Stalking Nabokov

by Brian Boyd

  The pattern seems charged with significance, yet it remains elusive, unlike the overt implications of, say, the motifs in Ulysses, such as the outsider Throwaway, the horse that wins the Ascot Gold Cup on Bloomsday and is associated with Bloom, and the ousted favorite, Sceptre, associated with Bloom’s seemingly favored rival, Blazes Boylan.

  One aspect of the Enchanted Hunters pattern I noticed many years ago was a series of covert links between the attempted rape of Lolita at the hotel and the killing of Quilty at his manor, where, as he stalks his prey, Humbert calls himself “an enchanted and very tight hunter.” Despite this arch echo, Humbert fails to realize that fate (or Nabokov) has constructed a whole system of parallels between the Enchanted Hunters episode and the episode of the murder (VNAY 253). In The American Years I ask: What are we to make of this pointed pairing of ostensibly unrelated scenes?

  And I answer:

  Humbert carefully places after the murder that haunting and famous scene on the mountain trail overlooking the valley filled with the sound of schoolchildren at play: “I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.” In the position Humbert has given it, this becomes the last distinct scene of the novel. Even a fine reader like Alfred Appel, Jr., can treat this moment of epiphany for Humbert as his “moral apotheosis” (Annotated Lolita 326), a final clarity of moral vision that almost redeems him. Humbert does indeed feel profound and sincere regret here, albeit too late, but that is only one part of a complex whole. He places this image of himself to stand in contrast to Quilty, whom he has just murdered, though the vision itself occurred not then but three years earlier, when Quilty took Lolita from him. What difference does the timing make? For two years Humbert had been lucidly aware that he was keeping Lolita a prisoner and destroying her childhood and her spirit, but he continued to hold her in his power. So long as he could extract sexual delight from her, he could remain deaf to his moral sense. Only after her disappearance, when she was no longer available as the thrice-daily outlet for his lust, did he allow his moral awareness to overwhelm him as he looked down into that valley.

  But that was a very selective insight. Humbert places the scene at the end of the novel to leave the closing impression that he can be selflessly concerned for Lolita, and his rhetorical strategy persuades many readers. Nabokov assesses things differently, and although he gives Humbert complete control over his pen, he finds a way to inscribe his own judgment within and against what Humbert writes. By the covert parallels he constructs between the climaxes of the novel’s two parts, he indicates that both scenes reflect the same romantic sense of the imperious dictates of desire, the same quest for self-satisfaction even at the expense of another life.

  (VNAY 253–54)

  The links between the scenes at The Enchanted Hunters and at Pavor Manor, where the murder occurs, are inconspicuous until noticed but then become insistently precise and pointed. Whether others agree with my interpretation of why Nabokov inscribed this particular covert pattern is another question. But the Enchanted Hunters pattern shows how Nabokov can continue to amplify the effects of the patterns of character and event that we register at once by planting further complementary patterns we can discover only on careful re-rereadings.

  Another related pattern I noticed only recently. Ironies that ripple through the novel pervade the early scene at Hourglass Lake, where Humbert bathes with Charlotte and thinks of drowning her in what seems like ideal seclusion, but decides against it. Sunbathing with Charlotte afterward, he is surprised when Jean Farlow emerges from the bushes. The brief passage below, though funny in its own right, seems primarily preparation for other ironies:

  Charlotte, who was a little jealous of Jean, wanted to know if John was coming.

  He was. He was coming home for lunch today. He had dropped her on the way to Parkington and should be picking her up any time now. It was a grand morning. She always felt a traitor to Cavall and Melampus for leaving them roped on such gorgeous days. She sat down on the white sand between Charlotte and me. She wore shorts. Her long brown legs were about as attractive to me as those of a chestnut mare.

