bit of a story pops up and you can make sense of it for a few lines, but mostly it is the sort of poem you realize you’ll have to live with for years in order to start piecing together the images. Just in case you miss the Eliot comparison, there is a truly funny part about a third of the way through the poem. The poet’s daughter is in another room and starts calling out to her parents to ask them the meaning of some words in a book she is reading. The words she asks about: Grimpen, Chtonic, Sempiternal. If you laughed when you saw those three words, you have spent a lot of time puzzling out Eliot. (Kinbote’s commentary on this scene: “I believe I can guess (in my bookless mountain cave) what poem is meant; but without looking it up I would not wish to name its author. Anyway, I deplore my friend’s vicious thrusts at the most distinguished poet of his day.”)

And now your mind starts working a bit harder in thinking about this novel. If Kinbote is not being completely truthful about the connection between this poem and Zemblan history, about what else is he not being completely truthful? What if Kinbote is an unreliable narrator? As soon as the thought hits, you realize he is indeed an unreliable narrator.

But how unreliable? And now you can watch your own mind work. You just read this nice little book which if your mind would have left it alone would have seemed like a good story told in an unconventional format. But, your mind can’t leave it alone. Why not? Why do you feel compelled to solve the mystery of the book? The solution is just right there around the next corner, so you start recalling little oddities here and there, and you start putting together a picture of what really happened in this book. Step back and watch your mind make these connections, screaming “Aha!,” quickly followed a moment later with, “Oh, but what about this?”

Your mind starts racing through hypotheses about the book, each seemingly more outlandish than the last until you realize that the outlandish thesis actually seems to work even better that then less outlandish one. When you get really hooked you realize you probably should read the Index. Are there clues in there? If you start reading the index and looking up the passages referenced in the Index, are there even more clues there. (Yes, there are.)

Suddenly you realize this is even more intricate than Eliot. With the Waste Land or the Four Quartets, you just have a poem to puzzle over for the rest of your life. Don’t mistake how long you will ponder Eliot; as Kinbote notes in his commentary, “toilest” is an anagram of T.S. Eliot. Here in Pale Fire you have not just a poem, but a whole commentary and index as well. What fresh insights will you get with just 15 more minutes of thinking about it?

And sooner or later you realize you can’t help yourself. Your mind is wired to find ever more complicated answers to simple questions. You see clues everywhere. In fact, you start staring at passages which you originally read as straight narrative, looking for the hidden clues. The only question is how long you will keep at this game.

And when you are done playing, then you can step back and ask yourself why you played this game in the first place. Why did you make the connections you did? Where did you look for the clues? How does your mind work? Pale Fire does an incredible job at taking that one aspect of humanity—how does the mind form patterns?—isolating it and then crafting a story around it so that you can see it more clearly that you would have ever thought possible.

You want to understand how people craft grand narratives of their lives or the world which seem so different than the narratives you have crafted? Read Pale Fire.