NPPF - Foreword - Summary / Commentary (1)

[Jasper Fidget]

The Foreword acts in some ways as sort of an overture for the novel; all the
themes are more or less here in miniature, paraded around on the eloquent
madness of Kinbote's prose.  The first few pages take the reader from an
initial sense of normalcy -- an academic introduction to a work of
literature by a critical scholar -- through gradual stages of disorientation
until it becomes clear that Kinbote isn't what he pretends to be.  The
narrator's personality, complete with its delusions, mad convictions, and
persecution mania, intrudes upon the writing, batters its form, but also
moves the narrative forward.

The first such intrusions are subtle: the "amusing birds", the odd and
inexplicable "your favorite" and "shocking tour de force" in paragraph two,
the first-person pronoun and shift in diction in the next paragraph, none of
which are enough to keep the sudden intrusion at the end of that paragraph
from being completely jarring: "There is a very loud amusement park right in
front of my present lodgings," much as it must be for Kinbote, given that
*it* has intruded into the text, has taken the narrator over for a moment.
Plainly, the circumstances of K's composition, and those of his mind, will
continue to influence the story.  See page 28 where he complains: "that
carrousel [is] inside and outside my head."

The amusement park has several other implications: 1) Kinbote is not quite
right in the head; 2) the text we read has not been professionally edited or
proofed -- seeming like a manuscript; and 3) Kinbote is also a character in
this work.

The normally rigid border between art and life -- the circumstances in which
art is created -- have been blurred, vividly and abruptly, very *loudly* as
it were.  In parallel, one of Kinbote's main themes is his striving to merge
with art, to enter the poem, to become a fairy tale, mirrored by his
obsessive attempts to intrude on Shade's personal life.

Page 13:
"Pale Fire, a poem in heroic couplets, of nine hundred ninety-nine lines,
divided into four cantos":  a poem in heroic couplets with 999 lines?  One
may be rightfully perplexed before the end of the first sentence.  Boyd
points out it's like saying "that a family has nine children, all twins"
(_Magic of Artistic Discovery_, 17).

Pale Fire is at once the name of the poem, the name of what Kinbote offers
as the larger work, and ultimately the name of VN's work.

Kinbote with this volume presents "Pale Fire" the poem to the public for the
first time.  Here begins a theme about the role and function of criticism
for art and within art.  One might construe it as a particularly dim view,
but is it really?  VN had his share of grumbles in relation to critics, but
has published his own critical work on Pushkin.

John Francis Shade --> John Francis Key: why is the key missing from the
name?  (Hiding in the shade?)  The key to what?  Where's the key to John
Shade?

Obviously much can be made of the name "Shade".  It reminds one of "Haze"
from Lolita; it has a sense of secrecy and ambiguity.  It can (and will be)
linked to "shadow".  A shade is also something you might pull down in front
of a window, frustrating all the little Kinbotes out there.  Windows are an
important prop in PF, as is other kinds of glass.

Wordsworth is implied through "New Wye" (see Forward - Notes); WW wants to
end the 18th century, destroy the heroic couplet, and writes to himself of
himself like Shade.

Sybil's name (see Forward - Notes), had the three main stages of western
movement in it: Sybil (Scandinavia) --> Irondell (France) --> Shade
(America).

Canto One: 166 lines on 13 index cards.  Kinbote is amused by the birds.  He
might have also noted the preponderance of trees in Canto One: larch(16),
hickory(34), no tree(43), shagbark(49).

Canto Two: 334 lines on 27 index cards.  This is "your favorite".  Whose
favorite?  Is Kinbote predicting the reader's response?  Or is he speaking
to someone in particular?  (Proponents of the Shade-wrote-it-all theory --
the "Shadeans" -- will claim the pronoun refers to Sybil since Canto Two has
mostly to do with her and Hazel, and because VN refers to his wife Véra in
this manner in Speak Memory.)

Canto Three: 334 lines on 27 index cards.  "That shocking tour de force".
Why shocking?  Presumably to Kinbote because of its ruminations on God and
afterlife?

Canto Four: 166 lines (-1) on 13 index cards.  "the last four [cards] give a
Corrected Draft instead of a Fair Copy."  Second indication that all is not
well at the end of the poem's composition.

Page 14:
On page 14 we have our first example of Kinbote asserting his own certainty
about Shade's poem in the face of dubious evidence.  The last third of the
text of Canto 4, we are told, is "extremely rough in appearance, teeming
with devastating erasures and cataclysmic insertions," but these strong
adjectives notwithstanding, Kinbote insists the text is "beautifully
accurate."  Indeed, it is exactly their questionable quality that seems to
make Kinbote all the more certain -- a man more in tune with his own beliefs
and convictions than with facts and evidence.  Or perhaps this is Kinbote's
"tell", the indication we as readers will have that he might be bluffing, or
even lying.  He retreats into more colorful language at these moments: "the
limpid depths under its confused surface", and acquires an accusatory tone:
"compel yourself to open your eyes".

By the second page then, Kinbote has become querulous and argumentative,
very different from the narrator of the first page, and this sets the tone
for his conflict over the manuscript and his role as the poem's commentator.

"None can say how long John Shade planned his poem to be, but it is not
improbable that what he left represents only a small fraction of the
composition he saw in a glass, darkly."  

An attack by K's opposition in regard to Shade's intention for "Pale Fire",
that Prof H. uses the word "none" must be particularly grating to K., given
his tenuous hold on being a real person.  Also note another glass reference,
and this time obscured, unknowable.

akaJasperFidget