The Secret Life of Stories

by Bérubé, Michael;

  In a weird sort of trickery, Kinbote’s criticism of Eystein’s aesthetics also sounds like an affirmation of Nabokov’s own aesthetic; but then, it is difficult to know whether to read Kinbote ironically in this passage, chiefly for the reason that it is difficult to know whether in fact—in the world of the novel—Kinbote actually “exists.”

  This is the puzzle posed by the notorious final paragraph of this monstrous semblance of a novel, and without the presence of this puzzle, which frames the entire text and raises the question of Kinbote’s sanity, the earlier metafictional and metacritical moments of Pale Fire would be, I submit, garden-variety twentieth-century experimentalism with no implications for the study of disability in literature. But this adieu compels us to think about whether intellectual disability does, in fact, have a nontrivial relation to the metafictional hijinks for which Pale Fire is justly renowned—or infamous:

  God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans fortune, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon [not to be confused with Nodo, of course] in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principals: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain. I may huddle and groan in a madhouse. (300–301)

  The first of these possibilities seems to suggest that Kinbote will turn up as Vladimir Nabokov, teaching in exile at Cornell; the “old-fashioned melodrama” seems to describe reasonably well the drama we have just read, and is usually taken as Nabokov’s wink to us. Kinbote, representing himself as King Charles of Zembla, is out of his mind, and Jakob Gradus really is only “Jack Grey, escapee from an asylum, who mistook Shade for the man who sent him there” (299)—not King Charles, of course, but Judge Goldsworth, whose house Kinbote has been renting. But many more possibilities abound, and critics have not failed to explore them. Perhaps Kinbote is really Botkin, a colleague in another department at Wordsmith College; perhaps Kinbote has invented Shade out of whole cloth, and no old poet perishes in the final pages of the poem; perhaps, conversely, Shade has invented Kinbote. It may even be possible that Nabokov has made the whole thing up—that even from the opening page, from the sentence “Pale Fire, a poem in heroic couplets, of nine hundred ninety-nine lines, divided into four cantos, was composed by John Francis Shade (born July 5, 1898, died July 21, 1959) during the last twenty days of his life, at his residence in New Wye, Appalachia, U.S.A.” to the sentence “There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings,” he has been lying to us.8

  In one sense Kinbote is (if he “exists”) a master fabulist, and if he can be described in terms of intellectual disability, he is far more like Quixote than like Christopher Boone. And yet he is almost as clueless in his social exchanges as is Christopher—and to greater comic effect. Whereas Christopher simply does not understand the nonverbal social cues that go into the buying of a street map, Kinbote fails to see that he quickly becomes an object of derision and ridicule. “My free and simple demeanor set everybody at ease,” Kinbote writes (21); a bit further on, “Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? ‘Is that a crime?’ I countered, and they all laughed” (21–22). Perhaps, then, we are asked to suspect that something is amiss from the very outset, quite apart from the fact that there is a very loud amusement park right in front of Kinbote’s present lodgings.

  Peter Rabinowitz tried gamely to make sense of this vertigo-inducing text in a 1977 Critical Inquiry essay, “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences,” in which he set out four levels of readerly immersion in/interpellation by a fictional text. The “actual audience” consists of flesh-and-blood readers holding the book in their hands; the “authorial audience” consists of readers who share the author’s historical and cultural assumptions and background; the “narrative audience”—the most important for our purposes, and for Rabinowitz’s—consists of members of the actual audience who agree to suspend their disbelief and enter into a work of fiction as if a young girl could talk to armored bears and move across multiple universes with the help of a knife that cuts through the fabric of spacetime; and the “ideal narrative audience” consists of hypothetical people who believe everything a narrator tells them, such that (in Rabinowitz’s apt example) the ideal narrative audience of The Sound and the Fury “believes that Jason has been victimized and sympathizes with his whining misery, although the narrative audience despises him” (134). The problem with Pale Fire, then, is that we simply cannot determine what we need to believe in order to join the narrative audience. The actual and authorial audiences know that Nabokov is making it all up; the ideal narrative audience believes that Charles Kinbote is indeed the exiled king of Zembla and that he became John Shade’s dear friend and confidante in the final year of Shade’s life. But the narrative audience does not know which of the various interpretive options (Shade and Kinbote both exist, Kinbote is Botkin, Kinbote invented Shade, Shade invented Kinbote) is most plausible:

