Shade and Shape in Pale Fire
by Brian Boyd
page eight of nine

One reason I spent some time on Pale Fire's entry levels, its human levels, before probing deeper is that although the beyond-the-human levels of Shade's shade and of the shaping force that he now sees still beyond him appear to offer a profounder understanding of the novel's world, and although Nabokov incorporates into the very texture of what he writes problems that challenge us to reach for these richer truths, the text of the novel naturally remains almost entirely at the human level.

If Shade's spirit plays a role in forming the story of Gradus in Kinbote's mind, and in shaping his advance through the Commentary in time with the composition of the poem, how does that relate to the characters of Shade and Kinbote as we understood them before we peered into the novel's beyond? Why would Shade's shade do what he does?

By helping Kinbote formulate and integrate the Gradus story into the Commentary, Shade attain several goals at once. He can find a new outlet for his own creativity. He can retreive from the chaos under which the Commentary threatens to submerge the poem an order, a shape, a mounting tension, despite all Kinbote's manic impulsiveness. He can confirm the "contrapuntal theme," the interplay of life and death, that he had sensed in mortal life, and can himself now help to "play the game of worlds" by promoting Gradus's advance. And he can acknowledge his much deeper awareness, from the other side of the mirror, of the "combinational delight" behind things, his recognition that everything in his poem has been patterned by a force beyond him, and in just such a way that it could reach its perfect completion only in his death, when his end becomes a new return to his beginning, when he can become, in a sense far vaster than he could ever have imagined, the shadow of the waxwing slain, living on, flying on, in that reflected sky.

Shade's intervention especially reflects his kindness in mortal life. Kinbote has believed in his special relationship with Shade for no more reason than that Shade has tolerated his eccentric, intrusive, megalomaniac neighbor, has listened to him, has even broken off the intense work on his composition of the poem to take a walk with his distressed companion (C.802, 259), and has recognized both the desperation and the creativity in Kinbote's Zemblan fancies (C.629, 238). All the same, this kindness could not extend to composing a major poem at Kinbote's prompting; inspiration cannnot come at the bidding of others. Shade had to compose the poem he did for his own human reasons, although from his new vantage point he can see now that it has also been shaped by a force far beyond him. Now, as he in turn helps Kinbote from the beyond with the Gradus story, he offers him a way of tightly relating Zembla to the long poem he wrote that then could not reflect Zembla, and specifically of integrating the Zemblan elements retrospectively with the very composition of "Pale Fire." In a highly Nabokovian reversal, the person convinced he has inspired another's composition turns out to the the one inspired by the other.

In influencing Kinbote, Shade forces nothing in Kinbote's soul--or to put it another way, he can work only with the materials available: Kinbote's obsessive desire for attention and admiration that deep down he knows he does not deserve, and his flair for prose despite his incompetence as a poet. Shade can develop the Gradus theme, can turn his killer Grey into a surreptitious Zemblan assassin, through Kinbote's tendency to see the world as focussed on himself, and he can turn that into a well-shaped story. He does not cause Kinbote's madness, but provides him with some sense of control, at least so long as he writes, over the forces he thinks are pursuing him. Only when he ends the Commentary, when he records Gradus's death, does Kinbote again feel the acute alarm he seems for months to have held at bay.

By picking up on Kinbote's Zembla in his own unique way, by setting up the elaborate counterpoint of Gradus and the composition of the poem, Shade helps Kinbote--always in awe of him as an artist--to become as much of an artist as he can, to impose a much tighter form than he can manage anywhere else on the obsessions filling his mind. In this sense Shade says thank you to Kinbote for appreciating the contrapuntal aspects of his art, just as in "The Vane Sisters" the narrator's admiration for visual minutiae in Cynthia's paintings determines the way she and Sybil guide him to the point where he will meet the man who can tell him of Cynthia's death. Now, accompanying Kinbote as he writes the Commentary, he can also provide his old neighbor with something of the close companionship Kinbote had craved from him but that had been impossible between them in life.

Shade's imparting to the Commentary a control, a rhythm and a direction that it would otherwise have lacked does nothing to diminish Kinbote's rich independence. Indeed, vainglorious as ever, Kinbote cannot help drawing attention proudly to the artistry of his counterpoint ("We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem, riding past in a rhyme, following the road of its rhythm" [C.17 and 29, 78]; "Never before has the inexorable advance of fate received such a sensuous form" [C.131-132, 136]; "I have staggered the notes referring to him in such a fashion that the first . . . is the vaguest while those that follow become gradually clearer as gradual Gradus approaches in space and time" [C.171, 152]). Commenting on Shade's synchronization of events on the night of Hazel's death, Kinbote, ironically, is rather condescending: "The whole thing strikes me as too labored and long, especially since the synchronization device has been already worked to death by Flaubert and Joyce. Otherwise the pattern is exquisite" (C.403-404, 196). Yet the very next note begins immediately with an absurdly highlighted and clearly unwarrantable synchronization of Gradus's and Shade's combined approaches to line 1000: "On July 10, the day Shade wrote this, and perhaps at the very minute he started to use his thirty-third index card for lines 406-16, Gradus was driving in a hired car from Geneva to Lex" (C.408, 197). The note ends almost six pages later with Kinbote again highlighting the synchronization: "From far below mounted the clink and tinkle of distant masonry work . . . and John Shade took a fresh card" (202). Even inspired by Shade, Kinbote remains his uniquely self-satisfied self.22

In having Kinbote picture Gradus as he crosses from Onhava through Europe to America and New Wye, Shade helps him for the first time imagine from another point of view than his own. True, Kinbote again remains himself, gloatingly vindictive, eager to demonstrate Gradus's inferiority and his own superiority--as when he has young Gordon's shorts metamorphose without Gradus's noticing--but despite this desperate need to raise himself and lower others, something Shade never shared, Kinbote still has his first brief stretch past the prison bars of his personality.

For Shade, Gradus has a different value. In the much more objective pattern of his artistry, he places Gradus in counterpoint to his own creativity and equates him with the implacable fact of death's advance, inescapably involved even in mortality's most creative moments, but able to be seen, reversed in the mirror of the beyond, as the other side of the dazzlingly creative Sudarg of Bokay.23 For although Gradus now throbs through the poem, in counterpoint to every iambic beat, with the blind step of approaching death, without him, without death itself, Shade could never have reached that surprising line 1000 and its key to the dizzying design beyond.

22. As also, for instance, in his Index entry for "Flatman, Thomas," the only real English poet to feature in the Index despite Flatman's obscurity and the acknowledged Shakespeare allusion in the very title of Shade's poem. The reason? On the restoration of Charles II of England in 1660, Flatman wrote "A Panegyric To His Renowned Majestie, Charles the Second, King of Great Britaine, &c." (1660); twenty-five years later he responded to Charles II's death by writing a Pindaric ode "On the much lamented Death of Our Late Sovereign Lord King Charles II. Of Blessed Memory" (in Poems and Songs). The panegyric begins:

Return, return, strange Prodigie of Fate!
Gird on thy Beams, and re-assume thy State.
Miraculous Prince, beyond the reach of Verse,
The Fame and Wonder of the Universe! . . .
Come, Royal Exile! We submit, we fall,
We bend before thy Throne, and give thee all.
Accept Eternal Honour and that Crown. . . . (ll. 1-15)

23. Alter comments that Sudarg of Bokay "is just one remove from the fashioner of Pale Fire" (191).