JM: In the recently announced issue of NOJ we find René Alladaye's article "Through the Looking-Glass - Pale Fire as anamorphosis: an alternative theory of internal authorship"* in which the author returns to the questions related to."Who invents whom and who writes what in Pale Fire?" Who "is to be master in Pale Fire?" ... "where do I stand as regards Shade, Kinbote, and eventually the author?," as they were raised by Maurice Couturier. René Alladaye argues that "all avenues have not been explored on the question of authorship in Pale Fire."  For him, besides having "Shade or Kinbote as possible alternatives," there may yet be a third character to consider, once we recognize that there is "a major pictorial subtext of Pale Fire:...closely connected to the use of one device, anamorphosis" that  may provide him with a new perspective over the matter. This new element is Holbein's painting, "The Ambassadors," that is "universally known mostly for the enigmatic scholarly still life which plays an important part in its composition and for the anamorphic skull wrenching the center of the painting"

 

René Alladaye describes various allusions to this painting in Pale Fire ": it is " 'a drama in two acts,' in which the viewer first fails to understand the distortion only to find out that all is revealed when the correct viewpoint is enforced." The author's next move ("Anamorphosis does resemble chess in that it sets a problem which is both geometrical and aesthetic, in the same way that a chess problem goes beyond mere chess theory to reach an aesthetic dimension"), shall acquire its full meaning at the conclusion of his article  There are excellent examples of catoptric anamorphosis. For me, the author's great find concerns Paul Hentzner and its connection to M.McCarthy's "red King pattern"** 

 

The anamorphic reading of Pale Fire leads the author to localize the novel's "dead center" in relation to Holbein's Vanitas, the anamorphic skull painted in the "dead center" of "The Amassadors" Noting that Brian Boyd calls Hazel’s demise 'the dead center' of the poem" (MAD, 129).he'll argue that she could be Pale Fire’s internal author and that her “resurrection” is "a literary transposition of the rule of promotion at chess: when a pawn reaches the final rank of the chessboard, it transforms itself into the piece that the player chooses (except the King)" Hazel, having reached "the final square of her personal board (the lake) is also promoted to a Queen (the queen of the book)." In his opinion "Hazel may be a more valid option than Shade and Kinbote as internal author of the whole book."

 

The author examines four hypotheses related to the question about "who is Hazel? What are we to make of a character who fakes her own death and writes a poem and its commentary under two different aliases, impersonating both an ageing poet and a madman posing as an exiled king? Envisaging Hazel as the author of Pale Fire implies that we reconstruct a context that is plausible enough to accommodate this major change in the book’s narrative structure." He recognizes the peril lurking in his suggestion that "neither Shade nor Kinbote ever existed," because this entails in the conclusion that "everything is an invention.".

 

For him, the "figurative reading of 'dead center' might be a character who, like Death, incarnated by Holbein’s skull, is omnipresent in the novel, yet difficult to identify (unless we adopt the right angle), hiding in plain sight." He then proceeds to identify the mysterious character, when he dwells about how "Kinbote, in the Foreword, Commentary and Index, tries hard to convince the reader that his story has three central characters, all male: John Shade, Jakob Gradus, and himself" whereas a "closer reading suggests that he bypasses one element of the Pale Fire equation: Sybil Shade." As he points out, Sybil Shade is one of the three main characters of the poem (the other two being Hazel and John Shade)" and, although easy to overlook, she "is omnipresent in Pale Fire."  In Kinbote's Index she occupies a verys little space (“Shade, Sybil, S’s wife, passim”) - although "Passim" means “here and there,” showing that "Sybil is present literally 'here and there,' virtually on every single page. And one reason why she may indeed be everywhere, although her name does not appear on every page, could be that she wrote every page. This deduction is also consistent with a chess reading of the novel."

