Alive the Song
“Dead is the mandible, alive the song[1]”
(Canto II: Line 246)
Sarah Germaine
November 22, 2011
“Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.”[2]
-Ludwig von Beethoven
Introduction: Music and the myth of Orpheus
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The word “music” is derived from the ancient Greek word “mousike” meaning “the art of the Muses.” The muses in Greek mythology were nine goddesses who embodied the aesthetic bliss of the cosmos and were called upon by artists for inspiration. In harmony with the muses, Orpheus has served as the archetypal creative artist throughout the ages. A son of the muse Calliope, Orpheus was a semi-divine being endowed with the supreme gift of music. Orpheus’ musical genius was initially excited by Apollo who presented Orpheus with a golden lyre. The muses further nurtured Orpheus’ song to its full potential; transforming it into its own divine entity. Orpheus’ music had the power to enchant both the human race and the natural world with its beauty so captivating that it had the ability to move mountains.
Orpheus’ destiny was determined through the death of his beloved wife Eurydice. On the day of Orpheus and Eurydice’s wedding, Eurydice was victim to a snake bite that ultimately took her life. Orpheus lamenting the loss of his wife descended into the Underworld to face death in the hopes to retrieve her. Addressing Hades and Persephone- Orpheus charmed the Underworld with his lyre creating sweet music that had the vitality to reduce Hades to tears and win Orpheus permission to bring back his wife to the world of the living. However the gift of Eurydice’s transmigration held one condition; Orpheus was instructed to journey ahead of his wife, never to glance back in her direction until the light of the surface was reached. The Fates’ sewing needle had created a twisted thread for Orpheus that insured that this transcendence would be inevitably lost; at the brink of the threshold Orpheus lost his self control diverting his gaze towards his wife causing Eurydice to die a second time[3].
The tragedy devastated Orpheus to the point of renouncing his desire for women and transferring his love to men. The rejection of the lyrist’s affection inevitably drove the Ciconian women to explode into a frenzy of destruction. The maddened women destroyed Orpheus; dismembering his body and devouring his flesh in their uncontrollable lust. The head and lyre of Orpheus were all that escaped the jaws of the Ciconian women, falling into the Hebrus River out of the wreckage[4]. In the river, “the lyre made mournful sounds, and the tongue murmered in mournful harmony, and the banks echoed the strains of mourning[5]” (Ovid, 10. 58-60). As the divine members drifted down Hebrus, Apollo came to the aid of the lyrist and froze Orpheus’ open mandible and raised the lyre to the heavens thus creating the constellation of Lyra.[6] Dionysus, enraged by Orpheus’ death, transformed the Ciconian women into trees as punishment for committing such an evil act. Through these actions Orpheus’ psyche was capable of being lifted with the winds and transcend down to his beloved Eurydice where they became eternally united[7].
The tale of Orpheus exemplifies a complex beauty that parallels the aesthetic bliss that accompanies the discovery of laminated meaning in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Pale Fire is a novel distinguished by its triptych nature that consists of a poem, commentary and index. A brief forward introduces the audience to the “focus” of the novel, a 999 line poem written in epic heroic couplets by the American poet John Shade. The poem is supplemented by notes provided by an eccentric annotator- a professor and colleague of John Shade at Wordsmith University in New Wye Appalachia who refers to himself as Dr. Charles Kinbote. Witnessing John Shade’s untimely death at the brink of the poem’s completion, Kinbote steals Shade’s poem to ensure that its publication is under his rule. Subsequently, Kinbote fleas with the sacred manuscript to execute its publication that is further flourished with a commentary and detailed index running in conformity after the poem. In the novel, Kinbote serves as a literary guide to the comprehension and complete understanding of the poem “Pale Fire,” that additionally addresses the death of John Shade at the hands of a gunman and the events that led to the murder[8].