  (Lolita 88–89)

  Notice the names of Jean Farlow’s dogs, casually dropped in here, referred to once earlier as “two boxer dogs” but never mentioned again after the lines above. Cavall was not only King Arthur’s favorite hound but the first of his hounds to turn the stag in a hunting episode in The Mabinogion.11 Melampus is the name of the first hound of Actaeon, in Ovid’s telling of the story of Diana and Actaeon in his Metamorphoses.12

  The precision of these allusions startles: two hounds from different literary traditions that are the first to chase or turn a stag. Actaeon, remember, is the hunter who spies Diana, the virgin goddess of hunting, naked. Diana, enraged, transforms him into a stag, and his hounds pursue him, Melampus leading, and tear him to pieces. He still feels as a man, but he can express himself only as a deer, so his own hounds and his fellow hunters cannot respond to his strangled voice pleading for them to stop tearing him apart.

  This leads us back to the Enchanted Hunters motif and the idea of the hunter hunted and of sex and chastity as linked with hunting and pursuit. Humbert, stalking Lolita, finds himself hunted by Charlotte and “captured” in marriage. Wanting to end Charlotte’s life, but not daring to, he finds her suddenly killed, after a dog chases a car that swerves and kills her, as if his deadly plans have met with enchanted success. Stalking Lolita at The Enchanted Hunters, Humbert finds himself “hunted” by her when she proposes they try out what she discovered at camp. But Quilty, already at the hotel, witnesses Humbert and recognizes his designs on Lolita. This recognition inspires him to write the play The Enchanted Hunters, revolving around a character called Diana, whose role Lolita will take. The play itself turns out to be an enchanted device for Quilty’s hunting down Lolita and then for stalking and hounding Humbert, now very much the hunted rather than the hunter, all the way across America. Just after Humbert gives up his hunt for Lolita’s “kidnapper,” he passes through Briceland (echoing Brocéliande, the home of Merlin the Enchanter) and The Enchanted Hunters Hotel, before writing a poem about Diana and the Enchanted Hunters. When he hears from Lolita about her marriage to a young American, Humbert resumes the hunt but finds himself chasing the wrong prey, and when at last Lolita gives him the scent he needs, he heads straight off to kill the man who had hunted and hounded him.

  Nabokov was a scientist and had spent most of the decade before writing Lolita in charge of butterflies and moths at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He was fascinated by pattern in nature, like the patterns of butterfly wings, the patterns of matching patterns in natural mimicry, and the complex patterns of relationships a scientist has to disentangle to work out the taxonomic relatedness within a genus or a family of butterflies. As a novelist he was also a shrewd intuitive psychologist, aware of how the mind processes pattern. He realized that the profusion of patterns in nature may obscure or distract us from other significant patterns. Beside Hourglass Lake, the character patterns of Charlotte’s jealousy (of Lolita, of Jean) and of Humbert’s scornfulness toward adult women, and the wry verbal patterns of free indirect speech, here ironically maximizing the mental distance between Humbert and Jean—all seem much more prominent than the incidental Cavall and Melampus.

  Even if we track down Cavall and Melampus and link them to the Enchanted Hunters, and through Cavall as King Arthur’s dog link to the Arthurian pattern that Nabokov seems to have attached from the first to the Lolita theme, I am not satisfied with what we can interpret of either the Enchanted Hunters or the Arthurian (and Merlinesque) pattern. Nabokov’s patterns have powerful implications, once we trace them far enough, and in the case of Lolita I don’t think I or anyone else has yet reached that point.

  What do the
se examples from Lolita suggest? A writer can capture our attention before, in some cases long before, we reach what academic critics would accept as the “meaning” or “meanings” of works. The high density of multiple patterns holds our attention and elicits our response—especially through patterns of biological importance, like those surrounding character and event, which arouse attention and emotion and feed powerful, dedicated, evolved information-processing subroutines in the mind.

  Patterns in fiction, as in life, may proliferate and obscure other patterns. They can yield rich but sometimes far from evident implications. They may be open-ended: they and their implications often do not come preannounced and predigested. Sometimes they feed into efficient, evolved pattern-detection systems, but often they have to be discovered through attention and curiosity, and sometimes in ways that neither audiences nor authors fully anticipate.

