Breanna Holmes
Michael Sexson
Honors Seminar 400: Mything the Point
December 6, 2011
Waxwings:
The way up and the way down are the same way
Nabokov wrote that in both art and science “there is no delight without the details and…unless these are thoroughly understood and remembered, all ‘general ideas’ (so easily acquired, so profitably resold) must necessarily remain but worn passports allowing their bearers short cuts from one area of ignorance to another” (Lee 136). Similar to how Ibsen becomes the ideal scientific observer through detachment and his powers of observation, Nabokov’s advice for understanding literature is true to his status as lepidopterist. In order to glean understanding of the whole, the reader of literature must observe the most banal and obvious details; to discover rather than impose through a process of meticulous and impartial observation. Both the creator and observer of art must have the passion of the scientist and the precision of the poet. In order to understand Nabokov’s Pale Fire, the reader must observer the realm of archetypes and myth. In the collective unconscious, specific stories and images are hardwired into the human instinct. These shared dreams are not stereotypes but archetypes; the stories founded in dreams, myths and fantasies wired into human instincts; the pervading stories of our unconscious beings that do not operate according to social institutions but humanity’s own intrinsic construction. In our understanding of literature, it is integral to observe and understand the inherent mythology if we are to understand anything at all.
In Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, the figure of the artist and the art he creates separate from life echoes the myth of Daedalus and Icarus. In the image of the Master Craftsman and ideal scientist, Daedalus embodies the image of the patron saint of artists: the Master Builder. Similar to Nabokov’s Kinbote, Daedalus is also an artist in exile longing to return to his homeland; in the artist, love is felt most keenly as a kind of homesickness, where the longing for a reality that exists separately from the real motivates the artist to fill the yearning with creation. The Daedalus myth also reflects on the sacrifice that the Great artist must endure—in the examples of Shade and Daedalus, the loss of their only child is the sacrifice necessary to continue to allow the artist the position of the outsider (the impartial scientific observer). In Icarus, the figure of man attempting to transcend his human limitations on the wings of art is a poignant image of the resulting failure and triumph of the attempt. Through the image of the waxwing slain and Icarus falling into the reflected azure of his desire, Foucault’s reflections of the macrocosm and microcosm are evoked; in a science of resemblance, the cosmos and the corporeal mirror each other until the way up and the way down are the same way. In its examination of art and life, Pale Fire holds many resemblances to the myth of Daedalus, the Master Craftsman, and Icarus, the boy who dared to fly beyond human limitations on wings of wax.
In reference to the correlations between science and imagination, Nabokov states that “The tactile delights of precise delineation, the silent paradise of the camera lucida, and the precision of poetry in taxonomic description represent the artistic side of the thrill that accumulation of new knowledge, absolutely useless to the layman, gives its first begetter…there is no science without fancy, and no art without facts” (Dembo 33). The roles of artist and scientist are as inseparable as life and art. For both Daedalus the Master Builder and Nabokov the lepidopterist and novelist, science and art function as mirrored images of each other. In the process of creating a reality separate from the real, the artist must glean knowledge with the passion of scientist to reorder the natural order of things.
THE MASTER BUILDER
“Is it true, or isn’t it?...That my master builder dare not—can not climb as high as he builds?” (Ibsen 404)
Commissioned to make “a labyrinth that tricked the eye”, Master Craftsman Daedalus takes his inspiration from nature by crafting the maze to follow the path of the river Meander as it flows through Phrygian pastures, “Twisting its streams to sea on fountainhead, The dubious waters turning left or right”. In a similar vein, Daedalus appears to mimic nature in order to construct the wings that will carry him out of exile (“He placed a row of feathers in neat order. Each longer than the one that came before it Until the feathers traced an inclined plane” (Ovid 230). However, the crucial difference between pure mimesis, a sole act of mimicry, and poesis, an act of creating separate from the artist’s “real” experience, is illustrated by these two integral lines: “So Daedalus turned his mind to subtle craft, And unknown art that seemed to outwit nature” (Ovid 230). Not mimic nature, not resemble nature. Daedalus’ act of creation outwits nature in an act of poesis. True to the passion of the scientist, Daedalus must remain the impartial observer by following the order of nature to construct his wings and flee exile.