The stability of this presumably standard structure is questioned by the realization that Dr. Kinbote is in all reality considered “a loony”[9] by his associates. The great admirer of Shade believed himself to be the exiled King Charles the Beloved from the distant northern land of Zembla. King Charles under the alias name of Kinbote had escaped Zembla and the clutches of the nation’s Extremist Party to settle in a house that stood directly across the street from John Shade rented to him by a Judge Goldsworth. The overbearing neighbor Kinbote confided in John Shade of the wild adventures experienced by King Charles and was convinced that the tale served as the muse that founded the creation of the poem “Pale Fire”[10]. However, upon reading the Fair Copy Kinbote came to the revelation that the poem was far from a romance of the King’s Zembla but was in all actuality a sentimental autobiographical account of the suicide of his twenty three year old daughter Hazel.[11] Kinbote’s efforts to be Shade’s artistic inspiration were in vain but he discovered that “it is the underside of the weave that entrances the beholder and only begetter, whose own past intertcoils there with the fate of the innocent author” (Pale Fire, 17). Within this web Kinbote imposes the belief that the mysterious gunman that killed John Shade was the assassin notably known as Jakob Gradus. Gradus, a member of the Zemblan Extremist Party was assigned to kill King Charles but accidently killed the wrong man. The commentary thus acts as an antithesis to the poem and on the surface appears to have no relevance to the poet’s prose with Kinbote stating that “without my notes Shade’s text simply has no human reality at all” (Pale Fire, 28)
By conducting a more thorough analysis of the poem in correlation with consulting the farcical commentary provided, a separate reality begins to unfold. This is a phenomenon in which the reader lays witness to Nabokov “perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse” (Pale Fire, 27). By considering Orpheus as the archetype of artistic expression and using the soul of Orpheus’ music as an anchor in the exploration of Pale Fire a unique conception of the novel can be achieved. The sensing of little jewels that are strategically placed within the frame of the novel increase the thrill of the read and further break down the walls in which the disciplines of art have been divided. A system of consciousness that has been hammered into a human being’s sense of order.
Orpheus and Nature
Orpheus’ power to mesmerize the world with music did not solely pertain to mankind but to all universal elements. “There was a hill, and on it a wide-extending plain, all green but lacking the darker green of shade, and when the singer came there and ran his fingers over the strings, the shade came there to listen[12]” (Ovid, 10: 93-94). The absolute power of art to sway nature is exemplified in the harmony connecting Orpheus’ musical spirit with the world surrounding him. This is further exemplified in Rilke’s illustration of Orpheus’ body being broken and scattered upon the earth establishing Orpheus as “the ears of nature, and her voice[13]” (Rilke, XXV1: 1)). The evidence of music holding a mutual bond with the physical world and each echoing the other can be identified in Shade’s cryptic text.
Life is a message scribbled in the dark
Anonymous
Espied on a pine’s bark
As we were walking home the day she died
An empty emerald case, squat and frog-eyed
Hugging the trunk; and its companion piece
A gum-logged ant
That Englishman in Nice
A proud and happy linguist: je nourris
Les pauvres cigales-meaning that he
Fed the poor sea gulls!
Lafontaine was wrong:
Dead is the mandible, alive the song[14]
(Canto II: Lines 234-246)
The empty emerald case is a portrayal of the metamorphosis of a cicada or grasshopper from a nymph into a mature insect. This transformation is caused by molting in which the grasshopper sheds his exoskeleton with its remains lying as evidence on the tree. In ancient Greece cicadas were a symbol of resurrection, immortality, spiritual realization, and spiritual ecstasy[15]. The basis of their existence was believed to be generated by the magic of the muses. The cicadas were originally human beings who were seduced by the Muses and became consumed in song and dance until death overtook them from lack of food and sleep. The Muses- admiring the humans’ ecstatic passion granted them life in the form of a cicada bestowing upon them the gift to “sing triumphantly[16]” for all eternity. The humans “live again in the grasshoppers; and this is the return which the Muses make to them-they neither hunger, nor thirst, but from the hour of their birth are always singing, and never eating or drinking; and when they die they go and inform the Muses in heaven who honors them on earth[17]” (Plato). This is achieved by observing whether humans are lulled by the cicada’s sweet song or if they reject its magic[18].
“Les pauvre cigales” further refers to Lafontaine’s fable “La Cigale et la Fourmi” or “The Grasshopper and the Ant,” a tale that poses the moral concepts of hard work and responsibility. The fable concerns the consequences of the opposing life styles of a grasshopper and an ant with the ant working all summer gathering food and building a shelter while the grasshopper being a fool, sings and dances without any forethought about the winter ahead. In the end, the ant survives and the grasshopper dies out in the winter cold as punishment for his idleness[19].
