Is Pale Fire a Great Poem?

The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;
The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears; the earth's a thief,
That feeds and breeds by a composture stol'n
From gen'ral excrement; each thing's a thief.
William Shakespeare (1564 — 1616)
Pale Fire ( 1962, poet's age: 63) by Vladimir Nabokov (1899—1977)

On Pale Fire, the poem, and its worth.

There has been since its publication considerable disagreement about the goodness of Pale Fire as verse. One of the surprising elements of the discussion of the goodness of Pale Fire, the poem, is the many attempts to deduce the artistic value of the poem, not by reflecting upon one's native response to the poem, did the reviewer like it, but from less direct means, the opinion of other critcs, the intention of the author, statements of the author, description of his reading the first two cantos while still composing the rest of the poem. For myself, I think that the overall value and particular merits of a poem should be derived mainly from the poem itself and will try to follow that advice.

However it should be pointed out that because of its status as a piece inside a larger piece of art, one might expect our valuations to change as we view the piece alone, or framed by the rest of the novel apparatus, although personally it doesn't really change much to me.

The value of the poem Pale Fire, and its ability to stand alone as a piece of art, are pretty much the same issue. If the poem is good, then, unless it is too semantically tied to the rest of the scheme, the poem should stand on its own. The reader should actually lean in this direction a priori, on that hope that something like Pale Fire, the poem, could be an uniquely enjoyable anachronism. Now here it is I find myself deducing.

The problem in evaluating Pale Fire, the poem, lies in its anachronism, its irony, its structural framing, and its intentions.

Its use of an old form, rhymed couplets in iambic pentameter, a seminal poetic form, implies for some that the verse must be parodic. And indeed Pale Fire is parodic, and so may be a lot of other verse, Pope, but perhaps most importantly Ovid. Ovid worked in the same form as his heroic predecessors, Virgil & ??, but turned to form in a more light-hearted direction. So parodic and ironic verse can be good, provided the reader recognizes the existance of these qualities. One can still pose the questions: "Was it enjoyable?" and "Why was it enjoyable?"

George Cloyne's review Of Pale Fire in the New York Times on Sunday, May 27, 1962 derides the poetry as minor and anachronistic: John Shade’s poem also comes too late.

And then the poem. It is not a bad poem at all. Cast in heroic couplets, it reads like a decorous exercise of the Nineteen Twenties:

    Out of his lakeside shack
    A watchman, Father Time, all gray and bent,
    Emerged with his uneasy dog and went
    Along the reedy bank. He came too late.
John Shade’s poem also comes too late. It is about on a level with the work of Alfred Austin, Tennyson’s successor as Poet Laureate, who also had a bent for conversational verse: not bad, but also not good, not, in the strict sense, a poem at all. The reader, having plowed through it with mild interest, is likely to be afflicted by the disproportion between its merit and the apparatus that surrounds it. For the author has to keep up a pretense that Shade was a great man, and the poem a great poem. Yet it is also part of the joke that he does not believe this for a moment. He is carefully building a farce, assuming the mask of pedantry in order to point a grimace at his readers.

Cloyne admires VN's conversationalism and so do I, but finds that insufficient for it to be in the strict sense, a poem at all. Presumably this means that poetry must arise to some kind of high-mindedness or solemnity. Pale Fire is not in fact just conversational, but everyday conventional banalities are mixed in with tragedy and moments of genuine sadness and wonder in the strange stew that is Pale Fire.

Cloyne believes that Kinbote's commentary deserves a genuine work of art to attach to, and Pale Fire, the poem, fails to provide that. Yet the two parts match each other in fact in many ways. They both do trade in banalities, conventionalism, sentimentalism that is surprisingly affective. Much of Kinbote's tale really climaxes at his final farewell to Disa where VN describes the scene in a series of moviesque tableaux. [give quotation]

Each of Kimbote's commentaries, at least the longer ones, tell a story like a chapter in a book, and are a semiautonomous piece of art in themselves. So too do Shade's stanza each depict a scene, or advance his story, but most importantly, capture a mood.

The Trouble with Irony.

The problem in evaluating Pale Fire, the poem, lies in its anachronism, its irony, its structural framing, and its intentions.

Part of this difficulty stems simply from the issue of how one judges any ironic or parodic work of art. Irony needn't be humorous though most of the time it is. Parody is always intended to be funny. Parody often involves deliberately taking a convention that is in common use, more likely overused, and exagerating it use to comic effect. Should we conclude from this that a work that parodies a particular literary convention can never be truly great since it shares the shortcoming of the convention that is being made fun of? I think this argument applies to practically all ironic, parodic, satiric, and perhaps all comic, art or literature. It certainly applies to Pale Fire, the poem. Look at all the foreshadowing that goes on. Quite arguably it's overdone. The reader/listener knows what's coming at Lochenhead, there's no surprises, he's been hit over the head with foreshadowing beginning with the phantom of my little daughter's swing.

I'm not going to list the other instances of foreshadowing in Shade's poem, I think we all would agree on what they are.