In a similar act of impartiality, John Shade describes himself in Canto Two: “I stand before the window and I pare/My fingernails”, a line that resembles Stephen Daedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in that both artists describe themselves as sometimes remaining “within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, pairing his fingernails” (Dembo 26). While Nabokov denies answering James Joyce with a dismissive “I never liked A Portrait of the Artist” and the correlation an “unpleasant coincidence”, the two works do share similarities. In James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the young poet Stephen Daedalus is compared with the Greek architect Daedalus. Joyce equates the institution of the Catholic church in his novel to the labyrinth designed by Daedalus at Knossos and the waxen wings used to escape its confines as the powers of poetry (Harris 1004). In Joyce’s novel, the skill of the artist to create a reality separate from his own is freedom itself; without poetry to transcend the prison of his human limitations, the artist must remain confined to a very human reality.
In other works, Nabokov sometimes presents the fallen poet who put too much faith in the powers of his art as the hero; “such a failed artist has put too much faith in the act of art, for he has believed that it, language, could manipulate ‘reality’” (Lee 27). Kinbote is a poet as well—“a person who deliberately peels off a drab and unhappy past and replaces it with a brilliant invention…John calls him a fellow poet” (Pale Fire 238). Kinbote’s desire to commit suicide in order to escape the confines of all his worlds echoes the struggle of humanity’s fate; forced to confront the reality of our own humanity, the poet attempts to move beyond the constraints of his physical world and into invention—and the divine. In the figure of the artist, Nabokov is describing the example set out by Daedalus; to construct a labyrinthine work of art for the artist and observer to become lost in, a reality separate from the artist’s current existence. In order to truly examine the real, the artist must construct a reality that makes the “real” world seem an imitation.
LABYRINTH
The labyrinth was designed and built by the Master Craftsman Daedalus for King Minos of Crete at Knossos in order to house the Minotaur. Daedalus crafted the Labyrinth so cleverly that he himself could barely escape it after he built it: “And as one entered it, only a wary mind Could find an exit to the world again—such was the cleverness of that strange arbour” (Ovid 230). As Daedalus constructs a labyrinth for the wanderer to lose track of direction and the outside world, so too does the artist engage in the act of poesis to construct a reality separate from the real for the person experiencing art to become lost in. Trapped wandering its paths, for the reader of poetry the labyrinth of art becomes more real than the reality it exists in.
Similar to how Nabokov engages the reader as a co-artist in the construction of the book, Daedalus’ labyrinth allows the wanderer to construct his own path as he navigates its corridors. In Pale Fire, the pen—the act of reordering reality into poetry—is the guide for navigating the labyrinth: “The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar A canceled sunset or restore a star, And thus it physically guides the phrase Toward faint daylight through the inky maze” (Pale Fire 64). The Great Artist constructs art that functions as a labyrinth to the beholder; however, the tool that is used to create the art is also used to navigate it. In order to make meaning of the labyrinth’s meanderings, the person experiencing its twisting paths must observe his own footsteps and methods of navigation. Pale Fire in particular resembles the labyrinth because it engages its reader to create his own meaning while navigating the twisting path set out by Nabokov, master builder. Kinbote uses the commentary and foreword to suggest a method of navigation, but so too does Daedalus’ labyrinth demand the use of an observable thread to map the wanderer’s movement through its corridors. In both works of art, the navigator retains the illusion of agency when in reality he is manipulated by the Master Builder. For you see, contrary to popular opinion, the labyrinth is not simply a maze.
The root word of labyrinth is labrys: the double headed axe. This is a shape that is recapitulated in the curve of a bull’s horns…or in the mirrored double triangle shape of a butterfly. In Greek mythology, the butterfly is a symbol of transformation. The readers of Pale Fire will recognize the butterfly as a symbol for eternity as the mirrored pattern of its wings reflects the pattern of the lemniscate. In the image of the labyrinth, sacrifice and renewal and conceptions of life and death converge on each other until the labyrinth becomes the symbol for eternity and the holder of worlds (Harris 325). While the concept of the labyrinth is generally seen to be synonymous with maze in colloquial English, in actuality the two differ on a very fundamental level. The term maze refers to a complex branching puzzle (multicursal) with choices of path and direction, while the labyrinth contains a single (unicursal), non-branching path that leads the wanderer to the center and back with one decisive turn at the midpoint. In the Socratic dialogue that Plato produced as Euthydemus, Socrates describes the labyrinthine line of a logical argument:
"Then it seemed like falling into a labyrinth: we thought we were at the finish, but our way bent round and we found ourselves as it were back at the beginning, and just as far from that which we were seeking at first ... Thus the present-day notion of a labyrinth as a place where one can lose [his] way must be set aside. It is a confusing path, hard to follow without a thread, but, provided [the traverser] is not devoured at the midpoint, it leads surely, despite twists and turns, back to the beginning” (Euthydemus).
By this line of reasoning, the spiral image of the labyrinth is also evocative of the form of Pale Fire itself. In an act similar to Ariadne navigating the labyrinth constructed by Daedalus with the help of a red thread, the reader of Pale Fire follows the thread of the narrative until the eventual middle; line 500 of the poem. When Hazel commits suicide by drowning, the reader follows a decisive turn back to the beginning of the poem—or what would have been the beginning had Nabokov finished the perfect cycle of the poem by including the last two lines that would have sealed the circle of the narrative: “I was the image of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane” (Pale Fire 33). But Nabokov does not allow his poem to become the vicious, all-consuming circle. True to the form of traditional labyrinth construction, Nabokov’s exclusion of the 1000 line evokes the image of a spiral instead. In Pale Fire as well as the Daedalus myth, life imitates art; and in order to discover the real, sometimes the Master Builder must sacrifice the human relationships that keep him too much in the realm of life.
SACRIFICE
“And as the artist made his miracles The artless boy was often in his way” (Ovid 221)
As the patron saint of the Great Artist, Daedalus’ story includes an aspect integral to the archetypical artistic figure: in order to craft the labyrinth for the wanderer to become lost in, the Master Builder must sacrifice the needs wired into his human evolution. In order to create, the artist often painfully sacrifices relationships with people and the love of a family. Just as the rage for order holds danger with the gain, the specific sacrifice common to the figure of the great artist Daedalus, Shade, and Master Builder Solness is the loss of the relationship that incurs the maximum amount of guilt: the loss of a child.
At line 500 of Shade’s poem Pale Fire, Hazel commits suicide. As her parents unknowingly entertain themselves by watching TV, the lake in which their only daughter drowns herself stands with black spring “just around the corner, shivering In the wet starlight and on the wet ground. The lake lay in the mist, its ice half drowned. A blurry shape stepped off the reedy bank Into a crackling, gulping swamp, and sank” (Pale Fire 51). In a mirror image of both Icarus and the waxwing slain, Hazel’s death occurs with the earth reflected in the cosmos (wet starlight and wet ground) and at the exact center of the poem: where the “wings” would join if the reader were to draw the shape of a lemniscate. Similar to Daedalus’ emotion when “…his eyes discovered The boy’s torn wings washed on the climbing waves. He damned his art, his wretched cleverness” (Ovid 221), Shade’s inability to believe in the existence of God—the ultimate Master Builder—leads him to compose poetry speculating eternity while his belief remains purely skeptical. In the end, both Daedalus and Shade’s cleverness and artistic talent cannot undo the sacrifice of their most precious relationship: their only child. The master craftsman remains solely with his guilt and craft, alone.
In Ibsen’s play, Master Builder Solness’s career becomes more prolific with the fire that destroyed his two children. He speaks to Hilda about the paradoxical triumph and devastation of the tragic act that destroyed his family: “So, you see, as I said, that fire set me up—as a master builder, that is…The price, Hilda. The terrible price I had to pay to get that chance…Because in order to build homes for others I’ve had to renounce—to renounce for all time—any chance of a home for myself” (Ibsen 393). Later in the play, Solness speculates about the necessity of the tragedy, stating that the fire happened to ensure that nothing else would occupy him; “Nothing, like love or happiness, you understand. I was to be master builder only. Nothing else” (Ibsen 417). However, when Master Builder Solness ascends the scaffolding to climb as high as he builds, he falls. Using his art to leave the realm of the human below, the Master Builder ascends his art to stand in opposition to the God that inflicted the cruel tragedy—to stand as God—but at the peak of his ascension he slips. At the moment of his triumph, he falls to his death.
THE FALL
“By this time Icarus began to feel the joy Of beating wings in air and steered his course Beyond his father’s lead: all the wide sky Was there to tempt him as he steered toward heaven. Meanwhile the heat of sun struck at his back And where wings were joined, sweet –smelling fluid Ran hot that once was wax. His naked arms Whirled into wind; his lips, still calling out His father’s name, were gulfed in the dark sea” (Ovid 222)
In Ovid’s myth and Pale Fire, the figures of Icarus and the waxwing slain search for windows but find only mirrors—and in their futile quest to transcend the confines of their reality, they fall to their deaths. In crossing the boundary between the mortal and immortal spheres, both creatures emboldened with wings of wax (Shade’s primary image of the waxwing slain and Icarus himself) refuse the instinct of self preservation and fall into the reflection of the azure they desire. For the Greeks, the myth of Icarus was the embodiment of the lesson for necessity of moderation and self-control. However, the Renaissance Icarus became a figure of admiration for his audacity to break through the limits of convention and ordinary human experience; he became instead “a tragic figure whose fall into the sea is the price he pays for a glimpse of a higher vision, for a moment of transcendence at the peak of a brief albeit glorious trajectory” (Harris 1018). While humankind is living in an amusement park hall of mirrors and viewing solely the self in the glass, the individuals transcending the confines of human reality on “wings of wax” created by the Great Artist embark on a trajectory that carries them beyond their corporeal experience and into the divine.
In Pale Fire, Kinbote becomes preoccupied with the idea of one’s soul “plunging into limitless and chaotic afterlife with no Providence to direct her” (Pale Fire 227). When Shade brings up the absolution of the psychopompos’ presence, Kinbote refuses belief and ponders the possibility of an absence of Providence in which “the soul must rely on the dust of its husk, on the experience gathered in the course of corporeal confinement, and cling childishly to small-town principles, local by-laws and a personality consisting mainly of the shadows of its own prison bars” (Pale Fire 227). For Kinbote, the fear of plunging into oblivion after shedding the physical body holds influence over his conception of the remaining soul’s ability to transcend the “prison bars” of its corporeal existence. In Kinbote’s conception of eternity, the soul must rely on the divine to overcome the memory of human limitation. However, for Shade the poet and atheist, another route to eternity exists in the form of art.