  At a more general level, humans are extraordinary open-ended pattern detectors because we so compulsively inhabit the cognitive niche. Art plays with cognitive patterns at high intensity. The pleasure this generates is an essential part of what it is to be human and matters both at the individual level, for audiences and artists, and at the social level, for the patterns we share (in design, music, dance, and story). The pleasure that art’s intense play with patterns affords compels our engagement again and again and helps shape our capacity to create and process pattern more swiftly. Perhaps it even helps explain the so-called Flynn effect,13 the fact—and it seems to be one—that IQs have risen with each of the last few generations: perhaps as a consequence of the modern bombardment of the high-density patterns of art through television, DVDs, music and iPods, computer games, You-Tube, and the like.

  And with their high intensity of pattern and their fixed form, works of art should provide ideal controlled replicable experiments for the study of both rapid and gradual pattern recognition in the mind.

  Literary studies have no need to feel embarrassed at the art of literature or the pleasure we derive from it. Literature and other arts have helped extend our command of information patterns, and that singular command makes us who we are.

  24. “Pale Fire”: Poem and Pattern

  Pale Fire was the first Nabokov novel I read with rapture, in 1969, in my last year in high school. In Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, I made an emphatic case for reading the whole novel as the invention of John Shade, an interpretation strongly influenced by Andrew Field’s 1967 Nabokov: His Life in Art (which I read at an impressionable seventeen, in 1970) and by Julia Bader’s 1972 Crystal Land. When the subject of the “Shadean” reading of Pale Fire rose again on the Nabokov listserv at the end of 1997, I found what I took to be additional evidence to support my Shadean reading and was asked by Zoran Kuzmanovich, the editor of Nabokov Studies, to expand this into an article. As I began to do so, I realized in pursuing clues that not only was a Shadean reading of the novel wrong but so were the terms of the debate. I found myself led by the evidence to a new interpretation that took me by surprise and exploded into Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery (1999), which I wrote in six weeks of concentration that jarred my nerves and wrecked my back. In keeping with the strategy of that book, I will disclose nothing of the interpretation until readers work through a first reading and then a first rereading response to Pale Fire. I have since written a couple more pieces on the novel, extending the interpretation offered in my book. But I had never written on the poem “Pale Fire” by itself.

  Early in 2007 Jean Holabird, the artist of AlphaBet in Color (2005), a painter’s rendering of the colors letters had in Nabokov’s synesthetic mind’s eye, proposed to Gingko Press another novel book idea: an edition of John Shade’s 999-line poem, “Pale Fire,” as if handwritten on index cards—the very index cards that, according to the fiction of Pale Fire, his neighbor Charles Kinbote takes from him at his death, “annotates,” and publishes. I was delighted to be asked to edit the volume and by the opportunity to focus intently on the poem, which I have loved for forty years, rather than to consider it within the mesmerizingly distracting context of Kinbote’s commentary, which I have also loved for forty years. Shade takes the title of his poem from Shakespeare. I compare the intensity of patterning in “Pale Fire” to what we find in Shakespeare’s sonnets.

  “Pale Fire,” John Shade’s verse autobiography, credo, manifesto, and magnum opus, written in three weeks of sustained inspiration in July 1959, offers a clear retrospect on his quiet life and a confident prospect of a future in life and death that he knows he cannot know.

  Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, written in a year of sustained inspiration from late November 1960 to early December 1961, discloses that “Pale Fire” is also Shade’s unwitting last testament and the tragic target of a scholarly outrage perpetrated by his first editor, campus-town neighbor, and would-be friend K. Cruelly, the commentary continues to divert attention from the poem. Our edition returns the poem to readers as Shade left it, in his own hand, before unspeakable others intervened.

  Writers as diverse as Penelope Lively, Edmund White, Orhan Pamuk, Martin Amis, and Zadie Smith have come to consider Nabokov the last of the great novelists, the most fertile fictionist of the last century. Many Nabokov admirers think Pale Fire his greatest novel—but there agreement ends, for the novel has spawned notoriously divergent and irreconcilable interpretations.

