My Potential Patients: Origins, Detection, and Transference in Pale Fire and Freud's Case of the Wolf-Man
by David G. Cohen
page three of four

Two: Detection and Repetition

Detective fiction is perhaps the most concrete interest shared by Freud and Nabokov. Excluding archaeology, detective work is Freud’s favorite metaphor for analysis, a trope he unabashedly deploys in the early case histories of Studies in Hysteria and later complicates in The Wolf-Man (Brooks 269-71). The Wolf-Man confirms Freud’s fascination with Sherlock Holmes, conjecturing in an autobiographical essay that his surprising interest in “this type of light reading matter” is related to the similarity of detective and analyst in their use of “circumstantial evidence” to reconstruct events (qtd. in Brooks 269). Nabokov acknowledges his childhood admiration for Sherlock Holmes in interviews (Strong Opinions 43 and 57), but is quick to denigrate Conan Doyle as a children’s writer (57) and the mystery story in general as “a kind of collage combining more or less original riddles with conventional and mediocre artwork” (129). As in his relationship with Freud and psychoanalysis, Nabokov plays out his mingled appreciation and distaste for detective fiction through appropriation and parody, most notably in Despair (Hermann as criminal mastermind, Felix as victim, and the conspicuous absence of a detective [Oakley 480-81]), Lolita (Humbert’s hard-boiled pursuit of Claire Quilty), and Pale Fire.

The Wolf-Man and Pale Fire use the structural and thematic conventions of classic detective stories, but invert their order and emphasis. Freud’s chapter on the “General Survey of the Patient’s Environment and of the History of the Case” follows the conventional detective model, introducing the fragments of information known after the crime has taken place but before the investigation has begun. By establishing causal links between these unrelated elements, the analyst/detective promises to transform a chronicle into a meaningful historical narrative:

Here, then, in the briefest outline, are the riddles for which the analysis had to find a solution. What was the origin of the sudden change in the boy’s character? What was the significance of his phobia and of his perversities? How did he arrive at his obsessive piety? And how are these phenomena interrelated? (163)

Pale Fire inverts the detective story model even more radically. Although Kinbote sits down to write his commentary only after Shade’s death, the events he narrates take place almost exclusively prior to the murder. His formative years in—and exile from—Zembla, his new life in New Wye, and (especially) Gradus’ regicidal journey all point insistently toward the act of violence that culminates his narrative. Gradus is identified as the criminal nearly halfway through the novel, and the source of suspense is his metrically synchronized movement toward the victim, not a detective’s halting yet inevitable movement toward him. At the same time, though, the gravitational pull of Shade’s death is resisted by the discursiveness of Kinbote’s commentary. Namely, the entirety of Kinbote’s narrative is presented as the product of a literary investigation that knowingly and willfully privileges the critic/detective and his structuring preferences: “Although those notes, in conformity with custom, come after the poem”—Kinbote has to maintain at least a charade of critical respectability—“the reader is advised to consult them first,” to re-read them while reading the poem, and then to re-read them again “so as to complete the picture” (28). Better yet, it occurs to him, the reader can “eliminate the bother of back-and-forth leafings by either cutting out and clipping together the pages with the text of the thing, or, even more simply, purchasing two copies of the same work” (28). Kinbote uses advice like this, insular cross-references, and a self-referential index to trap the reader within a world where he is both detective (of a poem intended to be about him) and victim (of a bullet intended for him).

Ironically, the creative license Freud and Nabokov take with the conventions of detective fiction underscores that which is perhaps most fundamental to the genre, The Wolf-Man, and Pale Fire: the act of decryption. In The Wolf-Man, a dream is decoded to uncover a repressed memory; in Pale Fire, a poem is interpreted to reveal a fantastic life story. Using Freud’s terminology, we could call the encrypted object the manifest content and the decrypted object the latent content. We can avoid privileging Freudian theory, however, if we follow Peter Brooks in making use of the Russian Formalist concepts of sjužet, “the order of events presented in the narrative discourse,” and fabula, “the order of events referred to by the narrative” (12). While the fabula is one sense primary in sequence and importance as the account of “what really happened,” it is simultaneously secondary, “a mental construction that the reader derives from the sjužet, which is all that he ever directly knows” (13). Echoing Russian Formalist critic Tzvetan Todorov, Brooks notes that the detective’s investigation is the province of the sjužet and the criminal’s actions that of the fabula (25). Since plot arises from the action of the sjužet on the fabula (13), the detective story can be seen as the ur-text, “the narrative of narratives” (25) that dramatizes the relationship between an event and its reformulated presentation.