  Thus, we may say vaguely that Pale Fire has something to do with the nature of imagination, the nature of criticism, and the relation of truth to illusion. Yet until we know whether or not Shade and Zembla exist, we cannot know, with any more specificity, just what the novel is doing with these subjects—what questions it is asking, what solutions it is proposing. If both Zembla and Shade exist, we have one novel, probing one set of problems; if Zembla does not exist, but Shade does, we have an entirely different novel, with another set of problems; if . . .

  How then is one to read the book? The only way, I suppose, is to make an arbitrary choice about which narrative audience one wants to join—or to read the novel several times, making a different choice each time. As in a game, we are free to make several opening moves; what follows will be dependent upon our initial decision. Simply with respect to the questions suggested above, we can generate four novels, all different but all couched, oddly, in the same words. And as we begin to ask further questions—Has Shade invented Kinbote? Is the poem a good one in the eyes of the narrative audience?—the number of possible novels begins to proliferate at a geometric rate. (140)

  Despite the likelihood that Nabokov would shudder at the thought that anyone would ask one of his novels to propose “solutions” to anything, this is a reasonably accurate rendering of the interpretive dilemma posed by Kinbote’s instability. One might go so far as to say that just as Memento attempts to disable its viewers’ sense of causality, Pale Fire attempts to disable readers in such a way that they cannot join any one narrative audience with any certainty.

  The only question I have is this: why is this a problem? At the very least, by Rabinowitz’s reckoning, Nabokov has given us four novels for the price of one. Philip K. Dick did no less, offering us the possibility that Martian Time-Slip closes in Arnie Kott’s hallucination (a hallucination in which he dies twice), in Jack Bohlen’s schizophrenia, in Manfred Steiner’s disability chronotope, or in the timespace of the Bleekmen whose entrance into the novel, and whose water witch, warped the text the moment it appeared in the second chapter. For Rabinowitz, the impossibility of joining any one narrative audience presents “an obstacle which prevents us from even the most superficial understanding of the text” (139). But surely this is an unwarranted conclusion, not only be
cause the proliferation of possible texts both invites and follows from (in the reciprocal reader-text loop) the proliferation of possible readings, some of which will go well beyond “even the most superficial understanding,” but also because, as I will show at the conclusion of this chapter, there is a potential reading of Pale Fire that obtains for all possible scenarios, one that goes to the heart of why any writer would explore the infinite terrain of metafiction by way of the deployment of intellectual disability.

  ✴ ✴ ✴

  To conclude this chapter—and to bring these reflections on textual self-awareness to a (provisional) close—I will turn to a work of metafiction whose (putatively) intellectually disabled character seems to have no control over the production of the text, and whose capacity for metarepresentation is irrelevant to the interpretation of the text. If you like, you might think of this final scenario as an example of what happens when a writer puts Stevie from The Secret Agent into a Cervantes-Pirandello-Nabokov-Haddon hall of mirrors: both of this chapter’s central questions (What does the character know about the narrative s/he inhabits? Why is the text self-reflexive with regard to intellectual disability?) are animated in such a way as to feed off each other in ways that heighten the hermeneutical impasse of metafiction by means of the hermeneutical impasse of disability. And just for good measure, there will be textual glitches, as well.

