It never seemed to me unusual for Shade, a poet who intends to record some retrospection, to begin first with a glance at his present surroundings. Especially since his present surroundings include as unimprovable a metaphor as the man's picture window which holds such potent delusions in its sun-glazed face. So, in his own home, where he has lived his whole life, Shade finds a thought even more apposite than the fountain-to-mountain misprint he had so excitedly researched years ago.
It’s been suggested that the PF poem begins shortly after the death of Shade's ornithologist parents. My feeling is that Shade materially "begins" his poem, puts pencil to index card -- at exactly the moment he is currently living, a time of life when (as a lifelong thanatophile would be super-aware) the Reaper is at last taking some serious warm-up swings at his head. This generally impending mortality -- where “old” uncomfortably but indisputably has more than a nodding acquaintance with "end" -- motivates Shade to commence a long poem to be called Pale Fire.
The primary image, the metaphor for so much that the old scholar and poet has learned and and observed, is the cedar waxwing dead beneath the living room picture window. Shade has presumably seen this all his life, since he has lived here all his life. But only seems to perceive it clearly in advanced age (time enough to have put tape or shiny strings or whatever on the picture window ... but aviarian disaster is short and life is long).
It's probably unnecessary to mention that there was just such a picture window, with which cedar waxwings had fatal collisions, in the house where VN and Vera lived at a time when VN may have been cogitating Pale Fire.
Reflections and delusional images from New Wye to the mirror ateliers of Sudarg of Bokay (to ... Onhava? ... wherever Charles Xavier’s father, in wonderfully waxwing fashion, flew into the freshly complete, perversely-timed new erection) all reassert the idea of the delusional permutation of worlds in reflective surfaces. Reflections are to PF what reoccurrence was to Pnin.
There are no true reflections. None of us really looks like what the mirror shows us, since we give to a mirror an expression of face we don’t give to actual people. There are artistically achieved reflections, sometimes in the pages of mad men, and there are distorting reflections against which (possibly juniper-impaired) waxwings can collide with what looks like endlessly perfect flying weather. And, for all we know, eternally perfect flying weather into the azure sublime, is what may be reserved for CWWs who at last fly free of the ovoid form into Waxwing Nirvana. As VN wrote, the bodiless time might seem as incredible to us as the earth span would seem to our unborn self had we the opportunity to review it before committing to any extended stay. Well, VN didn’t put it exactly that way, but you know that.
I’m grateful to Jansy for a forehead-smacking insight that made me realize I’ll have to seriously reread the novel Pale Fire. I missed the significance of its being an APPLE on that plate. Slapdash reality may be nothing but a concatenation of accidents but great literary artists still have to avoid as many as possible in making imaginary reality. There are some mistakes in VN's work, as Boyd describes in his essay "Even Homais Nods.” But it’s no accident that we later learn how greatly Shade dislikes attacking the fortress of an apple, whereas vegetarian Kinbote knows no fruit he cannot love. As a youthful reader it seemed to me that the poem Pale Fire was written by a man who, in 1959, was old, but that the book Pale Fire was the work of an artist who would never stop being young.
Andrew Brown
On 11/27/07 3:55 PM, "NABOKV-L" <NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU> wrote:
> Many thanks to Brian Boyd for his wonderful close reading of Shade's opening
> lines. What Brian's analysis highlights is how poets--perhaps especially
> formal poets--are often led forward by sound as much as by ideas. Nabokov,
> like Auden and a few others, is witty enough to conform the sound of his poems
> to his ideas, but we fail the poem and the author when we too easily move past
> the texture of the language itself in order to think about meaning.
>
> As for whether or not the opening lines point to Shade's childhood, I tend to
> side with Sam Gwynn on this, though I have a hard time saying what part of his
> childhood. There is certainly a "then vs. now" theme that runs through the
> first Canto, and the past tense in the opening stanza puts these lines in the
> former category. But I suppose the "then" in this case could point to a more
> recent moment. Still, the exact moment when Shade felt himself to be the
> shadow of the waxwing slain is unclear. Some possibilities: he is reacting to
> the death of his parents; he is reacting to Hazel's suicide; he is referring
> to a change that occured in him as a result of his childhood (or adult) fits.
>
> Matt Roth
>
> Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
> Search archive with Google:
> http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
>
> Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
> Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
> View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm