A World of Mirrors

I was the shadow of the waxwing  slain

By feigned remoteness in the windowpane

Canto 1: Lines 131-132

“Today,when the feigned remoteness” has indeed performed its dreadful duty, and the poem we have is the only “shadow” that remains, we cannot help reading into these lines something more than mirrorplay and mirage shimmer.  We feel doom, in the image of Gradus, eating away the miles and miles of “feigned remoteness” between him and poor Shade.  He, too, is to meet, in his urgent and blind flight, a reflection that will shatter him” (135). 

*This “mirror play and mirage shimmer” is a key theme in Pale Fire that Nabokov emphasizes throughout  the novel to illustrate the ambiguity of life and imagination.  A mirror functions by reflecting light and creating an inverted image in its glass of the material image directly ahead of its gaze.  Nabokov plays with this notion beautifully to accentuate the role of art in the universe by intricately and strategically placing the evidence of this device throughout the novel.   The quintessential symbol of the “lemniscate”, the infinity symbol, or “a unicursal bicircular quartic” embodies this action of reflection that is displayed throughout the poem and commentary.  With this aphorism exposed, it is conveyed to bring to light further ideas in Nabokov’s design.  

The reflection of art and nature is exemplified through the following lines in Pale Fire:

 And in the morning, diamonds of frost

Express amazement: Whose spurred feet have crossed

From left to right the blank page of the road?

Reading from left to right in winter’s code:

A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat:

Dot, arrow pointing back…A pheasant’s feet!

Canto 1: Lines 19-25

The recognized method in Western culture of deciphering and forming art in the written form is through the means of reading the lines from left to right.   The pheasant’s feet on the other hand written on the “blank page of the road” are formed in the poem going the opposite direction, the reflection through “diamonds of frost” into the creation of art.  The “code” expressed in this passage is the fact that art or in this case poetry is the instrument utilized to “make sense” of the winter scene.  

The poem: Shade’s creation of art through his perception of nature proceeded to destroy his rough drafts that were not utilized; “in the pale fire of the incinerator before which he stood with bent head like an official mourner among the wind-borne black butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fé” (15).  This destruction is thus the creation of more beauty in the magical form of “wind borne black butterflies,” with the rejected cards forming art within itself.  This image painted in the forward of the novel communicates the continuous reflection upon another reflection that is represented through the reincarnation of art.  The ouroborus.  

Nabokov enhances this notion of art as a reflection of nature by demonstrating the enigma of language through the word-play that causes further obscurity to his novel.  The clever game of reflection is illustrated through reversals in character and place names such as the Goldsworth house and Wordsmith University that can be altered into a “word’s worth” and “goldsmith.”  This is a significant implication of the scheme that Nabokov may be proposing of the obtuseness of language.  Throughout Pale Fire “odd Gallicism” (Canto 2: Line 455) is encountered throughout the commentary.  What does this ode to the French language mean?  French is a beautiful dialect that has been known to have a strange tendency in its lexicon to possess “double entendres” or double meanings.  Nabokov has produced in Pale Fire a double entendre   as an epithet for the reader to look past the obvious “meaning” of a word and discover the true message.  

For example baiser has a double meaning of “to kiss” and “to have sexual intercourse.”   With this in mind, by having a phrase such as “je lui pris la main et la braise” or I took her by the hand and… (the options could be) kiss her hand, kiss her, or have sexual intercourse with her-the double entendre.  The reader can interpret this phrase in a number of ways with the meaning only depending on how explicit the reader desires it to be.  Through the imagination of the audience Nabokov’s Pale Fire comes to life.  

This thus leads to the question of who killed John Shade?  The truth is that even by completing the the novel, the answer still is a bit uncertain.  Nonetheless the black butterflies may provide a clue.  The minute before Shade’s death, a dark Vanessa flashed in the sunbeams and rested on Shade’s sleeve and quickly dissolves.  The outcome following this event is the deaths of both Shade and Gradus.  Kinbote however states that he will assume other disguises but will continue to exist until the next Gradus appears.  With these final words, it seems as if Gradus, Shade, and Kinbote function as symbols.   It may be that Shade is the creative notion illustrated by the manifestation of the poem, Gradus- the “reality” that bridges itself with art after the poem has been completed (ending or destroying the beauty but also reflecting more beauty through the means of black butterflies) and Kinbote being the imaginative mind.  He can thus do what “only a true artist can do-pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of the web” (289).  Through this fantastically complex portrayal of the imaginative process, Kinbote’s character has a tremendous ability to transcend into unlimited shapes and disguises and can interpret any entity (including a poem such as Pale Fire) into a tale of Kings, escapes, and revolutions.  In the world of reflections, the mind has an infinite capacity to create.