This overuse of a common storytelling device is clearly ironic, is it innately humorous? Even if you find it to be ironic and comic it still seems to fulfill the function that all foreshadowing seeks to achieve, to intensify by making an event seem inevitable. And Shade achieves that sense of doom quite effectively. Surely all readers feel that. But how many sense that the device is overused and so find a kind of wry amusement in its abuse?

Much more than beauty, irony is in the eye of the beholder; or say that irony is its own kind of beauty.

All in the Family

The sitcom from the ?? [do research on All in the Family!] also illustrates the paradox of how irony can be absorbed and then dismissed or contain. The middle class bigot being satirized nevertheless became a hero to the very folks who shared his qualities and thus ought to be offended by their satirizing. Unlike Homer Simpson who is mainly dim-witted, Archie Bunker represented a political point-of-view as well as an intuitive, non-analytical, style of thinking. It's great to be able to laugh at your self, but in this case Archie's admirers had to embrace themselves and were flattered at seeing their own style of thought being worthy of depiction, even when depicted derisively! The point is the ironic derision for them was entirely compatible with their own genuine admiration for Archie Bunker and themselves. In part it could be said that good art overcomes or transforms even prejudice, if only momentarily. Similarly, in Pale Fire, the many ironies are felt and yet fail to destroy an abiding sense of sympathy for Hazel and genuine sadness at her death. And make no mistake about it, Hazel is ironically abused in the worse way, [humorously] derided by witty remarks and rejoinders that have to be felt as cruel. when she tried on your fur coats which made her almost fetching, and the mirrors smiled, The lights were merciful, the shadows mild,
Irony is a modality that's derived from the overuse of past conventions. When Americans and other anglophones think of satire we're apt to think of Twain and the satirizing of social conventions, but Nabokov parodies concern primarily literary conventions and norms and the standard use of language in literature and story telling.
Don Quixote looms large. All comic book art, fantasy, can perhaps be called implicitly ironic. the adventures of Swift; except that for much of it there is often little explicit use of irony and so an overall sense or tone of irony is never really achieved. Stories are relocated amid fantastic props and settings. Was the Prioress's tale from the Canterbury Tales a rendering of a common miracle story or its parody? Not all parody or irony draws us into sympathizing with its character. In much comedy, slapstick, the characters are clowns who extract any degree of empathy from the viewer. But then their are Don Quixote, Charlie Chaplin, Falstaff?, Forrest Gump, whose actions are often absurd but with whom we nevertheless identify.

But might not the situation dictate that the poem be intentionally bad?

What's the meaning of intentionally bad? Is slapstick intentionally bad ballet or theatre? No, its intention is humour. It succeeds if it makes us laugh.

Pale Fire, the poem, will take the reader/listener on a sentimental journey that visits a large number of varying moods and emotions, this range is one of the poem's strongest points, but only if the listener/reader allows it. If they just relax and try to take it in, oddly, without being judgmental, but merely comprehending. After a couple of readings so as to take the whole thing in, then ask yourself, Is it good? enjoyable? are not a wide range of emotions aroused and scenes, often ironic, depicted?

Bolt from the Blue is the effusive review by Mary McCarthy published in The New Republic on June 4, 1962. The quote printed on the current cover of the novel comes from this piece. A creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness... one of the very great works of art of this century. The opening lines of the essay are rather striking:

Pale Fire is a Jack-in-the-box, a Faberge gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers, a cat-and-mouse game, a do-it-yourself novel. It consists of a 999-line poem of four cantos in heroic couplets together with an editor's preface, notes, index, and proof corrections. When the separate parts are assembled, according to the manufacturer's directions, and fitted together with the help of clues and crossreferences, which must be hunted down as in a paper-chase, a novel on several levels is revealed...

Some of the lines sound as if the author may have had a hand in forming them:

Pale Fire is not a detective story, though it includes one. Each plane or level in its shadow box proves to be a false bottom; there is an infinite perspective regression, for the book is a book of mirrors.

McCarthy's essay was published close to the book's own publication. It contains a useful summary of the book and a number of insights and associations. She also touches upon one of the most important aspect of the work:

But the real, real story, the story underneath, has been transpiring gradually, by degrees, to the reader. Kinbote is mad. He is a harmless refugee pedant named Botkin who teaches in the Russian department and who fancies himself to be the exiled king of Zembla.

McCarthy is surprisingly silent on judging the poetic value though of Pale Fire the poem.


Everybody should believe in something. I believe I'll have another drink!


Although those notes, in conformity with custom, come after the poem, the reader is advised to consult them first and then study the poem with their help, rereading them of course as he goes through its text, and perhaps, after having done with the poem, consulting them a third time so as to complete the picture.
This, of course, is facetious, and simply marks Kinbote's egoism. His second suggestion, while whimsical, deserves some consideration:

I find it wise in such cases as this to eliminate the bother of back-and-forth leafings by either cutting out and clipping together the pages with the text of the thing,...