Pale Fire Pales in Comparison to Lolita, Plus Other Bad Puns

Pale Fire May Not Be the Pun-nacle of Nabokov's Talents After All

I promised myself that before I could bring another new book into the house, I’d have to read one that was already on my shelf, so I re-picked up Pale Fire, a book I failed to get into a couple years back. It seemed after Lolita to be Nabokov’s most praised book, and I heard rave reviews from two of my podcast host besties — you know, podcasters I’ve been listening to for so long I’ve formed an intimate relationship with them that exists only in my mind.

Pale Fire is cutely arranged as a 999-line poem penned by a fictional poet named John Shade, followed by a forward, extensive commentary, and index written by Charles Kinbote, Shade’s neighbor and colleague at the Wordsmith College in the fictional town of New Wye. In addition to recounting the story of Shade’s untimely death in the commentary, Kinbote relays two other narratives — the story of the deposed King of Zembla’s secret escape from the fictional country of Zembla and of Gradus, the hired assassin who mistakenly kills Shade in his mission to kill King Charles in New Wye.

I loved Lolita and delighted in Humbert Humbert’s flair for language, but it turns out Mr. Humbert isn’t the only pompous protagonist in the Nabokovian universe with a pun-chant for wordplay. Now it seemed it was the author himself who was the wordy birdy, delighting in the idea of sending his readers off to big dictionaries to define obscure words. And while I was charmed by the profligate prolixity of Mr. Humbert, I was not amused this time around.

I was so unamused, in fact, that it wasn’t before long that I began to “hate-highlight,” marking out the passages I detested with a sick relish. Here are three such passages thus emphasized (emphases mine):

Anyone who has tried to struggle up a steep slope, on a dark night, through a tangle of inimical vegetation, knows what a formidable task our mountaineer had before him.

The gnarled farmer and his plump wife who, like personages in an old tedious tale offered the drenched fugitive a welcome shelter, mistook him for an eccentric camper who had got detached from his group.

He followed the girl and a happy sheepdog up the overgrown trail that glistened with the ruby dew in the theatrical light of an alpine dawn.

Adjectives for all! Let no noun go adjective-less under the reign of King Charles the Beloved of Zembla.

While the book originally appealed to me for its seemingly clever contrivance as a commentary, it turns out to be merely a gimmick. After all, madman that he is, Kinbote reads things into the poem that aren’t there, and he more or less narrates the events of the plot in chronological order. That ol’ prankster Nabokov has written us a novel after all.

While reading Pale Fire, I couldn’t help but think of Nabokov for his confectionery display of style and his embrace of twee and tweed as the Wes Anderson of American letters.

Did you know, Mr. Anderson, I once watched a theatrical performance about puns?

Oh yeah? How was that?

It was a play on words.

Well played, Sir. I admit your puns have really groan on me.

I have never considered myself to be a fan of Anderson’s, whose emphasis on style has left me feeling cold and alienated from the characters who are more like figurines in a glass display than real people, although there are a few exceptions, including his 2021 movie The French Dispatch.

I admit that even after reading Lolita, I found myself wondering, “But what was Nabokov trying to say?” This fault in the otherwise perfect Lolita — an absence of a world view or moral purpose — was particularly glaring in Pale Fire. I was not surprised to read that Nabokov had a distaste for ideas in novels and believed they should be read primarily for aesthetic enjoyment. 

(While some might argue that Nabokov is pointing out all the various “shades” of meaning that people can read into the same thing  — a John “Shade” poem … see what he did there? — this is too obvious of a statement to count as an actual idea.)

I’m all for aesthetic pleasure, and a sublime aesthetic work can be a statement in itself (take Lolita for example), but in the highest realm of aesthetics artists say something (and I should add, they don’t sell anything). Personally, I prefer the way Joyce plays with language. His prose expresses not merely the self-congratulatory ecstatics of someone on a Words with Friends winning streak but also a point of view. As totally amazing as puns may be, they don’t quite reach the same level of transcendence as ultimate truth.

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For you Nabokov fans out there, are there any books that fall outside of the unreliable narrator/lexophile genre that you’d recommend? And the poem in Pale Fire sucks, right?

Hit reply and let me know!

XO,

Jesse