In the context of this specific stanza of John Shade’s poem, Nabokov’s intent is to counter the ethics of this fable by proclaiming “Lafontaine was wrong: Dead is the mandible, alive the song.” Music is therefore everlasting. This theme is exalted like a watermark throughout Pale Fire with the continuous echo of the cicadas’ music resonating within the texture of the novel. It is a theme that additionally intertwines Orpheus with the cicadas and the natural world. As Orpheus’ head drifts down the river, Apollo rescues his vital pate from harm and freezes his open mandible in mid note by transforming it into stone. Orpheus’ musical metamorphosis therefore embodies immortality by stone defying both the force of time and change; his mandible is dead but his lyrical spirit endures. This is parallel to the achievement of immortality by the cicadas from their love of the muses. The cynics of beauty, “the gum logged ants” may survive through life but they will never fully live their lives. Music and the cicadas are the victors.
The interplay of art and nature is not an impromptu correlation, or haphazardly created but is a network that is fused within Nabokov’s very being. Nabokov, a world renowned lepidopterist treasured the essence of the physical world around him. In Speak, Memory Nabokov as a scientist says, “I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception[20]” (Speak Memory, 125). This magic is in part exemplified by John Shade’s passion for natural history being recorded in the commentary in accordance to the poem’s cicada reference. Shade’s strong fascination for the elements of the universe is of trivial sentiment in Charles Kinbote’s universe with his mind being transfixed on the progression in his poem about King Charles adventures through Zembla. The paradox to Kinbote’s obsession however is that without the energy of the cosmos, Shade’s poem would be impalpable. Kinbote’s narcissist qualities prevent him from detecting the true muse of the poem “Pale Fire” and the flow of nature acting as a vessel toward Shade’s artistic enlightenment. This axiom further emphasizes the immortality of Orpheus in nature.
“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness-in a landscape selected at random-is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern- contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal” (Speak Memory, 139).
Orpheus’ song is echoed throughout the universe and builds upon itself as the foundation in which art can be manifested. Throughout Nabokov’s existence, he had the aptitude to confront raw nature and discover within its chaos a sense of harmony that is timeless.
Musical Counterpoint in Pale Fire
Nabokov’s ambiguous prose strategically formulated within Pale Fire is futile in the analysis of the puzzle. The word-play that Nabokov manipulates throughout the text provides a cryptic artistry of rhythm and rhyme that enunciates major facets of the novel and further embellishes the novel in a lyrical nuance. For the purpose of this paper, the scope of this device will be channeled within the context of the Orpheus myth. An example of the notes in this orchestration can be detected in the following lines of Shade’s masterpiece.
“There’s one misprint-not that it matters much
Mountain, not fountain. The majestic touch
Life Everlasting-based on a misprint!”[21]
(Canto 3: Lines-801-803).
The mountain-fountain transformation is a quintessential clue towards a deeper appreciation of Pale Fire. Nabokov’s perfect rhyme of fountain and mountain (this one consonant variation) can be employed as a thematic guide into a more mystical layer of his twisted design. In Kinbote’s commentary, the gunman Jacob Gradus’ journey is mentioned in correlation with the revival of John Shades heart to a more “conclusive destination.”[22] This occurred subsequently after a heart attack that induced an epiphanic vision of a white fountain during his slip out of consciousness. By following this cue in the narrative, the reader can be navigated to the phrase “Gradus ad Parnassum” which in latin translates to "steps to Parnassus[23]."
Parnassus is thus discovered to be a reference to Mount Parnassus, the mountain of Apollo and the home of the nine muses in Greek Mythology. On this mountain, Orpheus is also presented with his golden lyre by Apollo and instructed on the techniques maneuvered to create beautiful music upon its strings. Mount Parnassus is now celebrated as a symbol of art, music, and learning through this inaugural enlightenment of the music by Orpheus[24]. In Pale Fire, we are initially instructed by Kinbote to:
"accompany Gradus in constant thought, as he makes his way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem, following the road of its rhythm, riding past in a rhyme, skidding around the corner of a run-on, breathing with the caesura, swinging down to the foot of the page from line to line as from branch to branch, hiding between two words, reappearing on the horizon of a new canto, steadily marching nearer in iambic motion, crossing streets, moving up with his valise on the escalator of the pentameter, stepping off, boarding a new train of thought, entering the hall of a hotel, putting out the bedlight, while Shade blots out a word, and falling asleep as the poet lays down his pen for the night" (Pale Fire, 78)
This gradual ascent of Gradus up the mountain of the muses is an allegory that corresponds with the progression of John Shade’s prose. Reaching the summit of this mountain is analogous to John Shade completing the poem and the mark of spiritual transcendence. The succession of the two characters throughout the novel is a further emphasis of the congruent rhythm between the two.