  Nabokov as poet has earned much less acclaim. Indeed, because his Russian poetry was regularly dismissed by the leading Russian émigré critic, Georgy Adamovich, Nabokov adopted the pseudonym Vasily Shishkov for two poems that Adamovich then hailed as works of genius—until he discovered their true author. “Pale Fire” is not only Shade’s but also Nabokov’s longest poem, and in part, like the lyrics he wrote under that other nonce nom de plume, Nabokov’s attempt to stake his patch on Parnassus. Pale Fire has sparked high praise but little critical agreement. “Pale Fire,” by contrast, has earned radical evaluative disagreement—some think it a great poem, even “perhaps the finest single American poem of the past century”;1 some think it a great example of either intentionally or unintentionally poor poetry—but everyone seems to agree about how we interpret it.

  I admire Pale Fire above all Nabokov’s other work, which is saying something, but the greatness of the novel and its interpretive challenge have obscured both the greatness of the poem and its interpretive challenges. We have not paid Shade and his poem the respect, the care in reading, they deserve.

  Let me quote from the opening of “Pale Fire” and from the opening of my discussion of the poem in my book about the novel:

  John Shade’s “Pale Fire” opens with an extraordinary series of images whose initial impact lingers in the mind as it expands in implication throughout the poem:

  I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

  By the false azure in the windowpane;

  I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I

  Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

  As we learn more about Shade’s lifelong attempt to understand a world where life is surrounded by death, we realize the full resonance of these opening lines: that he projected himself in imagination into the waxwing, as if it were somehow still flying beyond death, and into the reflected azure of the window, as if that were the cloudlessness of some hereafter, even as he stood looking at “the smudge of ashen fluff” of the dead bird’s little body. Alvin Kernan comments that the bird “has died flying into the hard barrier of the image which promises freedom but only reflects the world it is already in,”[2] and that irony persists:

  And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate

  Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:

  Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass

  Hang all the furniture above the grass,

  And how delightful when a fall of snow

  10 Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so

  As to make chair and bed exactly stand

  Upon that snow, out in that crystal land
!

  The contrast between the mundaneness of Shade’s room—“Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate”—and the magic of the reflection reflects in turn off those other contrasts already intimated between real and imagined, between life and the hint of something beyond life in the “reflected sky,” to create a tension sustained throughout the poem between the taken-for-granted, the freshly seen, the vividly projected, and the unseen beyond. This is major poetry, by any standard.

  (NPFMAD 25–26)

  Because Shade, like Nabokov, hides much of his design right under our noses, I will keep returning to these and other passages—as I did with others in Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery—to show what we have missed.

  Orhan Pamuk comments about his autobiography, Istanbul—perhaps the finest since Nabokov’s own Speak, Memory—that like metaphor, it conflates two things not hitherto brought together: in his case, a personal autobiography and a history of his home town.3 “Pale Fire” has that kind of originality: part autobiography, part philosophical credo, part artistic manifesto, part author’s self-interview, it modulates between a narrative poem with a tragic drama at its center and a reflective lyric focused on space as much as time, on the poet’s immediate surrounds and his sense of the unknown beyond. It slips back and forth between the everyday and the eternal, between Shade’s paring his nails and his decision “to explore and fight / The foul, the inadmissible abyss” of death.

  “Pale Fire” records Shade’s lifelong attempt to peer past the bars of mortality. Canto 1 begins with the waxwing and ends with the brief bout of boyhood seizures that he now sees as perhaps a foretaste of death or something beyond. Canto 2 opens with his decision to explore death’s abyss and closes, at the midpoint of the poem, with the harrowing account of his daughter Hazel’s suicide, just over two years before he pens “Pale Fire.” Canto 3 starts with wrong approaches to the hereafter, summed up in Shade’s wry reflections on the Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter, I.P.H., and its inept attempts to probe death’s “big if.” It finishes with his own near-death experience, less than a year before writing “Pale Fire,” the vision he had during that state, the futile attempt to corroborate that vision through another’s similar experience, and the conclusion that