The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Vladimir Nabokov · a novel in four parts: a foreword, a poem of 999 lines in four cantos, a commentary and an index · G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962 · scored on Nabokov’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Novel as critical edition; elegy, comic romance of a lost kingdom, campus satire and murder story in one apparatus
Mythos
The lost kingdom and the exiled king’s dream of return; the moon that steals its pale fire from the sun; the shade, the double and the reflection taken for the real; a fate that advances by steps
Phase
The last weeks of John Shade’s life, to the shot of 21 July 1959, within which the poem is dated; the Zemblan past and the assassin’s journey told alongside in the commentary
Presentation
Fiction in four parts, in this order: a foreword signed by Charles Kinbote; a poem of 999 lines in heroic couplets in four cantos, by John Shade; a commentary keyed to the poem’s line numbers; an index; the last three by Kinbote
Register
From Shade’s plain, Popean couplet to Kinbote’s florid, wounded, snobbish and lyrical prose; elegy, farce, mock scholarship and the index entry
Scale
Two houses and a campus seen from a window, and a kingdom of mirrors
Governing Proposition
A poet in a college town writes a poem of 999 lines about his life, his daughter’s death and what may survive it, and is shot before he can finish; an émigré scholar who gives himself out as the exiled king of a northern country edits the poem, and in his commentary tells instead the story of his kingdom, his escape and the assassin he says was sent after him. The wager of the novel is that every commentary is partly the commentator’s autobiography, that a mind can build a kingdom out of what it misreads, and that a book made as an edition, its plot recoverable only from the margins, can make the reader feel that appropriation from inside, while a plain grief stands untouched in the poem.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book opens as an edition. A Foreword signed by Charles Kinbote, an émigré scholar at the college in New Wye, presents the last poem of John Shade, a poet of the same town, written in the last weeks of his life in July 1959. Then comes the poem. Then comes Kinbote’s Commentary on it, keyed to its line numbers, and then Kinbote’s Index. Before a line of the poem has been read, the Foreword states the terms on which all of it will be read, in a sentence that the book will turn against the man who writes it: “for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word”.
The parts are unequal. The poem, “Pale Fire”, is 999 lines of rhymed couplets in iambic pentameter, in four cantos, and it is a small part of the book; the Commentary is by far the largest. The title comes from Timon of Athens, where the moon is named a thief of light: “the moon’s an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun” (4.3). Kinbote, who has no English Shakespeare with him, does not recognise where the poem’s title comes from. The editor misses the source of the very words he is editing, and the figure he misses is the figure of what he does.
The book was published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in New York in 1962, and by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in London the same year. Nothing in it is told straight. The reader moves from a note to the line it glosses, from the index to a note, from one note to another, and the story runs in none of the four parts alone. The poem stops at its 999th line. An odd number of lines leaves the last without its rhyme: the thousandth, which would close the couplet, is not there.
Movement II
The poem begins: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane”. A bird has flown into the sky reflected in a window and been killed by it, and the poet speaks as its shadow, the life that goes on after it. A life ended by a reflection taken for the real, and a voice that speaks as that life’s shade: the first two lines hold what the rest of the book will do.
What follows is a real poem, and a plain one. It tells one life in four cantos, in a couplet descended from Pope and loosened by a plainness like Frost’s: Shade’s life in New Wye, with his wife Sybil, the one stable love in the book, and their daughter Hazel. Its finish is uneven. There are flat stretches, and there are passages of high finish, and the voice is everywhere unlike the voice that will annotate it.
The second canto tells Hazel’s last evening. Her parents sit at home before the television, and their evening is told in couplets interleaved with her bus journey and her walk into the lake, so that each line of the one is set against a line of the other. She drowns herself. The grief is given without play, and it is the centre the rest of the book will circle: the thing set against the Commentary’s king.
Movement III
In the third canto Shade writes of an institute for preparing for the hereafter, and then of his own collapse, near death, in which he saw a fountain. Later he reads in a magazine of a woman who had seen the same, and then finds that her account said “mountain”: a misprint. The vision rises and falls in one movement, the hope raised by a coincidence and undone by an error of type.