The fountain comes into play as the fountain of the Castalian Spring that is founded upon Mount Parnassus. Legend has it that by drinking from this spring or by listening to its tranquil music, the sacred waters will have the miraculous ability to excite the work of poetic genius. In Greek myth, the naiade nymph Castalia threw herself into the spring to escape the pursuit of Apollo and was consequently transformed into the fountain. The water that flows into the springs originates at the top of the mountain, slips underground and rebirths at the source of fountain that is near the Oracle of Delphi. For this reason, Castalia can be translated to mean "a sewing needle". The sewing needle operates by interweaving the natural elements of the landscape with the powerful enchantment of the muses[25].
The fountain is also an allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s dream inspired poem "Kubla Khan":
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise[26].
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise[26].
“Kubla Khan” illustrates the power of imagination and art through the medium of a “mighty fountain”. This fountain feeds the sacred river Alph that runs alongside Kubla’s pleasure dome. While encountering the fountain, a dream is revived in Kubla Khan of an Abyssinian maid singing of Mount Abora while playing a dulcimer. The music enraptures Kubla and he muses upon the voice having the strength to raise his “dome in the air.” The musical entity that he is envisioning may be a reference to Mnemosyne, the Goddess of Memory and the mother of the muses. Kubla Khan calls upon Mneumosyne to aid him as a guide in recollecting the dream and manifest it into a work of art. The mountain illustrated in Kubla Khan could be a continued allusion to Mount Parnassus (the source of all poetry) and the fountain illustrating the eruption of the imagination via the spring flowing through Khan’s paradise. By calling upon this dream Kubla is capable of fabricating a greater more magical reality by utilizing his imagination. Kubla Khan's generated "dome in the air" that parallels Kinbote’s vision of the land of Zembla with each character "deliberately peeling off a drab and unhappy past and replacing it with a brilliant invention;" (Pale Fire, 238) an act that John Shade associates with the mindset of a poet. The delusion of the fountain by Shade essentially acts as a motif to Shade’s existence as an artistic entity, but also acts as a catalyst to connect the characters of Shade, Kinbote or Charles the Beloved, and Gradus harmoniously throughout the text in the mountain-fountain misprint.
The phrase “Gradus ad Parnassum” was first applied to the Latin verse dictionary that utilized the quantities of the vowels to help students understand the principles of Latin verse composition in terms of metrical feet. “Gradus” was assigned to the fourth declenation: a group of nouns with the suffix ending “-us.” The importance of this declenation is in the context of the difference between the singular and plural form of the word “gradus.” The two variants are grammatically identical but the singular form creates a metrical trochee while the plural form creates a metrical spondee. The double meaning of the noun emphasizes the student’s observation to detail and the awareness of double meanings[27]. This can also be applied to the novel Pale Fire with it being vital for the reader to absorb every detail in order to solve the puzzle. This phrase was later used as the title of the famous text of musical theory written in 1725 by Johan Fux and focused on the methods of counterpoint written. It was held in high regard by the musical genius Johannes Sebastian Bach. Bach-a champion of the Baroque period principles, continually destroyed the limits placed upon the structure of musical composition throughout the course of his life. The Baroque Period was a style of music that was prominent within the sixteenth and seventeenth century and whose name originates from the Portuguese term meaning “a pearl of irregular form.” The art form is marked by several distinguishing characteristics including the doctrine of affection and counterpoint[28].
The doctrine of the affections was a concept that embraced the notion that music had the magical ability to arouse a variety of emotions within its listener. It emphasized the power to yield the musical instruments to the composer’s will by manipulating the tonality and the tempo[29]. The concept of counterpoint is defined as the technique of combining two or more melodies in such a way that establishes a harmonic relationship while retaining linear individuality between the voices[30].
