Pale Fire - shallow diaphanous filth

Nabokov has open contempt for systems that dehumanize people: bureaucracies, totalitarian ape-men, Freudian psychoanalysis. Is sex the thing that drives people, hammered into acceptability by culture, creating epiphenomena we aggrandize as noble? Or is sex a thing that, in our culture, gets in the way of a core of something else, something very human?

Kinbote, the perhaps king, has a recurring dream of a woman, Disa, who in his 'real' life is unaccountably loyal and caring for this petty man, a spoiled adolescent accustomed to using people as accessories to his fantastical self indulgence. Dreams are a picture into the conflicts inside of human-animals to the Freudians, desperate wailings of the animal caught in the cage of human culture. But in Pale Fire, the dream comes from the artist in humanity trying to show the way to being human:

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 affecting at all his attitude towards the real Disa. (p209)

The king had to marry, but lusted after boys and men. He took this woman, lied to her, tormented her, debased her, used her, dismissed her. He couldn't be aroused by her because of his sexuality, but he couldn't be kind or honest with her because he was petty and inhuman. "The Disa [in his dreams]… forever remained exactly as she looked on the day he had first told her he did not love her,"

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. … 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. (p210)

The shallow, diaphanous filth? Later he says:

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 had betrayed her, and even so the sexual scum remained somewhere far above the sunken treasure and was quite unimportant. (p210)

The next paragraphs are quite beautiful, allowing this unpleasant user of people the feelings of tenderness, of empathy, of loss at not being able to receive this woman's gifts because of the crowd of easy pleasures and indulgences that he takes as his due. These nobler feelings only approach in his dream, a dream that haunts him. But in daily life, he cannot feel anything but contempt or irritation about anyone but himself, excepting the 'doppleganger' of the book, the great American poet, John Shade, whom the king's demented mind loops into being his personal Boswell (the chronicler of Samuel Johnson), a poet worthy to sing his story to an ignorant public.

Pale Fire - a group of subversive pseudo-cupids

Here's one: The main character, a self-absorbed, apparently mentally unstable, and desperate man, a homosexual, a professor, comments on two ads from the "family magazine, Life,"

so justly named for its pudibundity in regard to the mysteries of the male sex; hence one can well imagine how startled or titillated those families were. … The second [advertizement] comes from the issue of March,28, 1949, p. 126, and advertises Hanes Fig Leaf Brief. It shows a modern Eve worshipfully peeping from behind a potted tree of knowledge at a leering young Adam in rather ordinary but clean underwear, with the front of his advertised brief conspicuously and compactly shaded, and the inscription reads: Nothing beats a fig leaf. (p115)

And just as your chuckle dies down a bit, at this comic, demented figure, pointing out what you might take as a peccadillo of modern culture, you read

I think there must exist a special subversive group of pseudo-cupids--plump hairless little devils whom Satan comissions to make disgusting mischief in sacrosanct places. (p115)

Well, I agree. Deep inside, I agree. Do you? Can you dismiss this man? Make sport of him?

[You may have to look up 'pudibundity'. I did: Prudish. Shy or strict in behavior.

Pale fire

Recently finished a second reading of my favorite book, Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov. Want to record a few thoughts. My first is to note that I wonder why I put up with this thing. Like a good friend who is sweet and difficult at the same time. I let it inside my mind, then it fingers every little thought, putting them back slightly out of place. This book amazes me and brings out some of my most delicate thinking, but also makes me doubt that I have a stable mind.

Nabokov seems to mock almost everything, almost everybody, almost. But in the middle of this unstoppable attack, there is an insight into decency and kindness. And nobody I've come across puts down words like this, like a master mosaicist selecting the exactly correct tile.

I'm looking at the First Vintage International edition, April 1989. First published in 1962.