Shade does not end in despair. What he takes from the misprint is a pattern: the meaning lies “not text, but texture”, in “a web of sense”, the work of some “plexed artistry” behind the coincidence. The same canto describes the book before its commentator arrives: “Man’s life as commentary to abstruse / Unfinished poem”. The poet has stated his faith, and the novel has stated its form, in one breath.
The poem reaches a guarded hope, “I’m reasonably sure that we survive”, and its last canto has Shade expect to wake on the twenty-second of July, 1959. He is shot on the twenty-first. The poem stops at line 999, its last line waiting for the rhyme the thousandth would have given, and what the book calls the last word passes to the commentator.
Movement IV
What the Commentary finds in the poem is Zembla: a northern land of mirrors, its king overthrown in a revolution and gone into exile. Kinbote gives himself out as that king, and he is a lonely, mocked émigré at a provincial college. Note by note, keyed to lines about a waxwing, a daughter and a marriage, he tells the story of his kingdom, his court and his flight, and the book never confirms a word of it.
The romance is told at length and in farce. The king escapes the palace in red wool, through a secret passage and over the mountains. His amours return again and again. There is a Zemblan language, and there are long notes on the palace, and Kinbote tells them in a prose wholly unlike Shade’s: florid, wounded, snobbish, lyrical, paranoid, betraying itself at exactly the moments it least intends.
Through it all comes Gradus, the assassin the revolutionary Extremists send abroad, whose name means a step. The notes on him are dated against the days of the poem’s composition and placed so that, as the poem nears its end, he draws nearer by degrees. The act of annotation becomes a countdown, and the line numbers become a clock. The poem and the assassin approach their end together.
Movement V
Shade is shot on 21 July 1959. Told plainly, it is a poet’s accidental death; told by Kinbote, it is the end of the assassin’s road. His last notes turn to his own solitude and his foreseen end, in a cold pathos the farce has not prepared, and the commentator who took the last word is left alone with it.
The Index follows, in Kinbote’s voice to the end. It gives his last disguises away and half admits that he is V. Botkin, a Russian scholar at the college. Its last entry is the kingdom: “Zembla, a distant northern land”. The truth about Kinbote is never stated anywhere in the book. The reader assembles it, or fails to, from the poem’s silences, the Commentary’s slips and the Index’s entries, and the question of who wrote what stays open.
The title names the figure that governs the whole: the moon, an arrant thief, takes its pale fire from the sun. The commentator takes his light from the poet and does not know where his own title comes from; the poem takes its pattern from coincidence and finds it a web of sense. The first lines spoke as the shadow of a bird killed by a false sky, and the book that follows them is that shadow at its full length: a mind that takes a reflection for the real, and in the middle of it a grief that stands plain, beside a kingdom made of mirrors.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and it bites less here than on almost any novel of the book’s size, because the book is two texts locked together and each is the other’s evidence. The poem cannot go: it is the thing commented on, and its plain grief is the measure of the commentator’s appropriation. The Zemblan romance cannot go: it is what Kinbote reads into the poem, and the book’s argument lives in the gap. The notes on the assassin, placed so that he draws nearer as the poem nears its end, carry the plot; even the index closes the book in Kinbote’s voice and gives his last disguises away. Where the test bites: the palace and escape notes run longer than the counterpoint needs, the king’s amours repeat one joke, and some notes are wordplay that the design permits rather than compels, perhaps a tenth of the whole.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Three disclosures can be stated, and each holds. The first is the reader’s tyranny over the text: Kinbote reads into Shade’s poem the kingdom he has lost, and the book shows every commentary to be partly the commentator’s autobiography, a truth it puts in his own mouth: “for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word”. The second is the exile’s self-making: a lonely, mocked émigré at a provincial college builds a royal past that the book never confirms, and the delusion is shown as dignity and wound together. The third is Shade’s: grief for a daughter who drowned herself, and a search for meaning that ends in a pattern found in coincidence. The book’s strongest pages are its least playful. Held off the top because part of the disclosure is of a stance toward meaning rather than of a social condition, and much of the book’s knowledge concerns texts and their readers, a narrower field than the social novel’s.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Elevation comes often, mostly as beauty and pathos, and once as something higher. The opening couplet is a summit at the first line: a bird killed by a reflected sky, and the poet speaking as that bird’s afterlife. The book’s height is the second canto’s account of Hazel’s last evening, her parents at home before the television in couplets interleaved with her bus journey and her walk into the lake: grief made by counterpoint. The third canto’s vision of a fountain, and its undoing by a misprint, rises and falls in one movement. Kinbote’s last notes, his solitude and his foreseen end, reach a cold pathos. Held below the higher reaches because the commentary’s ruling register is comedy, much of it deliberate absurdity, and long stretches of play lie between the transports.