Jansy Mello has kindly translated a few paragraphs from Ermelinda Ferreira's essay "O leitor no texto," recently mentioned in a post, into English.  Here is Ferreira's discussion of Pale Fire as a self-reflexive or "metaphysical" detective story.  Her essay can be found in the original Portuguese online here.

Excerpt from "The Reader in the Text" by Ermelinda Ferreira (2005)

 

[. . .] The same resource is used by Vladimir Nabokov in Pale Fire (1962) and by Italo Calvino in If On a Winter Night a Traveller (1979), when they discuss the status of the novel genre in the light of modern aesthetics and reception.  Inserting into the form of the detective novel a discussion with a theoretical and critical basis—concerning the destinies of authors and fictional narratives, in a universe loaded with deconstructionists and constructivists who make the text a victim of its own plot—they transform the argument into a parody of contemporary attitudes toward reading and literary criticism.

In the first instance, with a great sense of humor, Nabokov, under the guise of a visiting lecturer at an American university, satirically disrobes the trappings of academia, producing a critical edition of a poem by a recently deceased poet, professor, and celebrated writer. The “criticism,” which actually takes the form of a detective story—here under the guise, pretext, and appearance of a conventional literary study—is simultaneously hilarious as a parody and effective as a narrative.

Nabokov, in this critical dimension, achieves exactly what the most radical theories of reading propose to do: he over-interprets the poem (simulating an analysis of a formalist-biographical type) to the point of fatally dismembering it and dissolving it in sulfuric acid, so that after his murderous study no real clue about the cadaver remains. Not even the ashes from the poem, strangely named “Pale Fire,” are left, and not even a shadow of its author, curiously called John Shade, but only the enthusiastic fulminations of an envious critic, a king in disguise, who wishes to become an author himself. [. . .]

What is interesting to emphasize at this point is Calvino’s and Nabokov’s insistence on using the model of the novel as raw material for their stories, revitalizing it under different shapes, dissolving various styles, and mixing together all kinds of elements involved in the complex “system of literature.” [. . .]

Ironically or not, in truth, their writings not only designate themselves as “novels” but they also present themselves as literary works. [. . .]  In this way they offer a gift to the partisans of literary homicide by offering a body to modern critics, since “there is no crime in the absence of the body.”  Cruel or kind-hearted, Little Jack Horner won’t be able to pursue his pranks when there is no pie in front of him to provoke his instincts.  This is why Charles Kinbote, in Nabokov’s novel, insistently prompts the poet John Shade to have him write the text that will become the object of his analysis. [. . .]  Such analysis is carried out by Kinbote himself, expressing, like Borges, the strict opposite of what he intends to do: “I have no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel.”  Ironically, this is exactly what the reader can obtain from his reading, probably one of the most radical examples of the consequences of the practice of constructivism.  After all, as foreseen by Shade, in his verses:

But all at once it dawned on me that this

Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;

Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream

But topsy-turvical coincidence,

Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense.

Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find

Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind

Of correlated pattern in the game,

Plexed artistry, and something of the same

Pleasure in it as they who played it found.

In this way Kinbote, as a critic, takes possession of Shade’s poem in order to use the poet’s fame to promote his own writings: the story of “Zembla,” his homeland, and the history of Charles the Beloved, a Zemblan king anonymously exiled in the United States who is actually Kinbote.  The sincerity with which he “constructs” his reading as independent of the original poem is only comparable to the cynicism with which he insists in using his text as itself the origin of his own “reading.”