This contrapuntal skill is infamous in Johann Sebastian Bach’s masterpiece The Art of Fugue in which Bach’s final climactic movement ‘’Fuga a 3 soggetti’ (Contrapunctus 14) consists of three distinct voices of a flute, violin, and harpsichord mirroring Nabokov’s three stories arranged within Pale Fire involving the characters John Shade, Charles Kinbote, and Jacob Gradus[31]. The fugue creates “a system of cells interlinked within/ cells interlinked within cells interlinked/ within one stem[32]” (Canto III: Line 704-706). The coincidence that each of the characters were born on the same day of July 5 stresses the common origin, the notes “within one stem.” There is also a sense of congruent cycling of the characters through the text by the process of time that is highlighted within the text: John Shade initiates his poem on July 2, 1959[33] with Kinbote being informed of the project on July 3 and Gradus’ departure on his quest on July 5[34]. The word fuga, originating from the latin word ‘to chase’ which also reflects the cat and mouse game of Gradus’ quest to murder King Charles as the basso continuo that is developed throughout the novel. Gradus acts as the third method of composing that relies on “the flash and flute of the subliminal world and its “mute command”” (Pale Fire, 263).
Bach, whose adaptation of the canon enriches the texture of his musical arrangement, conveys the interlacing of a tune that is imitated by individual parts at regular intervals. These melodies may enter at different measures and pitches with each distinct voice frequently being altered throughout the progression of the composition by being introduced both backwards and inverted. Pale Fire is exploding with what Kinbote refers to as “contrapuntal pyrotechnics;” musical notes that allow glimpses into the “intricacies of [Nabokov’s] game” (Pale Fire, 254) through the means of an obscure prosaic canon. In part, these semiotic jewels are revealed through various lexical dimensions. This can partially be identified in John Shade’s engagement of word golf, a puzzle that involves a discovering of a chain of linked words that differ in the alteration of a single letter that concludes with the gain in deciphering the opposing word. In Pale Fire, Kinbote addresses the solutions to the word codes that illustrated the arrangements of hate-love (in three words), lass-male (in four words), and live-dead (in five words)[35].
Additional word magic is found through Hazel’s investigation of paranormal phenomenon in the old barn where she deciphers “twisted words” or inversions (rising tones to falling tones) that transforms “spider” to “repids” and “powder” to “red wop”[36]. This anagrammatic grid is further convoluted through the reflections and inversions of the conceptual names and places of Pale Fire’s narrative as well. The mirror deception on a wider scope is also exemplified through King Charles the Beloved’s Zembla-the land of semblances that is pictured through the looking glass of Kinbote’s deranged world. Nabokov’s enigmatic prose acts as an apotheosis that “synthesizes the contrapuntal aspects of its “accidents and possibilities”’[37] that devises “the cunning working-in of several inter-echoing phrases into a jumble of enjambments” (Pale Fire, 263). This satirical cadence acts as a tool through the composition that artistically challenges the reader in an eclectic fashion to detect counterpoint in the prose that stresses the reader’s attentiveness to not only the text but the texture of the piece. It also has the ability to emphasize the idea of immortality within Pale Fire by the characters echoing the theme in rounds depicting an endless cycle of music.
The Science of Music: Breaking Down the Walls of Artistic Composition
Music has the supernal ability to refute the essence of Michel Foucault’s description of the human episteme[38]. It toys with our perception through the means of our emotions that is both confusing and disabling. In order for music to tug on these heartstrings it must initially tickle the neurons. Nabokov mimics this development in Pale Fire causing the reader to shiver and to” get drunk” on the prose by reading “with the spine and not with the skull” (Pale Fire, 155). The cognitive system that responds to the experience of music is perplexing but recent experiments have produced extraordinary hints that have provided further insight into music’s polyvalent nature.
An opus is created through the synthesis of various elements of musical expression including tonality, rhythm, timbre, harmonics, and timing that attribute to the audience’s engagement of the music. In an experiment conducted by Dr. Daniel Leviton, the director of the musical perception at McGill University, had study subjects decipher different flavorings of music through the analysis of results that recorded the individuals’ brain activity while listening to various versions of Chopin’s “Etude in E minor”[39]. This piece was initially played by a professional musician that flourished the music with personality and self expression. The musician’s rendition acted as a blueprint from which the scientists manipulated the form to create various levels of homogenous tones within the notes. The variations produced a steady development of musical phrases within the composition that at its final point contained notes that were all evenly timed[40]. As anticipated, the results illustrated that brain activity was at its optimum when subjects experienced the original piece that was solely manipulated by the musician’s raw emotions- a finding that dictates the Baroque period’s theory of the doctrine of affections. However, other data provided surprising clues that related to the unique ingredients of the musical composition.