  I do not need to establish that J. M. Coetzee’s Foe is a text about texts. Like Curious Incident and Pale Fire, the title announces its intertextual relations, and as many readers have noted, the explicit rewriting of Robinson Crusoe is cross-cut with a less explicit incorporation of the more obscure Defoe novel Roxana.9 Nor do I need to belabor the point that Foe is largely a novel about authorship, about who gains control—in what circumstances and with what consequences—over a narrative, one’s own or someone else’s. The novel devotes many pages to Foe’s and Susan Barton’s debate over how Foe should be written, and on what grounds: “The story I desire to be known by,” Susan insists, “is the story of the island.” In demanding that Foe leave her life in Bahia out of his account, she says,

  You call it an episode, but I call it a story in its right. It commences with my being cast away there and concludes with the death of Cruso and the return of Friday and myself to England, full of new hope. Within this larger story are inset the stories of how I came to be marooned (told by myself to Cruso) and of Cruso’s shipwreck and early years on the island (told by Cruso to myself), as well as the story of Friday, which is properly not a story but a puzzle or hole in the narrative (I picture it as a buttonhole, carefully cross-stitched around, but empty, waiting for the button). Taken in all, it is a narrative with a beginning and an end, and with pleasing digressions too, lacking only a substantial and varied middle, in the place where Cruso spent too much time tilling the terraces and I too much time tramping the shores. Once you proposed to supply a middle by inventing cannibals and pirates. These I would not accept because they were not the truth. Now you propose to reduce the island to an episode in the history of a woman in search of a lost daughter. This too I reject. (121)

  Susan Barton opens this prospectus by demanding that the story begin where Foe actually does begin, when she is a castaway washed up on the island inhabited by Cruso and Friday. She then proceeds to offer commentary on novels Daniel Defoe has (in the timeframe of Foe) not yet written, Roxana (with an abandoned daughter named Susan), and of course Robinson Crusoe (the version we now know, featuring those fictional cannibals and pirates). Friday’s story, like that of Michael K, is not properly a story at all: where Michael K always found a gap, a hole, a darkness when he tried to account for himself, Friday is not even capable of attempting narrative self-representation, and is therefore assigned the role of puzzle or hole by a character who never appears in Robinson Crusoe (where, notably, Friday can speak). “Friday has no command of words,” Susan tells Foe, “and therefore no defence against being re-shaped day by day in conformity with the desires of others” (121).

  Benita Parry has remarked on the phenomenon by which Coetzee grants some narrative agency to Susan Barton while stripping the subaltern subject of his very tongue; “The effects of bestowing authority on the woman’s text,” she writes, “while withholding discursive skills from the dispossessed, is to reinscribe, indeed re-enact, the received disposal of narrative power, where voice is correlated with cultural supremacy and voicelessness with subjugation” (158). It is as if Coetzee has restored a woman’s voice to an eighteenth-century text while leaving the black character with even less autonomy and voice than he had had centuries ago: as Radhika Jones remarks, the novel “accords Friday even less agency than he possessed in the colonial age” (59). (Susan thinks at one point that Foe will decide that Cruso’s story is “better without the woman” [72], and we surmise thereby that Defoe did indeed come to that conclusion, and that Foe gives us the real story of which Robinson Crusoe is but the redaction.) But again, we need to ask specifically about the status of disability in the text. The disability studies reading should supplement, rather than attempt to supplant, the necessary postcolonial reading: for it is not a question of whether the subaltern can speak. This one cannot. The question is what function or functions the nonverbal subaltern, presumed by his fellow characters to be incompetent, to be intellectually disabled, performs in the text. Clearly, Friday is physically disabled, unable to speak ever since someone (slave traders? cannibals? Cruso?) cut out his tongue. The question that consumes Susan Barton is whether Friday is therefore intellectually disabled as well: as she asks Cruso, “Is Friday an imbecile incapable of speech?” (22). Susan reports to Foe that she “found Friday in all matters a dull fellow” (22), but as with the narrator and the mute girl in The Woman Warrior, she is not content to leave it at that. He becomes an object of morbid fascination: “I began to look on him—I could not help myself—with the horror we reserve for the mutilated. . . . [I]t was the very secretness of his loss that caused me to shrink from him” (24). Susan spends the remainder of the novel obsessing over the fate of Friday’s tongue and Friday’s relation to speech: “What I fear most is that after years of speechlessness the very notion of speech may be lost to him” (57). To Foe, she writes, “To tell my story and be silent on Friday’s tongue is no better than offering a book for sale with pages in it quietly left empty. Yet the only tongue that can tell Friday’s secret is the tongue he has lost!” (67).

