An excerpt from Pale Fire:
“Line 680: Lolita [swept from Florida to Maine.]
Major hurricanes are given feminine names in America. The gender is suggested not so much by the sex of furies and harridans as by a general professional application. Thus any machine is a she to its fond user, any fire (even a “pale” one!) is she to the fireman, as water is she to the passionate plumber. Why our poet chose to give his 1958 hurricane a little-used Spanish name (sometimes given to parrots) instead of Linda or Lois, is not clear.”
Heh heh, after reading this passage, I understand with some affirmation as to why critics call Pale Fire “…the wildest, the funniest” and “A monstrous, witty, intricately entertaining work…”, exaggerated praises written on the back of the novel cover.
Aside from the minor snicker of the exclaimation in parenthesis, I will spoil the joke for those of you who are scratching your heads (I’m guessing, that’s most of you, save for the few exceptional readers), even though I know it’s an impeding disaster when I first went over the explanation in my mind. Nabokov is both the author of the notorious Lolita and the lesser known Pale Fire, where Pale Fire is a latter work written after Lolita. Here, Nabokov is writing as a peculiar cerebral scholar (a common theme, or should I say more precisely, a reoccurring archetype character of his works) commenting and analyzing the poem of Pale Fire. The words in the brackets were not present in the commentary section of the book of which I’ve quoted, but I have given the full sentence from the poem here to make clear of its context and meaning. Obviously the line refers to Nabokov’s own work Lolita. But the humour arises because the commentator, behind him written by Nabokov of course, is apparently not aware of the existence of a novel called Lolita, utilizing the fact that Nabokov is not truly writing through himself but through a character, a character that could have not read or read about Lolita yet. It’s absurd yet plausible at the same time! Sigh, somehow elucidating the workings of the joke saps away all its comedic value. It’s one of those things that are only funny to those who are “in the know”. The main caveat of Nabokov’s highbrow humour like this that pervades Lolita and Pale Fire, and perhaps other novels of his that I have not read yet, is that it may be superficially seen as elitist. Honestly, I do not feel anything intrinsically haughty about his humour; it just merely exists at a higher sophistication and complexity (think of poor misunderstood Shinku). I suppose it’s simply a consequence of the relation that things increasingly intellectual also inadvertently gains a greater tendency to be perceived as pretentious. Oh well.
Muir Woods 