‘What had the sentiments he entertained in regard to Disa ever amounted to? Friendly indifference and bleak respect. Not even in the first bloom of their marriage had he felt any tenderness or any excitement. Of pity, of heartache, there could be no question. He was, had always been, casual and heartless. But the heart of his dreaming self, both before and after the rupture, made extraordinary amends.”
This is a narrative depth change, with no lightness or giddiness or humour. I sometimes read this section to students as an example of how a narrative can be indirectly and deeply illuminated through minor characters or descriptive asides, and no matter who they are, grad students or sophomores taking the class to fulfil a Lit major, I can feel their attention come into focus from the first two lines. Even with minimal information about who the speaker or the woman he is speaking of might be, almost any nominal adult, no matter how inexperienced, can recognise the emotional reality of those sentences that open the soliloquy.
“He dreamed of her more often, and with incomparably more poignancy, than his surface-life feelings for her warranted; these dreams occurred when he least thought of her, and worries in no way connected with her assumed her image in the subliminal world as a battle or a reform becomes a bird of wonder in a tale for children. These heart-rending dreams transformed the drab prose of his feelings for her into strong and strange poetry, subsiding undulations of which would flash and disturb him throughout the day, bringing back the pang and the richness — and then only the pang, and then only its glancing reflection — but not at all affecting his attitude towards the real Disa.”
Here, words create images to describe something that happens wordlessly, physically but subtly, in the inchoate realm of feeling. The words “subsiding undulations” which “flash” and then gradually fade (as a wave returns and fades) describe the movement of intimate emotion, the way people repeatedly draw near one another and then move away, sometimes simultaneously, in different aspects. The words also describe the bodily experience of strong feeling in a single person, rising up and then subsiding, either becoming greater or — as it is here — fading completely but for a troubling echo that lingers so faintly you can’t tell where it’s coming from. It is something almost impossible to talk about let alone write about but which almost everyone experiences. Using words to describe what is experienced wordlessly is art on a high level, at least as impressive and more affecting than even the most intricate structuring.
“Her image, as she entered and re-entered his sleep rising apprehensively from a distant sofa or going in search of the messenger who, they said, had just passed through the draperies, took into account changes of fashion; but the Disa wearing the dress he had seen on her the summer of the Glass Works explosion, or last Sunday, or in any other antechamber of time, forever remained exactly as she looked on the day he had first told her he did not love her. That happened during a hopeless trip to Italy, in a lakeside hotel garden — roses, black araucarias, rusty, greenish hydrangeas — one cloudless evening with the mountains of the far shore swimming in a sunset haze and the lake all peach syrup regularly rippled with pale blue, and the captions of a newspaper spread flat on the foul bottom near the stone bank perfectly readable through the shallow diaphanous filth, and because, upon hearing him out, she sank down on the lawn in an impossible posture, examining a grass culm and frowning, he had taken his words back at once; but the shock had fatally starred the mirror, and thenceforth in his dreams her image was infected with the memory of that confession as with some disease or the secret aftereffects of a surgical operation too intimate to be mentioned.”
The pain of unrequited love, both for the lover and the loved one who cannot return the feeling, is an obvious subject of the book as is the longing for an ideal which bleeds up through mundane reality, “the shallow diaphanous filth” vs. the fantastic colours, the dream which might be delusional or might actually be more real than acted-out life; the imagery is in effect a crumbling bridge between the two. It is in this passage that I see what I called the understated “essential something” about the book: how this elemental and raw experience is evoked as closely as possible to how it is felt, through the textures of the natural world that exist as the body exists, humbly and unknowably: plants, mountains, water, sky, light, the amazement of colours.
“The gist, rather than the actual plot of the dream, was a constant refutation of his not loving her. His dream-love for her exceeded in emotional tone, in spiritual passion and depth, anything he had experienced in his surface existence. This love was like an endless wringing of hands, like a blundering of the soul through an infinite maze of hopelessness and remorse. They were, in a sense, amorous dreams, for they were permeated with tenderness, with a longing to sink his head onto her lap and sob away the monstrous past. They brimmed with the awful awareness of her being so young and so helpless. They were purer than his life. What carnal aura there was in them came not from her but from those with whom he betrayed her… and even so the sexual scum remained somewhere far above the sunken treasure and was quite unimportant.”
A blundering of the soul through an infinite maze of hopelessness and remorse. This secondary character may be, as some critics say, a figment of Kinbote’s narcissistic imagination; she may be an alt-world creation of the deceased Hazel Shade. But whatever she is, the complex of emotions embodied in and provoked by her are real in any existing human world, as deep and for me more riveting than any problem posed anywhere else in the book. It is the mystery of human feeling/lack of feeling, the need for love and the fear of it, part of what Kinbote calls “the prison of personality” and it is not going to be solved. But here at least it is seen profoundly, with the compassionate wisdom that is the real “Crown Jewels” of Pale Fire, hidden in a description of an incidental relationship.
Of course, there are other jewels hidden elsewhere in the book, more than might be addressed within the scope of this essay. Brian Boyd quotes Nabokov remarking in relation to Pale Fire that: “You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you can never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms and hence unquenchable, unattainable.” The novel is a joyful and reverent mimic of such reality — and yet it invites readers and critics to come close, to find the unattainable, and so, with great gusto, they try. And I am glad that they do, even if it sometimes looks a bit like blundering through an infinite maze of some sort. I am especially glad for Brian Boyd and Michael Wood; over time, reading and learning from their intrepid analyses has deepened my understanding and respect for the book. But I still remember, as something rare and unrepeatable, the power of my first reading when I had so little knowledge and yet felt the brilliance and depth of Pale Fire almost as if through my skin. If reading this is your first experience of the book, that is what I hope for you: that you acquire a copy and see the griffin come in for a landing. If you worry that it is looking down on you, don’t. Because all you have to do is look up. Its heart is strange but it is huge; let yours beat in response.
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Pale Fire, with an introduction by Mary Gaitskill, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.