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Myth is built in two places. The lost kingdom: Zembla, a northern land of mirrors and exile, is paradise lost and the exiled king’s dream of return, and it bears the weight of the commentary as its structure, not its decoration. The thief and the light: the figure from Timon of Athens, the moon that snatches its pale fire from the sun, governs the relation of commentator to poet, and of every reflected art to its source. Around them the shade and the double, the waxwing killed by its reflection, and the assassin Gradus, whose name means a step and who advances as a fate by degrees, are woven through the book rather than hung on it. What holds the axis at the bar is that the archetypes are worked out through literary self-consciousness, patterns the book plays with as well as builds, and neither Shade nor Kinbote acquires a weight beyond his book.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance is real: Pope’s Dunciad Variorum (1729), a poem buried under mock scholarship; Swift’s A Tale of a Tub; Sterne; Borges’s fictions of encyclopedias and invented books; and Nabokov’s own commentary on Eugene Onegin, written in the same years and published in 1964. The turn is that none of these made the apparatus the novel: a full, plausible poem of 999 lines, then a commentary in which a second story, a third and a murder plot are told only through the misreading of the first, with the reader left to establish what happened from the margins. The stake was real: the first novel after the fame of Lolita, it refused every expectation that fame had made and asked a general readership to read a book as an edition. Held off the very top because Pope and Borges had opened the ground, and the scholar’s own labour made the form less of a leap for him than it looks.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Change the form and the book knows nothing. Told as a straight novel, the story is an émigré’s delusion and a poet’s accidental death; told as poem and commentary, it becomes an argument about reading, made by the reader’s own experience of reading it. The truth about Kinbote is never stated: it is assembled by the reader from the poem’s silences, the commentary’s slips and the index’s entries, so the form is the method of the knowledge. Setting a poem about grief beside a commentary about a king makes the reader feel the violence of appropriation from inside. The notes on the assassin turn the act of annotation into the countdown to a death, and the line numbers are its clock. Even the missing thousandth line is form at work. Held just short of the highest figure only because some of the apparatus’s play, the cross-references and certain index jokes, delights more than it knows.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, and the evidence is long. Over sixty years the book has supported rival readings of its own basic facts, none settled: that Kinbote is who he says; that he is V. Botkin, a Russian scholar at the college, as the index half admits; that Shade invented Kinbote; that Kinbote invented Shade; and Brian Boyd’s argument, in Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery (Princeton, 1999), that the dead, Hazel and Shade’s Aunt Maud, shape the text from beyond, a reading Boyd later revised himself. Mary McCarthy’s review of 1962 began the excavation and found layers that later readers still argue over. The formal yield matches the semantic: on return the poem reads differently, its waxwings, mirrors and coincidences answering what only the commentary reveals. Held below the summit only because a share of the return is puzzle-solving, a yield that narrows once a puzzle is solved.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The field is the novel of the 1960s, which the book entered in 1962, so force and reach are scored together. The force is a real reorganisation of possibility: the book showed that a novel could take the form of a critical edition, that its plot could live in the margins, that the reader’s work of reconstruction could be the experience, and that a text could be built as a web of cross-references to be read out of order. Two things hold it below the top: the reach is shared with Borges, whose fictions came first, and much of what followed took the manner of the apparatus more than the book’s grief. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book is a founding text of the metafiction of the 1960s and after, beside Borges and Barth; the annotated, footnoted and apparatus-built fiction that followed descends from it in part; and it is regularly cited as a forerunner of hypertext.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over sixty-four years. The text survives whole, as published. The book has been in print continuously since 1962, is taught as a central text of postwar fiction and of metafiction, and has been translated widely. Its surface is barely fixed to its moment: the college and the Cold War kingdom are setting, not dependence. Charged against it: its presence is narrower than that of the widest-read novels of its decades, Nabokov’s own most famous book among them, and it lives among serious readers and in the academy more than across the culture. Sixty-four years show survival without showing the centuries behind the summit, and a presence of this width sets the axis at the foot of what that span can carry.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged on Nabokov’s English, with no translation between, and the making bears weight at every level. The poem is a real poem: 999 lines in a Popean couplet loosened by a plainness like Frost’s, with passages of high finish (the waxwing, Hazel’s evening, the fountain) and one life told coherently in four movements. The commentary is a second voice wholly unlike the first: florid, wounded, snobbish, lyrical, paranoid, its self-betrayals placed with exact timing, so that the reader learns from what Kinbote cannot help saying. Interleaving the assassin’s journey with the dates of composition is a structural feat, and the index is comedy and evidence at once. Charged: the poem is uneven by design and also by result, with flat stretches in the first and fourth cantos; puns and private games sometimes clog the commentary; and the Zemblan language is whimsy at length.