Though Brooks grounds his claims in a reading of Conan Doyle’s “The Musgrave Ritual,” another Sherlock Holmes story is more pertinent to a comparative look at the inverted structures and involuted narratives surrounding the acts of decryption in The Wolf-Man and Pale Fire. In “The Final Problem,” Sherlock Holmes is pursued by a malicious doppelganger in a contest of rationality that ends with the apparent death of both. Although he has never before mentioned to Watson the existence of an English crime kingpin, an unusually apprehensive Holmes bursts in on his former colleague and claims to “have continually been conscious of some power behind the malefactor, some deep organizing power” (Adventures 491):

“For years I have endeavored to break through the veil which shrouded it, and at last the time came when I seized my thread and followed it, until it led me, after a thousand cunning windings, to ex-Professor Moriarty of mathematical celebrity.
“He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. . . . He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them.” (491)

If this has been and will be Holmes’ finest hour, it is also his most paranoid: excluding two glimpses from afar of a tall figure (497-498 and 503), Watson encounters Moriarty solely through Holmes’ verbal and written accounts. There is no evidence outside of Holmes’ authority that Moriarty exists, or if he does, that he is anything more than a math teacher at a military school (495). Nor is there any proof that Moriarty’s “agent[s]” (491) are trying to kill Holmes with airguns (489), speeding carriages, bricks, clubs (495), and falling boulders (501). And since Holmes and Moriarty presumably tumble into the violent Reichenbach Falls, the bodies will never be found and the story never substantiated (505). In short, it remains ambiguous whether Holmes dies at the culmination of an epic contest with villainy or is seduced by his own paranoid delusions, commits suicide, and misleads a gullible Watson into believing him.6 “The Final Problem” in question, then, is really a problem for the skeptical reader, who in investigating Holmes’ death must assume the same role of detective that the story has called into question as inherently self-validating: after Holmes witnesses a small alpine avalanche, “It was in vain that our guide assured him that a fall of stones was a common chance in the spring-time at that spot. He said nothing, but he smiled at me with the air of a man who sees the fulfillment of that which he had expected” (501).

This paradoxical situation of being invited to investigate a text that has itself questioned the act of detection is precisely the condition of reading The Wolf-Man and Pale Fire: Freud promises a coherent answer to the “riddles” (163) of the case and urges the reader to experience “the convincing power” (188n) of the analysis, but qualifies this explanatory confidence in two interpolated passages, shrouding his solution in ambiguity and indeterminacy; Nabokov writes through Charles Kinbote, a narrator so patently unreliable that his own life story is a blatant invention, but renders inadvisable and impossible (as we shall see) any attempt to construct an authoritative account of his identity and relationship to Shade. Since all texts assume the existence of just such a reader who will decode “the meaning of a cipher left by a life,” Peter Brooks says, “narrative thus seems ever to imagine in advance the act of its transmission, the moment of reading and understanding that it cannot itself know, since this act always comes after the writing, in a posthumous moment” (34). The Wolf-Man and Pale Fire are not only texts that involve reading and acknowledge the quandaries of reading, but are texts that are hyperconscious of the “posthumous moment” of being read. We will need to look more closely at what this doubled self-awareness means for each.

Freud’s stated purpose in writing The Wolf-Man is actually quite humble. Since “no means has been found of in any way introducing into the reproduction of an analysis the sense of conviction which results from the analysis itself” (158),

analyses such as this are not published in order to produce conviction in the minds of those whose attitude has hitherto been recusant and skeptical. The intention is only to bring forward some new facts for investigators who have already been convinced by their own clinical experiences (159).

The claim is somewhat misleading. Although he cannot “produce conviction” in the avowed enemies of psychoanalysis, Freud believes he can change the minds of those in the analytic community “who have already been convinced” by presenting them with irrefutable “facts.” The “investigators” he has in mind, we should remember, are those wayward analysts whose “twisted interpretations” of the psychoanalytic enterprise is a form of “resistance to its findings” (155). Freud’s goal is not only edification of an open-minded analyst, then, but the conversion of a hostile insider.