The results have contributed to the understanding that music communicates emotion through the subtle changes in the musical pattern of a piece rather than the rhythm of the melody. It is possible that these regions in the brain that are dually stimulated by language tap into empathy that Dr. Leviton considers it as “though you’re feeling an emotion that is being conveyed by a performer on stage,[41]” and through which the brain is mirroring these emotions. Additionally, the emotional divergence of the audience was discovered to be influenced more by the timing of the notes rather than the sound volume. The alterations in the expected timing of a note thus generated the emotional equivalent of depth perception produced via the optic system. It is also observed that when that when music is perfectly in time our brains tend to ignore it as if it were a ticking clock. It is only through the imperfections that art is formed with truth being within the imperfections. In Mary McCarthy’s review of Pale Fire, “A Bolt from the Blue” she reiterates the following theme. “It is not only in symmetry and reproduction that the magic signature of Mind is discerned, but in the very imperfections of Nature’s work, which appear as guarantees of authentic, hand-knit manufacture. That is, in those blemishes and freckles and streaking and moles already mentioned that are the sports of creation, and what is a vice but a mole?”[42] Each of the forces of music detected by the brain: timing, counterpoint, and emotion are all accentuated in the pleasurable torments leading to the little surprises running through Pale Fire’s pages.
Music is an entity that is significant in all human communication, perception, and learning and has been a source that sparks infinitive inspiration. Like Orpheus, Vladimir Nabokov acts as a medium for the expression of beauty. Nabokov gains great amusement in destroying the walls of the reader’s “conventional” paradigms and reconstructing the episteme with transparent boundaries. The reader loses a sense of being within the text of Pale Fire similar to a person disappearing within a song. Pale Fire is a reflection of a musical masterpiece that rewires the brain and synthesizes the senses with harmonies and cacophonies through the oddities of his prose. Nabokov may presumably place himself outside the text of the novel but in all reality, Pale Fire is drenched with Nabokov’s life and emotion. It is a notion that is similar to the doctrine of affections in Baroque music. Science is not the absence of art; Nabokov states in Strong Opinions that in fact in “a work of art there is a kind of merging between two things, between the precision of poetry and the excitement of pure science[43].” It is through the means of this precision and the excitement of investigation that the hidden meaning is distinguished within the text of Pale Fire.
The Nabokovian Doctrine
The music of Orpheus is also compatible with Vladimir Nabokov’s conception of the “other world.” Orpheus has been regarded as a source of esoteric knowledge about the afterlife and the quintessential hero to portray the transcendence into the Underworld. His descent is one founded upon love to retrieve Eurydice.
“I wanted to be able to bear this; I have tried to. Love has conquered….I beg you, weave over Eurydice’s life, run through too soon. To you we all, people and things belong, sooner or later, to this single dwelling all of us come, to our last home; you hold longest dominion over humankind. She will come back again, to be your subject after the ripeness of her years; I am asking a loan and not a gift. If fate denies us this privilege for my wife, one this is certain: I do not want to go back either; triumph in the death of two”[44] (Ovid, Book 10: 27-45).
Orpheus understands that the “prison of time is spherical and without exits” (Speak Memory, 20); each human will venture into the universal unknown, the black abyss. Orpheus only wishes to be granted a miracle by Hades and Persephone, to reverse Eurydice’s death through the aperture of love; the force honored in the heavens, on earth, and in the Underworld. The fusion of Eros and Orpheus has the ability to stop time and defy the Earth’s natural cycle. Eurydice is reincarnated but the condition of her rebirth is broken by the counter effect of love. Orpheus, “afraid that she might falter, eager to see her, looked back in love, and she was gone in a moment. Was it he, or she, reaching out arms and trying to hold back in love, and she was gone, nothing but empty air? Dying the second time[45]” (Ovid, Book 10: 65-689). The error in Orpheus’ judgment is as inevitable as Adam taking the forbidden fruit off the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden that illustrates the realistic notions of love. It echoes the dual power of love to essentially create and destroy; the counterpoint of music and life that is illuminated in art.
Kinbote meditates upon the last communication between him and John Shade on the threshold of death. “I felt-I still feel-John’s hand fumbling at mine, seeking my fingertips, finding them only to abandon them at once as if passing to me, in a sublime relay race, the baton of life” (Pale Fire, 294). This moment acts as the grand motif in the novel. Nabokov additionally proclaims this belief in Lectures on Literature:
“We can take the story apart, we can find out how the bits fit, how one part of the pattern responds to the other; but you have to have in you some cell, some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answer to sensations that you can neither define, nor dismiss. Beauty plus pity- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty, there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual”[46] (Nabokov, 252).
