1. The editor of the manuscript, Dr. Charles Kinbote, has published a 999 word poem written by the poet John Shade and has attached additional commentary onto the end of the poem.
2. The poem, called Pale Fire, was written during the last twenty days of Shade’s life and is composed of four cantos.
3. Shade wrote the poem on index cards, with fourteen lines on each card.
4. Dr. Kinbote has had to struggle with Shade’s wife and several publishing companies in order to have the right to transcribe and analyze Pale Fire without anyone else’s consultation.
5. Shade believed in burning first drafts and other unused lines that he had written, but Dr. Kinbote was able to procure several stanzas that were not in the poem’s final version. These lines that didn’t make Shade’s final cut were documented in a short stack of index cards held together with a clip in the same envelope that contained the larger, rubber-banded stack of cards on which the last draft of the poem was written.
2. The poem, called Pale Fire, was written during the last twenty days of Shade’s life and is composed of four cantos.
3. Shade wrote the poem on index cards, with fourteen lines on each card.
4. Dr. Kinbote has had to struggle with Shade’s wife and several publishing companies in order to have the right to transcribe and analyze Pale Fire without anyone else’s consultation.
5. Shade believed in burning first drafts and other unused lines that he had written, but Dr. Kinbote was able to procure several stanzas that were not in the poem’s final version. These lines that didn’t make Shade’s final cut were documented in a short stack of index cards held together with a clip in the same envelope that contained the larger, rubber-banded stack of cards on which the last draft of the poem was written.
I would argue that not one of these five facts can be considered as objective truths. The forward to Pale Fire portrays the story of a man, Dr. Kinbote, who is mentally unstable. The fact that both the forward and the commentary of the poem have their central focus around Kinbote and not the alleged author--John Shade is the first clue that all may not be exactly as it appears to be. Clues as to Dr. Kinbote's impoverished mental state can be seen first on page 13 (the first page), where Kinbote breaks from the forward to complain about the distracting noise of a nearby amusement park. This is followed by the discovery that his "dear friend" whom he claims to be such an expert on has only known him for two months. A disturbing chord is struck at the bottom of page 21 when it is mentioned that Kinbote has two ping-pong tables in his basement. The extremity of this strange chord is later made more readily apparent upon the reading of pages 74-75 where Kinbote's language begins to take on a disturbingly sexual tone:
"Many a time have I rebuked him in bantering fashion: 'You really should promise to use all that wonderful stuff, you bad gray poet, you!' And we would both giggle like boys. But then, after the inspiring evening stroll, we had to part, and grim night lifted the drawbridge between his impregnable fortress and my humble home"
This disturbing quote is followed by words and phrases like: "penetrated", "a small skyscraper of ultramarine glass was steadily rising", and "a crowd of schoolchildren". These things along with the grandiosity displayed by his belief that a general economic trend may one day bear his name for no apparent reason all are suggestive of a mental illness. Thus, this calls into question the entire foundation on which James based his blog. Was this poem written by Shade or Kinbote? Does John Shade even exist? We are left thus far with a disturbing sense of uncertainty.
No comments:
Post a Comment