This curious mix of deference and aggression toward the reader is amplified in a candid footnote where Freud maintains that he, not Jung or Adler, first considered the possibility that repressed memories are inventions of adulthood. He concludes the note with a plea:

If, in spite of this, I have held to the more difficult and more improbable view, it has been as a result of arguments such as are forced upon the investigator by the case described in these pages or by any other infantile neurosis—arguments which I once again lay before my readers for their decision. (245n.54)

Could Freud be so generous as to passively “lay before” the reader a position that was violently “forced upon” him? And who is this beleaguered “investigator” bullied “by the case described in these pages”? He buries a similarly telling remark at the end of another footnote, this one after having decoded each detail in the Wolf-Man’s dream:

The diffuseness and elaboration of this commentary have been forced on me by the effort to present the reader with some sort of equivalent for the convincing power of an analysis carried through by oneself; perhaps they may also serve to discourage him from asking for the publication of analyses which have stretched over several years. (188n.18)

Indeed, Freud openly states that his text is a do-it-yourself kit. Introducing the most intricately argued chapter of the case history, “Anal Erotism and the Castration Complex,” Freud notes that due to the difficulty of uncovering the childhood neurosis through the adult patient,

I have therefore been obliged to put it together from even smaller fragments than are usually at one’s disposal for purposes of synthesis. This task, which is not difficult in other respects, finds a natural limit when it is a question of forcing a structure which is itself in many dimensions on to the two-dimensional descriptive plane. I must therefore content myself with bringing forward fragmentary portions, which the reader can then put together into a living whole.7 (214)

The case’s fragments, however, cannot be synthesized as neatly as Freud’s instructions promise. In the first bracketed addition to the text, he offers the destabilizing possibility that the primal scene was an imagined fulfillment of a wish inspired by the child’s witnessing the copulation of sheepdogs. While the primal scene must have been an experience of the patient’s childhood and not a neurotic projection back from adulthood, Freud argues, it is inconsequential whether it was a historical event or a historical fantasy (201-203). And though Freud acknowledges he has “now laid myself open to grave aspersions on the part of the readers of this case history,” he sidesteps the questions that inevitably result by promising that “a factor will emerge which will shake the certainty which we seem at present to enjoy” (203). Yet the last thing the reader possesses at this point is “certainty,” and the promised “factor” elucidated in Chapter VIII, confidently entitled “Fresh Material from the Primal Period—Solution,” only serves to complicate an already overdetermined structure.

Namely, Freud interprets the Wolf-Man’s terror at encountering a butterfly as screening his attempted urinary “seduction” of Grusha, a family servant, and her subsequent threat to castrate him (232-234). While Freud holds up this bit of analysis as an intermediate link between the primal scene and the dream of the wolves, as well as between the childhood and adult manifestations of the neurosis, it is only effective in elucidating the latter. Picking up the differed questions from the first bracketed passage, Freud notes in the second that the incident “affords me a justification for having refused on an earlier page to adopt unhesitatingly, as the only tenable explanation, the view that the primal scene was derived from an observation” of animal copulation (237). The true purpose of introducing Grusha and the butterfly into the case, then, is to protect the historical validity of the primal scene.

When squeezed into the already over-crowded causal weave of the Wolf-Man’s early childhood, though, the Grusha incident becomes a kind of secondary primal scene, with the butterfly as the uncontested screen memory and the micturation as the disputed event: “It then appeared that his fear of the butterfly was in every respect analogous to his fear of the wolf; in both cases it was castration, which was, to begin with, referred to the person who had first uttered the threat of castration” (237). As before, Freud is compelled to defend the simple possibility of the event, arguing that the “scene in itself contained nothing objectionable or improbable; on the contrary it consisted entirely of commonplace details which gave no grounds for scepticism [sic]” (237). And with Freud’s defense of the scene’s historical validity, the reader’s experience of textual déja-vu is complete: “There was nothing in it which could lead one to attribute its origin to the child’s imagination; such a supposition, indeed, seemed scarcely possible” (238).