 

Another striking comprobation is found "on a combination of the ornithological comparison and a slight grammatical change of perspective, which again recalls our anamorphic theme. Let us imagine for a moment that “I” on lines 1 and 3 does not refer to John Shade – or not exclusively to him – but, in the contrapuntal (hence polyphonic) structure of the poem, to Sybil as well.  Sybil (the swallow) would then be the shadow of the waxwing (John Shade) slain by the false azure in the windowpane...she is the poet’s wife, standing in the shadow of the great man, invisible by nature. .. the authorial voice of the poem could be Sybil’s, and John Shade a mere mask." According to him, and against "all odds, the author of Pale Fire, this vastly enigmatic text, might therefore be the poet’s wife, Sybil." He thinks that "exposing Sybil as the real poet might be one way for Nabokov to pay homage to Véra, his wife and most faithful support, by acknowledging in his fiction the decisive role she played in his literary career.".R. Alladaye's concludes that there are "two Queens on a board" and that establishing "Holbein’s The Ambassadors as a pictorial subtext of Pale Fire, and anamorphosis as a key device to understand its intricate workings leads us, therefore, to a renewed perception of the question of internal authorship. Yet as all solvers know, a chess."

 

In my opinion, René Alladaye lays too much stress on the anamorphic importance of Holbein's painting, even when he describes it as a "pictorial sub-text" that he painstakingly (successfully?) manages to establish as such. For me, the anamorphic motifs and rethoric in general are important (not only in Pale Fire but in many other Nabokov novels) and their distortions and corrections shouldn't be restricted to a specific painting (would Nabokov resort to an allegory?). 

 

Since his interpretation of "Pale Fire's" relation to "The Ambassadors" makes him disagree with the limits he encountered in Priscilla Meyer's and Jeff Hoffman’s study “Infinite Reflections in Pale Fire: The Danish Connection (Hans Andersen and Isak Dinesen)” [ Russian Literature XLI, 1997: 197-221)], this is where our paths seem to diverge. Quoting him once again: After "briefly delineating the contours of Shadean and Kinbotean approaches, the article seems to suggest that the quest for sole authorship may not be the best choice: attributing both poem and commentary to either Shade or Kinbote deprives the novel of the tension engendered by their opposition, and since the text is 'predicated on [this] tension' (201), relinquishing it appears as a major drawback." For R.Alladaye, although their  "position... is perfectly tenable, my perspective here differs as the connection I see between Pale Fire and The Ambassadors leads me to another perception of the question of authorship in the novel." However, his special perspective doesn't, in fact, eliminate the tension that's engendered by the opposition between two characters, because he is introducing a different pair of "contenders": instead of Shade and Kinbote, he posits Hazel and Sybil. Chess.  

 

Recently, some of the N-L participants expressed their preoccupation about Nabokov character's "ontological status" in his fiction. When all the characters in a novel are only "inventions," created by a fictionally real character whose presence is often undetected, the entire novel, as a work of fiction, hinges on the matter of encountering a "real voice" that is not the Author's and his clever masks and impersonations. I fail to register Sybil's, but I can hear John Shade's and Charles Kinbote's ( at times).

 

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* - Nabokov Online Journal, Vol. VI (2012)

 

** (1) "In the novel, Paul Hentzner is a farmer with whom Shade used to take walks ...And although Kinbote feels nothing but disdain for him... J. Baltrusaitis confirms that Hentzner’s presence should be noted for another reason: a Paul Hentzner (1558-1623) authored a volume entitled Itinerarium Germaniae, Galliae, Angliae, Italiae, originally published in Breslau in 1617 – the date that Kinbote mentions in his note about Sybil’s translations of poems into French – and later republished by Horace Walpole as A Journey into England in the Year MDXCVIII in 1757. The book contains a description of the anamorphic portrait of Edward VI by Willem Scrots which, although executed after The Ambassadors (in 1546), is often mentioned in connection to Holbein’s work. Unobtrusive Paul Hentzner therefore provides yet another link between Pale Fire and anamorphosis."

(2)  Mary McCarthy's “the red King pattern.” according to which, "Charles II of England (1630-1685) is a possible source for Charles II of Zembla. This remark is brought out in bold relief when one learns that an anamorphic portrait of Charles II was painted some time after 1660 on which the monarch appears clad in a bright red robe lined with ermine."