Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery (review)

220 Nabokov Studies art, Zimmer is nevertheless right that both Nabokov's science and his art depend above all on an inspired command of detail. And that detail is where Zimmer also excels, in the catalogues that are the chief and lasting treasure of his Guide. David Sexton, reviewing Nabokov's Butterflies, ended with the comment that whatever your starting point, you would think more of Nabokov after reading the book. The same could be said of Zimmer's Guide. You will also think more of Zimmer, even if you already know how selflessly he has worked for Nabokov ever since 1959, in translating volume after volume into German, in compiling the first Nabokov bibliography, in editing and annotating the twenty-plus volumes of the Rowohlt edition of the collected works, in contributing to the website Zembla, and, currently, in putting the final touches to a book on Nabokov's Berlin. Anyone who teaches Nabokov, and especially anyone who supervises or hopes to supervise graduate students working on him, should ensure that they have their own copy of A Guide to the Butterflies and Moths 2001 and that they order another copy for their university library. Those who missed out on Michael Juliar's Vladimir Nabokov: A Descriptive Bibliography for themselves and their library and now find it quite unavailable should not make the same mistake again. Nabokov the commentator on Eugene Onegin, as well as Nabokov the researcher of "Notes on Neotropical Plebejinae," and Nabokov the author of The Gift, "A Discovery," and Pale Fire, would have welcomed and applauded Zimmer's invaluable Guide 2001. And Nabokov the lifelong lover of Lepidoptera would have had to blink back or wipe away tears of gratitude. Brian Boyd. Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. 303 pp. ISBN 0691009597 Review by Charles Nicol, Indiana State University. Brian Boyd was formerly a proponent of the single-author theory that John Shade wrote all oÃ- Pale Fire. He now believes that the intricate interweaving of the novel's prose and poetry can better be accounted for by theorizing the vigorous activities of the ghost of Hazel Shade. As foretold in the haunted bam by the ghost of Aunt Maud, Hazel appears as an intensely frolicsome Vanessa Atalanta just before Shade is murdered, and she helps inspire both Shade's poem and Kinbote's Zembla. "The idea that Hazel as the Vanessa has caught Shade's eye and even flown into his poem from beyond the grave will still seem a surprise, but part of a partem, to the reader familiar with other Nabokov works" (138); that the ghost of tormented Hazel also finds good company in the equally tormented and suicidal Kinbote—perhaps even better Reviews 221 company after he too commits suicide—makes a pleasant thought, even if it does go well beyond the text. But by the time Boyd has developed this to its final convolution where Hazel has helped Kinbote to imagine one aspect of Zembla "as if to catalyze her father's imagination" to write one part of his poem (205), we have reached a baroque level that calls for skepticism. Yet to whatever degree one ultimately accepts Boyd's theory—or rather, whether one accepts it partway or in toto—his book has so many interesting aspects that it is required reading. Boyd is the dean of Nabokov studies, and many of us know his interests well enough to simply nod in recognition when early in his text he cites Karl Popper's 1934 Logic of Scientific Discovery: "although tests cannot establish the truth of a theory they can establish its falsity—or show up flaws in it— and therefore, although we can never have grounds for believing in the truth of a theory, we can have decisive grounds for preferring one theory to another." Boyd merely claims that his reading reasonably accounts for more aspects of Pale Fire than the readings it both builds on and supplants. In that spirit I intend here not to simply summarize his book, nor to endorse it, but to applaud many of its insights, add a few notes, and test a few aspects. And since...