In attempting to preserve the historical validity of the primal scene, then, Freud ends up inadvertently recapitulating the very indeterminacy he is trying to resolve, with the inherent tension between imaginary and physical history resurfacing in the text itself. Describing earlier the Wolf-Man’s sadomasochism following the “seduction” by his sister, Freud remarks on “the unusually clear, intense, and constant ambivalence of the patient” (171):

Such behavior was also characteristic of his later life, and so was this further trait: no position of the libido which had once been established was ever completely replaced by a later one. It was rather left in existence side by side with all the others, and this allowed him to maintain an incessant vacillation which proved to be incompatible with the acquisition of a stable character. (171)

Brooks could have as easily been speaking about Pale Fire. Compelled by the strange parallels betweens Shade’s poem and Kinbote’s commentary, literary detectives have been tracking down the “real” perpetrator of the text for over four decades. Nabokov biographer, Brian Boyd, notes that critics questioning the novel’s fictional origins have fallen into one of three camps: (1) Shade wrote the novel, inventing Kinbote; (2) Kinbote wrote the novel, inventing Shade; and (3) Nabokov made the novel’s internal authorship inherently unresolvable. A fourth group claiming the majority of scholars and non-professional readers finds the issue itself absurd (111-14). In Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery (1999), Boyd recants the Shade authorship hypothesis he originally offered in his 1991 biography, proposing a supernatural “solution” that explains the text and accounts for its puzzling details. Rather than examining Pale Fire in isolation, it will be useful for us to see how Boyd, a self-consciously Nabokovian reader, contends with the novel. As part of this discussion, I will be examining Boyd’s book in terms of Shoshana Felman’s groundbreaking essay, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” (1977), a Lacanian reading of critical response to Henry James’ novella.

According to Boyd, Nabokov wanted his art to mimic the richness and detail of nature, and his reader to apprehend and appreciate this intricacy more and more with each re-reading (8-10). This process is one of “discovery,” Boyd says, and is aptly depicted by a passage in Speak, Memory where Nabokov describes, in terms of the Hegelian triadic series of which he is so fond,10 a chess problem he “had been trying to compose for months”:

It was meant for the delectation of the very expert solver. The unsophisticated might miss the point of the problem entirely, and discover its fairly simple, “thetic” solution without having passed through the pleasurable torments prepared for the sophisticated one. The latter would start by falling for an illusory pattern of play based on a fashionable avant-garde theme . . . which the composer had taken the greatest pains to “plant”. . . . Having passed through this “antithetic” inferno the by now ultrasophisticated solver would reach the simple key move (bishop to c2) as somebody on a wild goose chase might go from Albany to New York by way of Vancouver, Eurasia and the Azores. The pleasant experience of the roundabout route (strange landscapes, gongs, tigers, exotic customs, the thrice-repeated circuit of a newly married couple around the sacred fire of an earthen brazier) would amply reward him for the misery of the deceit, and after that, his arrival at the simple key move would provide him with a synthesis of poignant artistic delight. (qtd. in Boyd 11)

Although “the very expert solver” seems to come to the same solution as the “the unsophisticated,” it is the process of solving that distinguishes them. “Having passed through the pleasurable torments” prepared by Professor Nabokov, this “very expert solver” is edified and promoted to an “ultrasophisticated solver.” To experience “poignant artistic delight,” the solver submits to a rigidly determined game, a lesson plan that allows the student only the choice of participation. Once we choose to participate in the game, we cannot help but play according to Nabokov’s rules, dutifully responding to “an illusory pattern of play based on a fashionable avant-garde theme.” Arguing that Pale Fire embodies this chess problem concept, Boyd structures his argument to match the thetic, antithetic, and synthetic stages of solving, having them correspond roughly to the experience of first, second, and additional readings of the novel (13). By deploying Nabokov’s chess problem description as a model for reading, Boyd presents what he sees as the proper Nabokovian reading of Pale Fire. We know Nabokov has a plan for us, such a reading implies, and it is our task to make it manifest.

