The Second Rung of the Ladder

            It has become obvious through my departure from a superficial cognitive process into a more transcendent mindset that simplicity is not a feature of Nabokov’s Pale Fire. From this fact, it is apparent that the five key facts that I had argued to be true in my previous blog are obviously not true at all.  As Bizz revealed in her blog, the poet John Shade is not real.     What then in Nabokov’s Pale Fire is real?  This is a tricky question, but I believe that Nabokov may have created an enigma in which each character- Shade the poet, Kinbote the narrator, and King Charles the Beloved are each no more real than the other.  Instead, the entire scheme is an intricate manipulation of imagination and reality. 

            In the “Lumpers and Splitter” chapter of Nabokov’s Blues, Nabokov is illustrated as a man of science that strongly emphasizes the importance of microscopic study and dissection to classify different butterflies and to determine their evolutionary morphology.  This method of classification was contradictory to the accepted method of examination at the time.  The form of research that was usually used was ultimately on a strictly phenetic standpoint.  It is defined as a style that focuses on the overall similarities of characteristics among the biological taxa without any regard to the phylogenetic relationships.  Nabokov was appalled by this lack of depth in research by his colleagues and expressed his anger of their ignorance by stating…

“Their solicitude for the ‘average collector who should not be made to dissect’ is comparable to the way nervous publishers of popular novels pamper the ‘average reader’-who should not be made to think”(84).

            I speculate that the depth that Nabokov displays in his research of dissecting a specimen to its most microscopic form, then relating these minuscule differences to the species and lepidoptry as whole unit and then determining its evolutionary pattern is a complexity that mirrors Nabokov’s writing style in his novel Pale Fire.  It is clear just through my surface reading and comprehension of Pale Fire that Nabokov makes the reader think profusely.  Nabokov states “that a writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”  I believe that the evidence of this notion can be identified throughout Pale Fire.  One of the most obvious illustrations of this for example is the creation of Shade’s 999 line poem on eighty medium sized index cards.  It is exposed in “Lumpers and Splitters” that similar index cards were also used throughout Nabokov’s research to methodologically record information on his genitalic dissections.  This however is only a mere shallowly observed clue to the entanglement of imagination and science in the novel’s web. 

            One other point I feel needs to be addressed of “Lumpers and Splitter” in its association with Pale Fire is the act of lumping and splitting.  It is discussed in Nabokov’s Blues that Vladimir Nabokov used the method of splitting a species into different genus by determining significant distinctions between butterflies while most lepidopterists lumped groups together out of convenience and lack of knowledge.  My question that pertains to the novel Pale Fire is the investigation of whether Nabokov is lumping or splitting imagination and science?  Or does he in fact have greater knowledge of the order that I cannot comprehend yet?