It is this pivotal axiom that composes the “Nabokovian doctrine.” It is personified in John Shade’s empathy toward his mad neighbor who is not Charles Kinbote, nor the exiled King Charles the Beloved, but that is in reality the Russian Professor Vseslav Botkin-the true annotator of “Pale Fire”. Love is also witnessed in the relationship between John Shade and his wife Sybil and John Shade and his daughter Hazel. The impression that their love induces within Shade acts as a vehicle in the construction of “Pale Fire” that is a reflection of the cycle of life and death- evidence marked in the absence of the 1000 line of the poem- a mirror of the first line “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain,[47]” (Canto 1: Line 1) the “perfect” piece of artwork.
Perfection is nonetheless impossible; artworks beauty is in its flaws- a fact demonstrated in the exclusion of a single stitch of Turkish tapestries. The chaotic nature of the universe is thus present in artistic creation that is the synthesis of imagination and reality. This is the essence of the character of Kinbote and Coleridge’s Kubla Khan- the mad artist that creates an alternative reality that is greater than the reality naturally perceived. Kinbote, devastated by John Shade’s poem, explained “Pale Fire” as “void of my magic, of that special streak of magical madness which I was sure would run through it and make it transcend its time” (Pale Fire, 297). This immortality that is channeled by artistic creation is the foundation of all art and music. In Wallace Stevens’ poem “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” he states that “To impose is not to discover,[48]” but it is through this imposition that Pale Fire’s greater configuration of magic is exposed. Through a deeper examination of the poem, Kinbote discovers his Zemblan theme within the texture of the poem:
“What was that dim distant music, those vestiges of color in the air? Here and there I discovered in it and especially, especially in the invaluable variants, echoes and spangles of my mind, a long ripplewake of my glory” (Pale Fire, 297).
It is through these variants of musical counterpoint, the “echoes and wavelets of fire” initially manifested by Orpheus’ lyre that Nabokov has set “pale phosphorescent hints” within Pale Fire. By “mything the point” through the Orpheus’ story and music, Nabokov emphasizes that it is “not text but texture”[49] (Canto III: Line 808) that is the key to the novels power that “builds a pleasure dome in the air” for its readers.
It is only through the method of analysis that perceives Pale Fire’s composition as a work of art that imaginative discovery can be achieved. The labyrinth of artistic exploration is initiated by examining Nabokov’s masterpiece at multiple angles further challenging the reader’s attentiveness and intuition. This paper has ventured to investigate the aesthetic bliss that is stimulated by investigating Nabokov’s design through the scope of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus. Orpheus, the quintessential artist serves to anchor the principle theme in Pale Fire that “music is being.” The power of Orpheus’ music resonates throughout the texture of the novel and is identified through the use of musical counterpoint within Nabokov’s prose. The lyricism of Pale Fire’s structure accentuates the underlying motifs of love and loss, immortality, art, and nature that all intertwine to illustrate the power of imagination within the realms of science and art. Nabokov exemplifies this through the essence of beauty in the form of music; the mixture of harmony and cacophony, sound and silence that echoes the chaos of the universe and transforms it into an entity of art. It is this concept of art that I believe Nabokov held as an idea of order within his cosmos throughout the duration of his life and also exists within the pages of his chef-d’oeuvre Pale Fire.
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[17] Plato's Phaedrus, R. Hackforth, 1952, Cambridge U. Press
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[21] Nabokov. Pale Fire. 62.
[22] Nabokov. Pale Fire. 59.
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[32] Nabokov. Pale Fire. 59.
[33] Nabokov. Pale Fire. 13.
[34] Nabokov. Pale Fire. 157.
[35] Nabokov. Pale Fire. 262.
[36] Nabokov. Pale Fire. 45.
[37] Nabokov. Pale Fire. 262.
[38] Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon, 1971. Print
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[42] McCarthy, Mary. "Pale Fire: Notes: A Bolt From The Blue By Mary McCarthy." Innerlea -index- (a Timed Cover Page). 1962. Web. 27 Nov. 2011. <http://innerlea.com/aulit/paleFire/notes/mccarthy.html>.
[43] Nabokov, Vladimir. Strong Opinions. London: Penguin, 2011. Print
[46] Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, and Fredson Bowers. Lectures on Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. 252. Print
[47] Nabokov. Pale Fire. 33.
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[49] Nabokov. Pale Fire. 63.
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