Nabokov’s chess problem reverie bears a striking resemblance to Henry James’ stated project in writing The Turn of the Screw, presented in his Preface to the New York edition:

It is an excursion into chaos while remaining, like Blue-Beard and Cinderella, but an anecdote—though an anecdote amplified and highly emphasized and returning upon itself; as for that matter, Cinderella and Blue-Beard return. I need scarcely add after this that it is a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of cold artistic calculation, an amusette to catch those not easily caught (the “fun” of the capture of the merely witless being ever but small), the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious. (qtd. in Felman 101)

Both Nabokov’s “problem” and James’ “amusette” are mechanisms designed to engage the savvy participant, “those not easily caught,” and both involve return to a point of origin as part of the process of solving. There is furthermore a shared sense of diabolical control: Nabokov makes the reader feel the “misery of the deceit,” while James perpetrates an act of “cold artistic calculation.”

In “Turning the Screw of Interpretation,” Shoshana Felman employs James’ cryptic statement as a jumping-off point from which to discuss Edmund Wilson’s 1934 essay “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” an overtly psychoanalytic reading of The Turn of the Screw that spawned violently partisan critical debate.11 Wilson argued that the true content of the story is madness rather than the supernatural or metaphysical, claiming that the ghosts are in fact hysterical projections of the Governess’s repressed sexual desire for the Master (Felman 103). Under Wilson’s critical model, Felman says, the reader “is called upon to answer” the narrative, thematic, and rhetorical “questions” (104) posed by the ambiguity of James’ text: first, “in the case of the narrative question of the elliptical, incomplete structure of the enigma, he answers with the riddle’s missing word, with the mystery’s solution: the governess’s sexual desire for the Master” (104-5); second, he answers “the thematic question of uncanny strangeness” (105) with a diagnosis of the ghosts as hallucinated symptoms of this repressed desire; and third, he answers “the rhetorical question of symbolic ambiguity” with “the literal meaning of the phallic metaphors,” their “proper name” (105). In Wilson’s kind of Freudian reading, one that poses and answers these questions, the critic considers it his task to “pull the answer out of its hiding place,” where it is “concealed” (105).

Brian Boyd makes similar assumptions about the critic’s role in his reading of Pale Fire. His “solution” to the text, however, is explicitly supernatural:

Shade composes his poem, dies, and then helps Kinbote orchestrate his Commentary. Behind her father’s life, and before his death, his dead daughter, with help from his dead parents, inspires both Kinbote’s Zembla and through it the controlled convolutions of her father’s poem. Beyond them all, Nabokov determines the patterns of their world, precisely because he in turn suspects that something beyond him shapes his world and ours. (242)

Boyd certainly does not act inappropriately in applying the language and assumptions of the mystery novel to Pale Fire, as we have seen. But detective work is more problematic in the novel than Boyd makes it out to be. “Whose spurred feet have crossed / From left to right the blank page of the road?” (ll. 20-21), Shade asks the morning after a snowfall, “Reading from left to right in winter’s code: / A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat: / Dot, arrow pointing back . . . A pheasant’s feet!” (ll. 22-24). The “code” is partly whimsical, suggesting an urgent, clandestine radio transmission (“repeat:”) mulled over anxiously by the recipient (“Dot, arrow pointing back . . . ”) and decoded (“A pheasant’s feet!”). In another sense, though, the code is indecipherable: “Reading from left to right” to track the pheasant is impossible, for the would-be naturalist is incessantly directed to the “dot” upon reaching the “arrow pointing back.” “Repeat” can thus be seen as the real content of the code, with the ellipses suggesting an infinite reiteration of the action.12

Even when a small “mystery” is solved concretely, the solution is disappointing. Spying on Shade late in the evening, Kinbote observes that

sometimes Sybil Shade would trip by [the Shades’ window] with the velocity and swinging arms of one flouncing out in a fit of temper, and would return a little later, at a much slower gait, having, as it were, pardoned her husband for his friendship with an eccentric neighbor. (24)

“As it were” is partially whimsical, an acknowledgment that Sybil’s behavior does not, in fact, have to do with Kinbote; but it is also hopeful, betraying the wish that perhaps his life is indeed relevant enough to the Shade’s to warrant anger and forgiveness. “But the riddle of her behavior was entirely solved one night,” Kinbote admits, “when by dialing their number and watching their window at the same time I magically induced her to go through the hasty and quite innocent motions that had puzzled me” (24). Rather than being guilty of conspiring against him, Kinbote is presented with incontrovertible evidence that Sybil is in fact “innocent” (24). Kinbote takes pleasure in having “magically induced” Sybil to act, but this suggestion of smug control seems to be compensation for the blow to his self-importance.

