Quodlibet II
A hard turn toward fiction
A hard turn toward fiction
Different week. Less to report on the reading and a great deal happening at the desk, so this one is a pile of what I am building and turning over rather than a day by day. Here is what is on the bench.
How to Build Another Pale Fire
I keep coming back to Pale Fire because it is the rare masterpiece that hands you the blueprint. Most great books guard the secret of how they were made. This one prints it on every page, and once you see the machine you cannot unsee it, and you start to notice that almost no one has run the machine again even though it is sitting right there in the open.
The book is a 999-line poem in heroic couplets by a man named John Shade, and then a foreword, a line-by-line commentary, and an index, the last three supplied by his neighbor Charles Kinbote. Shade’s poem is the real thing. Four cantos. It is about his daughter Hazel, who drowned herself, about his wife, about a near-death vision of a tall white fountain that he took for proof of an afterlife, and then about the day he tracked down a woman who had seen the same fountain and learned the whole thing came down to a misprint, mountain set as fountain by a tired typesetter. Life everlasting based on a misprint. The poem ends one line short of a thousand, and Kinbote argues the missing final line would simply repeat the first, the waxwing slain against the windowpane, so that the poem closes into a ring. You could publish it alone and it would hold up, which is the part that matters most and the part nobody copying the form remembers to do.
Then Kinbote gets hold of it. He is an exile who believes he is the deposed king of a far northern country called Zembla, hunted across the world by an assassin named Gradus. His commentary has almost nothing to do with the poem in front of him. He reads his lost kingdom into every line, certain Shade was secretly writing the saga of Zembla and was murdered for it. He is wrong about all of it. The careful reader watches the true story assemble itself in the cracks: the killer was an escaped madman who shot the wrong man, meaning to kill the judge whose house Kinbote is renting, and Kinbote himself is most likely a homesick Russian scholar named Botkin who has come apart, and Zembla never existed anywhere but inside his head. Nabokov hid the solution to his own book in a single index entry. Botkin, V., American scholar of Russian descent, and the name is an anagram of Kinbote that the man cannot stop himself from filing.
That is the whole engine! A sincere text and a parasite fastened onto it, and the parasite, in the act of explaining the text, tells you everything about himself and almost nothing the text meant, so that the reader ends up doing all the work of reconstruction that the commentator was supposed to do and refused.
The thing worth knowing, the thing that tells you it is a method and not a miracle, is where it came from. Right before this, Nabokov spent years on a translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin with a commentary that ran past a thousand pages, and his own notes there are already half mad, already snorting at lesser writers, already a man in love with the sound of his own annotation. Kinbote is Nabokov doing an impression of himself. He built the funniest monster he could out of the exact apparatus he had just spent half a decade buried in. Once you know that, the book stops being a bolt from the blue and becomes a thing a working writer made out of the job in front of him, which means you can make one too.
Here is what you actually need.
A primary text that stands on its own and means something. Shade’s poem has to work, because the ache of the whole book depends on you measuring for yourself how far Kinbote drifts from what the poem actually says. The poem is the ruler against which his madness gets measured as distance off it. This is the law every imitator breaks, and breaks the same way. House of Leaves removes the original entirely so there is nothing to measure against, and the S. that Abrams and Dorst made buries a host novel nobody would read on its own, and both of them float free for the lack of a fixed text holding the cleverness down to something. Without the ruler the whole apparatus is just noise that cannot be caught lying.
A commentator whose obsession is a stranger to the text. The distance between what the poem is about, grief and dying, and what the commentator swears it is about, his stolen throne, is the space the novel lives in. The wider you open that gap, the harder the engine runs.
The apparatus of real scholarship. Foreword, numbered notes, variant readings, an index. You borrow the reader’s trust in the form and then let the content betray it from underneath. The footnote is the perfect weapon precisely because we have all been trained to believe a footnote is there to serve the text. Pope did a version of this two hundred years earlier in the Dunciad, drowning his enemies in fake scholarly apparatus, so the move is old. Nabokov’s advance was to aim it at a single human heart instead of at a literary feud.
A commentator who gives himself away without meaning to. The notes start as glosses on meter and slide into confession. The loneliness, the wanting, the crime, the madness, all of it leaks out between remarks about the verse. And let him fabricate. Kinbote invents draft lines he claims Shade discarded, and the tell is that the invention costs him something, you can feel him wince as he does it, and even so he never once touches the actual text of the poem, he only forges the margins, which is the small mercy that keeps him a person you ache for rather than a crook you dismiss.
A true story buried under the false one, which the reader recovers against the narrator’s intent. You seed the contradictions yourself, in the apparatus, never in the poem. The dates that do not line up, the neighbor who plainly cannot stand him, the killer’s real target. The reader convicts the narrator using evidence the narrator handed over without noticing he was handing it over.
An index that performs the man. Kinbote indexes Zembla and every minor courtier at luxurious length and can barely be bothered to log Shade’s dead daughter. The letter X is simply missing. The omissions are the characterization. Nothing tells you more about a man than what he forgets to list, and an index is the one place a narcissist files himself in his own hand and thinks no one is reading.
Why a learned reader can rebuild this with ease is that the parts are formal and portable, and the genius is not in the parts. The genius is the execution. The invention of an entire country with a working language that linguists have actually sat down and studied. The couplets good enough that scholars still fight about whether they are great or deliberately a little bad. The grief that stays real under all the comedy. None of that is the structure. The structure is a method you can lift whole. Take a sincere primary text. Attach a commentator who reads himself into it. Use the scholarly apparatus to do the betraying for you. Plant the contradictions and never let the commentator tell the truth on purpose. Then keep the cleverness chained to a buried human loss, a death, a loneliness, because the one lesson the failed imitators teach is that without the grief underneath, the whole thing collapses into a puzzle box, a clever object nobody weeps over.
I have been going back and forth on whether to write the full version of this as its own essay or to build the demonstration instead, an actual short poem with an actual deranged commentary hung off it. The essay is the easy version and I am not sure it earns its keep alone. The demonstration is the real test of the claim, because anyone can describe the machine and the only proof that you understand it is to run it. That is probably the thing.
Watching People as Orangutans
The thing that cracked human behavior open for me this week was not anthropology. I had been deep in the primate reading, and at some point I started running people through it, and the ones who usually make no sense to me came clear the second I pictured them as orangutans.
The orangutan is the right animal for this and not the chimp, and the reason is bimaturism. Male orangutans come in two kinds. There is the flanged male, large, with the broad cheek pads, who throws a long call that carries for miles through the canopy. Females move toward the call. Rival males read it and keep their distance. Then there is the unflanged male, smaller, faceless in the literal sense of having grown no flange, who matures late or never and who pursues females by other means,
