After “Pale Fire”, a Nabokov fan is born

With the first few pages turned, I have finished reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. The “Introduction” by Richard Rorty is rather ironically named and placed, because it is an assessment and analysis of Pale Fire, it assumes that the reader has read through the book, and thus the “Introduction” are the last words to be read. I realize what Richard Rorty, Professor of The Humanities at the University of Virginia, has explicated is far better than what I can ever articulate on the novel. That discouraged me a bit from writing too long of a critique, but I do have a few things I want to say. Pale Fire has been one of the most peculiar reads my mind has ever had the pleasure of wrestling with. The novel is more like a collection of few short stories, along with a large poem, somehow bundled up into one package and labeled with a very reflective title Pale Fire. I share the same sentiment as Richard Rorty said in the Introduction, that is, Charles Kinbote’s deviations into grand distant tales were far more interesting than the actual poem at hand and the occasional proper commentary. But while reading Richard Rorty trying to make sense of Pale Fire and Nabokov with deep and philosophical ideas such as the book denting reality and “arranged for us to forget” what matters the most (Dolores Haze of Lolita and Hazel Shade of Pale Fire he argues), I chuckle a bit in dubiety, and I bet the ghost of Nabokov did too if he happened to have read the Introduction while hovering besides me or some other soul with the book. I am reminded of what Nabokov once said in his essay called “On a book called Lolita“:

“Teachers of Literature are apt to think up such problems as ‘What is the author’s purpose?’ or still worse ‘What is the guy trying to say?’ Now, I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no other purpose than to rid of that book and who, when asked to explain its origin and growth, has to rely on such ancient terms as Interreaction of Inspiration and Combination – which, I admit, sounds like a conjurer explaining one trick by performing another.”

With this in mind, literary critics and teachers, being the answer seekers they are, chase after Nabokov’s messages that does not truly exist but are only illusionary phantoms arising from Nabokov’s richly elaborate anecdotes and entities that he contructs. Did you hear that? That sounded like a chortle from Nabokov’s spirit. But regardless, after reading Lolita and Pale Fire, there is no denying that he is a skillfully eloquent writer who’s self-aware of his own astute brain. His works has been very intellectually satisfying, and from today on I am a staunch Nabokov fan and defender. For those of you who are still virgins to his writing, taste a sample of him here. I do have one expectation of Nabokov, so I have set a goal for myself: to read all of Nabokov’s works, from Mary to Look at the Harlequins!, in an effort to scry out what really is, or could be, Nabokov’s definition of “art”.