Like Wilson, Boyd offers a “diagnosis” to accompany his solution, an answer to the “thematic question” (Felman 105) of the text. Boyd takes as “symptoms” the correspondences between poem and Commentary, explaining them as the effects of otherworldly influence by deceased characters on the living. Additionally, he explicitly diagnoses Kinbote. Citing Kinbote’s admission in his note to Line 1000 that Gradus is in fact Grey, Boyd argues that “only in this last note does the alternative account of Jack Grey clinch our doubts and confirm for us that Kinbote is indeed thoroughly mad. With Gradus identified as Grey and Kinbote marked as mad,” he continues, “we can diagnose from his behavior and his Commentary that he suffers from classical paranoia in all its three main forms,” namely “delusions of grandeur” (Kinbote’s belief that he is the exiled king of Zembla), “erotic paranoia” (his being convinced of Shade’s deep love and esteem for him, despite evidence suggesting otherwise), and “persecution mania” (his fear of assassination) (60). Note that Boyd uses the language of absolute conviction, with our doubts “clinch[ed],” Gradus “indentified” as fictional, and Kinbote “marked” as “thoroughly mad.”

This is a key moment in Boyd’s case. In order to armor his account against complaints that the world of New Wye is as much an artistic construction as Kinbote’s fantasies, Boyd must demonstrate the former to have the greater truth claim. This accomplished, he can safely dismiss Kinbote’s narrative and pay heed to its details only to read, as the book’s subsequent second part is subtitled, “In Search of the Story Behind” (75). “For Nabokov,” Boyd asserts here, “the kind of sensitivity to particulars and the attention to the interrelations of things that he invites us to see and shows Kinbote to be blind to is no mere aesthetic fussing over details: it carries a moral charge” (86). It is evidently this “moral charge” that allows him to deride Kinbote as a “sickening stalker” (86), and earlier, to brutally castigate him as “a pathetic, lonely paranoid, utterly deluded about himself and his importance to Shade, to Zembla, to anything outside the desperate compensations in his own mind” (61). Pale Fire does indeed carry “a moral charge,” but not in Boyd’s perhaps unintended sense of a direct command. Here he sounds not dissimilar to the anonymous New Wye resident who denounces Kinbote in the grocery store: “‘You are remarkably disagreeable person. I fail to see how John and Sybil can stand you,’ and, exasperated by my polite smile, she added: ‘What’s more, you are insane’” (25).

Boyd’s authoritarian dismissal of the validity of Kinbote’s experience, by discrediting the truth claim of his narrative and seeing through it, has less to do with preserving the moral order of the novel against an assault of relativist readings than it does with protecting his own argument. Referring to Wilson’s equally strident dismissal of the governess, Felman notes that “to point to the madness of the other is to deny and to negate the very madness that might be lurking in the self. The Other’s madness thus becomes a decisive proof and guarantee of one’s own sanity” (195). It is far from necessary to go to the lengths Boyd does to condemn Kinbote, who does a more than sufficient job on his own. Kinbote is a not a seductive Humbert, as Boyd suggests, who “can persuade some into thinking Shade should have put the colorful Zembla story in verse” (45); unlike with Humbert, the danger is not that we will take Kinbote too seriously, but that we will not take him seriously enough.

The third question of Wilson’s Freudian reading, Felman says, is “the rhetorical question of symbolic ambiguity” (105). Like Wilson, Boyd answers with “the literal meaning,” the “proper name” (Felman 105) of metaphors. “Through Kinbote’s disordered note,” Boyd claims, referring to his note to lines 1-4, “Nabokov . . . invites us to read through Kinbote rather than with him, to enjoy the outrageousness of his character and his scholarship” (39). “We are invited to see,” he reasserts, “behind Kinbote’s enthusiasm for his own viewpoint, how insufferable his obsessive behavior is” (45). Boyd goes on to devote an entire chapter to uncovering the literal meaning of Kinbote’s world, perceiving the ostensibly real Botkin through him. “V. Botkin,” Boyd notes, is a Russian émigré from a czarist family who moves to New Wye after his homosexual pedophilia forces him to abdicate his academic post at a Scandinavian university (92-94). His sexual advances rebuffed and subsequently mocked by the homophobic Gerald Emerald, Botkin’s persecution mania is augmented by his fear of “exposure and ridicule” (93). Upon taking up residence in the Goldsworth house, Botkin is inspired by the family’s alphabet obsession, his own delusions of grandeur, and the potential to be immortalized in verse through Shade, and then “rapidly develops a fantasy that sublimates his past and will carry him forever into the future” (98). Realizing upon Shade’s death that “Pale Fire” has not accomplished this end, he decides to preserve himself and his creation, Zembla, by writing a commentary. But since the edition’s publishing will reveal his true identity to the world and thus render intolerable his paranoid terror, Botkin vows to commit suicide as soon as he has finished the work, and we are to believe that he is successful (103).