Score: 9.2 / 10
One law governs: pattern, reflection and coincidence, and the question whether they mean. Take the two most distant elements: the farce of the Zemblan palace, the king escaping in red wool through a secret passage and over the mountains, and the drowning of Hazel Shade. They obey the same law. Each is a story of a shadow seeking its source, a reflection taken for the real, and each is told through mirrors: the windowpane, the lake, the false azure. Shade’s discovery in the third canto, “plexed artistry” and “a web of sense”, states the law the whole book keeps, and it holds across a range from slapstick to elegy. Held below the top because the question of who wrote what is left undecidable by design, so that some facts of the fiction cannot be settled, and a few seams, among them Kinbote’s knowledge of things he could not have known, read as easily as looseness as design.
Score: 9.1 / 10
For a short book it holds many orders, and it holds them through two minds. Consciousness, in two radically different forms. The family: Shade’s marriage to Sybil, the one stable love in the book, and the life and death of a daughter. The academy, its gossip and its cruelty. The state, in the Zemblan revolution, the Extremists and an assassin sent abroad, a Cold War kingdom in miniature. Exile, Nabokov’s own subject. The sacred, in the third canto’s institute for preparing for the hereafter, Shade’s vision and Kinbote’s religion. The natural order, in birds, butterflies and weather. They are integrated: every order passes through the question of what survives and what is reflection. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is missing: labour, class and the wider social body are nearly absent, the state is half fantasy, and the book’s world is two houses and a campus seen from a window.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.4, The Bottomless Well at 9.3 and The Made at 9.2. A form in which the truth about the commentator is never stated and must be assembled by the reader from the poem’s silences, the commentary’s slips and the index; sixty years of rival readings of the book’s own basic facts, none settled; and two voices wholly unlike, a poem in strict couplets and a florid commentary whose self-betrayals are exactly timed, locked together by the dates of composition.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.2: consciousness, the family, the academy, the state, exile, the sacred and the natural order are held through two minds, but labour, class and the wider social body are nearly absent, the state is half fantasy, and the world is two houses and a campus. Next above it, The Archetypal Deep at 8.5: the lost kingdom and the thief of light are built into the structure, but worked through a literary self-consciousness that plays with its patterns as well as building them.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.4, The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.1, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8, The Imperishable at 8.8 and The Unconcealment at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep meets it exactly at 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.5, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.2. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.9.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, in 1962, and by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, the same year. It is scored as one work in four parts, in this order: a Foreword signed by Charles Kinbote; “Pale Fire”, a poem of 999 lines in heroic couplets in four cantos, by John Shade; a Commentary on the poem by Kinbote, keyed to its line numbers; and an Index by Kinbote, which is part of the fiction. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Nabokov’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the opening couplet, the Foreword’s sentence on the commentator, the phrases and the two lines from the third canto, the poem’s line on survival, and the last entry of the Index; the title’s lines are quoted from Timon of Athens, 4.3. The Commentary is known here by its main thread and its set pieces; the order of its shorter notes is beyond this reading, and nothing is argued from a note that cannot be placed. Brian Boyd’s study and Mary McCarthy’s review are cited as the record of the book’s reception and are not part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the length of each canto, the page count and proportions of the first edition, the title of McCarthy’s review, the later translations and lists, and the book’s uses outside the page, are not given.