  Friday is the example par excellence of Quayson’s category of disability as hermeneutical impasse: his disability is indeed the puzzle, the hole, the vortex around which the entire text of Foe swirls until it meets its end in shipwreck. Friday deranges the protocols of representation at every level of the text, even unto the scene in which Susan tries to draw the truth from him by drawing the scene of his mutilation (in two versions, one at the hand of a Moor and one at the hand of Cruso) but gives up in despair at the realization that every aspect of her sketches becomes indeterminate once she shows them to Friday. Of the Cruso sketch, she writes, “I recognized with chagrin that it might also be taken to show Cruso as a beneficent father putting a lump of fish into the mouth of child Friday” (68–69). The Moor sketch is still more ambiguous:

  If there was indeed a slave-trader, a Moorish slave-trader with a hooked knife, was my picture of him at all like the Moor Friday remembered? Are Moors tall and clad in white burnouses? Perhaps the Moor gave orders to a trusty slave to cut out the tongues of the captives, a wizened black slave in a loin-cloth. “Is this a faithful representation of the man who cut out your tongue?”—was that what Friday, in his way, understood me to be asking? If so, what answer could he give but No? And even if it was a Moor who cut out his tongue, his Moor was likely an inch taller than mine, or an inch shorter; wore black or blue, not white; was bearded, not clean-shaven; had a straight knife, not a curved one; and so forth. (70)

  So much for the naive belief in “accurate” representation.

  Foe is therefore right to suggest that Friday
is “the eye of the story” (141), and it is no surprise that when Foe urges Susan to teach Friday to write, on the (illusory) ground that writing evades all disability (“Friday has no speech, but he has fingers. . . . Even if he had no fingers, even if the slavers had lopped them all off, he can hold a stick of charcoal between his toes, or between his teeth, like the beggars on the Strand” [143]), Friday responds by drawing “eyes, open eyes, each set upon a human foot: row upon row upon row of eyes upon feet: walking eyes” (147). If Stevie’s endless circles suggested (mutely) the nihilism at the heart of the plot of The Secret Agent, Friday’s walking eyes suggest that he is (mutely) conscious of his status as Central Textual Enigma.

  The text of Foe does indeed end in shipwreck, and even—or especially—in this respect, Friday’s disability is central to the text’s operations. As is evident on almost every page, those operations include metafictional attention to the text’s operations, as when Foe suggests to Susan in Quixotian terms that they might be characters in a narrative: “Let us confront our worst fear, which is that we have all of us been called into the world from a different order (which we have now forgotten) by a conjurer unknown to us, as you say I have conjured up your daughter and her companion (I have not)” (135). (The closing parenthetical is hardly reassuring, since Defoe, if not Foe, did conjure up Roxana and her daughter.) Susan does, apparently, win the right to have the story begin where she insists it should, with her arrival on the island, but along the way, Foe offers another theory of fiction, which Foe does not entirely repudiate:

  “We therefore have five parts in all: the loss of the daughter; the quest for the daughter in Brazil; abandonment of the quest, and the adventure of the island; assumption of the quest by the daughter; and reunion of the daughter with her mother. It is thus that we make up a book: loss, then quest, then recovery; beginning, then middle, then end. As to novelty, this is lent by the island episode—which is properly the second part of the middle—and by the reversal in which the daughter takes up the quest abandoned by her mother. . . .