Boyd furthermore identifies Niagarin and Andronnikov, the Soviet spies in search of the Zemblan crown jewels, as characters based on “Professor Hurley” and “Prof. C.,” the English department faculty chosen by Sybil Shade to wrest control of the manuscript from Kinbote. Shade’s index cards have become for Kinbote the “crown jewels,” and their importance to his survival in art accounts for his attitude of sneering condescension toward the Soviets’ failure to find them (101-102). When Kinbote first introduces them, Niagarin and Andronnikov are excavating a wing of the palace gallery hung with the paintings of Eystein, who, while a poor portrait artist, was nevertheless “a prodigious master of the trompe l’oeil” (130). Blending with Nabokov, Kinbote causally mentions Eystein’s practice of introducing to some of his brilliantly mimicked textures actual pieces of the represented material:

This device which was apparently meant to enhance the effect of his tactile and tonal values had, however, something ignoble about it and disclosed not only an essential flaw in Eystein’s talent, but the basic fact that ‘reality’ is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average ‘reality’ perceived by the communal eye. (130)

The real, real story, the plane of ordinary sanity and common sense, the reader’s presumed plane, cannot be accepted as final. The explanation that Botkin is mad will totally satisfy only Professors H. and C. and their consorts, who can put aside Pale Fire as a detective story, with the reader racing the author to the solution. 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.13 (86)

Indeed, Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery, the most dutiful and trusting Nabokovian reading imaginable, sounds uncannily like an early Freudian case history, like The Wolf-Man without Freud’s nagging self-doubt. Boyd writes:

Why would Hazel help Kinbote to develop his wistful wish-fulfillment world of Zembla? Presumably she takes note of him because he has moved next door to her father and admires Shade so. . . . The story of Charles the Beloved reflects Kinbote’s hypertrophied sense of his own importance and reverses the stigma of homosexuality in Appalachia into a sign of nobility, manhood, and style in Zembla. (153)

Like Wilson, the governess is suspicious of the ambiguity of signs and their rhetorical reversibility; like Wilson, she thus proceeds to read the world around her, to interpret it, not by looking at it but by seeing through it, by demystifying and reversing the values of its outward signs. (188)

In Pale Fire, it is the attempt to distinguish ourselves from Kinbote’s madness, to situate ourselves outside it and look through it, that causes us to read as he behaves. “The trap is but a text,” Felman contends,

an invitation to the reader, a simple invitation to undertake its reading. But in the case of The Turn of the Screw, the invitation to undertake a reading of the text is perforce an invitation to repeat the text, to enter into its labyrinth of mirrors, from which it is henceforth impossible to escape. (190)

