And
again, I think one of the more interesting problems with Nabokov the
fictionist's constructions of "shades" of the after-life is that they
are almost always hung around a first-person narrator. Invitation to a
Beheading and Bend Sinister are pretty much the only ones of the novels
that use outside narration to suggest that
writers-construct-worlds-therefore-the-world-might-have-been-constructed-by-something-analogous-to-a-writer.
None of these books are actual answers but tantalizing questions.
Nabokov seems to be trying to dramatize the sensation of the mysterious
and trying to find that gray line, or perhaps a gleaming red one in
Nabokov's case, where an intuition of the Other World or some Other
Worldly agent grades into an externalization of subjectivity, crazy in
the case of what Kinbote wants to make of the poem Pale Fire, all too
sane and more or less touching in the case of a bereaved father like
Shade; that line is where poet, annotator, critic and reader meet. As
poetically appealing as Shade's synchronized view of the universe is,
with a possible provided after life in which we go on as we were only
divested of physicality, it has been conceived in terms so parallel to
literary tropes that it seems cramped and trivialized and ultimately
just literary; I thought that was actually the point to the
poltergeists and ghosts and homologerie. There's an important point
somewhere, I think, in one of Shade's sample poems given in the
commentary by Kinbote where Shade theorizes that light might be an
expression of immortal souls, a charming idea until he makes a
qualitative distinction between the amount of light that Shakespeare
would generate, a whole city, versus a lesser poet, maybe a street lamp
I think. In other words, the greater the artist the more and the better
his immortality will be; it's an afterlife as caste system, not
terribly immaterial. One can't help snickering over this kind of
personification of the spiritual--it almost seems like a joke on
literary ranking only knowing Nabokov's strong opinions it probably
wasn't. Still I don't believe that we're meant to take this idea that
seriously, but to view it as a capricious possibility, one of the of
the many doors imagination gives us until death closes them all with a
great slam, and it doesn't cost us any extra to consider. Or does it?
Think about what Shade's saying in terms of other occupations. Would a
soccer player who had won more championships get more of an afterlife?
Would the best door to door bible salesman light up more blocks than
his coevals? Would he provide more or less light than a soccer player
or a mediocre poet? Surely the best plumber would beat even
Shakespeare! Pale Fire, ultimately, I think, is about the price of all
this toying with transcendent possibilities, makes us doubt as much as
hope. What if we're just fooling ourselves about what we think or want
because our lives are miserable failures, like Kinbotes'? That pathos
has more legs and life to it than Shade's metaphysics or his eternity;
frustration, accidents, loss and death have literally wiped everything
in the past away, we know from experience, but for most of us ideas of
slipping into some infernal eternal realm or reading room designed by a
waggish creative designer are pretty much just ideas, literature.
Despite what Nabokov experienced during his childhood illness,
beautifully discussed in Speak Memory and transformed with equal
brilliance in The Gift, he always wistfully withholds any objective
straight forward confirmation--we reach out for what we want but it's
always something WE have to find, WE have to piece together; WE have to
give it significance. So what I'm saying is that spirits disguised or
coded in first person accounts that have been built in the text along
with very key to the riddle we're meant to discover, such as happens in
The Vane Sisters, very aptly titled--referring to vanity and vane
hopes--can never really satisfy. I don't think it's supposed to; I
think N's writing about living with the exciting uncertainties of
existence, working with them, trying triumph over them and not step on
everything else in the process. Meaning, in short, that I agree with
Twiggs take.