There is, however, no truly safe passage, and even our most careful efforts are doomed: narrative is a “virus” (221), as Peter Brooks says, a contagion passed on and on from teller to listener. Like Freud, Boyd, Wilson, and Kinbote, we simply cannot help repeating—acting out—that which we hear. We have heard and passed on a number of narratives in this chapter, and it will be helpful for us to retrace the vectors through which the infection has spread. We first noted that Freud and Nabokov share an interest in detective fiction, and that like the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Final Problem,” The Wolf-Man and Pale Fire invite the reader to investigate a text that has itself called into question the act of detection. Second, we saw that Freud puts the reader in the roles of both analyst to and patient of his text, inviting us to fit its puzzle pieces into a coherent whole in the hope that the explanatory power we experience will convince us of the validity of infantile experience. In trying to create explanatory certainty, however, Freud ends up repeating in the text the historical ambiguity of the primal scene and the ambivalence he sees in the patient’s mind, a state of fragmentation in turn imparted to the reader. And third, we applied Shoshana Felman’s critique of Edmund Wilson’s reading of The Turn of the Screw to Brian Boyd’s book on Pale Fire. By offering a supernatural solution to the text, diagnosing and dismissing Kinbote as insane, and reading through him to the ostensibly real world behind his delusions, Boyd’s orthodox Nabokovian reading uncannily yields a psychoanalytic case history with the novel as his patient. We have gone through a rather convoluted route to come to these claims, and in doing so have been rather harsh with the world’s preeminent Nabokov scholar. The least we can do now is to acknowledge that this discussion enjoys no privileged vantage point, that it is as inside language as the texts it has investigated. “It is nothing other than the process of detection that constitutes the crime” (176), Felman says. The Wolf-Man and Pale Fire make it particularly clear that all readers are criminals.

6. Conveniently, it is also undecidable whether Holmes is really dead. After killing him off in "The Final Problem" (1894) and publishing the retrospective Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), Conan Doyle revives him in "The Adventure of the Empty House" (1905). Holmes explains to Watson here that he threw Moriarty from the falls, faked his own death, and went into hiding to avoid retaliation by Moriarty's agents (Complete 8-11).

7. Fragmentation is moreover a hallmark of the case history as a whole. Freud's official title for the case, From the History of an Infantile Neurosis, suggests the existence of a complete work, The History proper that is the source of the reader's abridged version. Additionally, the first sentence of the text warns the reader in a parenthetical aside that the analysis will be presented "once again only in a fragmentary manner" (153).

8. Freud also depicts the Wolf-Man's psyche using quasi-archaeological terms:

So it was that his mental life impressed one in much the same way as the religion of Ancient Egypt, which is so unintelligible to us because it preserves the earlier stage of its development side by side with the end products, retains the most ancient gods and their attributes along with the most modern ones, and thus, as it were, spreads out upon a two-dimensional surface what other instances of evolution show us in the solid. (260).

9. In her foreword to The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man, Anna Freud describes the desire to reexperience an analysis as one of the "unsuspected results" of her father's case histories:

The very familiarity which analysts began to feel with these patients aroused the temptation to deal with them in their imagination as if they were their own patients, to wish to know everything about them, to test the interpretations given, to probe beyond the conclusions drawn, and wherever possible to reconstitute once more the original data from which the author's abstractions had been made. (x)

10. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov says that "the spiral is a spiritualized circle," one that "has been set free" (275). He uses the triadic series here to model the stages of his life: the initial, "thetic" arc is his childhood in Russia from 1899-1919; the second, "antithetic" arc his European "exile" from 1919-1940; and the third, "synthetic" arc his residence in America from 1940-1960 (275).

11. "The foremost critic of his time" (Boyd, American 18), Edmund Wilson helped Nabokov to become established in the American literary world (19). Their two decade, often contentious friendship ended in 1964 when Wilson wrote a scathing attack on Nabokov's edition of Eugene Onegin, Nabokov fired back, and a spectacular literary battle ensued (496-99). The Nabokov-Wilson Letters testifies to their many disagreements, including Russian prosody, Marxism, James, and Freud. A pattern gets played out in several letters: Nabokov mocks James's work, Wilson responds by timidly defending James and recommending more titles, and Nabokov mocks James again. Some of Nabokov's criticisms of James are as follows: "He writes with a very sharp nib and the ink is very pale," he writes unflatteringly in 1941; in 1952, Nabokov dismisses James's short fiction as "miserable stuff," James as a "complete fake," and says that Wilson "ought to debunk that pale porpoise and his plush vulgarities some day" (278); and in 1948, Nabokov mentions an article in The New Yorker containing "some awful Freudian rot about 'father-writers'" (199), referring to a piece by Cyril Connolly arguing that James is an "archetype" (200n.4).

12. Shade then wonders, "Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose / Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes?" (27-28). Kinbote strengthens the tenuous connection between the detective and bird motifs in glossing Holmes as "a hawk-nosed, lanky, rather likable private detective" (78).

13. In an interview conducted in 1962, Nabokov declares that "you can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you can never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable" (Strong Opinions 11).