In Pale Fire, the circumstances of Hazel’s death share similarities to the Icarus motif. After Hazel’s blind date—and her last hope for escaping the confines of her homely exterior—leaves, the three young people stand “Before the azure entrance for awhile” where puddles of water reflect the “neon-barred” lights of the surrounding cars. In a reflection of the Icarus myth, Hazel’s death is also a mirrored trajectory towards transcendence of her corporeal state—the acceptance of the date and then eventual denial after seeing her homely physical being at the azure entrance—and the eventual descent into the waters of the lake (foreshadowed by the reflection in the puddle). In another instance of Pale Fire echoing the Icarus myth, the image of the Vanessa butterfly that accompanies Shade’s last steps evokes the image of a creature enflamed by fire and then engulfed by water: “Then the tide of the shade reached the laurels, and the magnificent, velvet-and-flame creature dissolved in it” (Pale Fire 290). As an embodiment of the eternal, the Vanessa Atalanta butterfly echoes the Icarus them directly before Shade’s physical death…and transcendence.
When referring to the end of Shade’s poem with the various erasures and scratching out, Kinbote writes that the poem itself “turns out to be beautifully accurate when you once make the plunge and compel yourself to open your eyes in the limpid depths under its confused surface” (Pale Fire 14). As in the Icarus and Daedalus myth, the attempt to fulfill desire of knowledge through the artist’s creation (in Shade’s case, the poem; for Daedalus, the wings) is equated with the eventual fall into water. In order to attempt the impossible pinnacle of human achievement and defy his corporeal reality, the Icarus figure must risk losing his physical form: he must risk death in attempt for transcendence.
The figure of King Alfin in Pale Fire is evocative of characteristics of both Icarus and Daedalus. While perusing the drawer of a secretary bookcase, Charles Xavier discovers the picture of his father, King Alfin “just before the white-blurred shattering crash, one distinctly saw him raise one arm in triumph and reassurance” (Pale Fire 104). Charles’ father had a passion for mechanical things, especially flying apparatuses, and the index states that he had a fondness for “sea shells” at one time (Pale Fire 305). Nabokov creates a figure in Zembla, the land of resemblances to the real world, that mirrors both the perils of Icarus’ flight and the passions of his father Daedalus. At the height of his pursuit of knowledge, King Alfin raises his arms in triumph and sheds his corporeal body. In the same way, Kinbote, alias King Charles of Zembla and King Alfin’s son, can be seen as a kind of reflection of the Icarus figure. Kinbote flies beyond the boundaries of reality by virtue of art and imagination.
When Kinbote speaks of contemplating the inviting abyss of oblivion, he states that the supreme method of shedding the body is falling “with the earth’s green seesaw now above, now below” (Pale Fire 221). Just as the waxwing slain finds its death in the reflected azure of its desire in flight, mirrored in the windowpane, so too does Icarus drown in the azure of the ocean: the liquid mirror that reflects the sky. In both Pale Fire and the Icarus myth, the reflections of the microcosm and macrocosm emphasize the concept of the way up and the way down as the same way. The attempt to defy human limitation and the resulting fall and shedding of the corporeal body are mirrored.
MACROCOSM & MICROCOSM: A SCIENCE OF RESEMBLANCE
“Daedalus gave his ill-starred son to earth” (Ovid 221).
In a worldview where the cosmos were conceptualized as reflecting the events of the earth, the movement of the stars were believed to mirror the movement of human life. Just as Ariadne’s crown is placed among the stars by her newly acquired husband Dionysus in a gesture that reflects their union on earth, Icarus’s description as being “ill-starred” highlights an integral past belief in the microcosm and macrocosm. Before fleeing exile in flight, Daedalus warns his son that his “route is not toward Bootes Nor Helice, nor where Orion swings His naked sword” (Ovid 231). In a reflection of the events currently happening on earth, Daedalus is cautioning Icarus not to stray too close to the Bootes and Helice: the two constellations that signify the ploughman and the plough. This image is echoed on earth at the moment of Icarus’s fall: “Far off, below them, some stray fisherman, Attention startled from his bending rod, Or a bland shepherd resting on his crook, Or a dazed farmer leaning on his plough, Glanced up to see the pair float through the sky, And taking them for gods, stood still in wonder” (Ovid 231). By warning Icarus not too fly too high and stray close to the constellations of the plough and ploughman, Daedalus is simultaneously cautioning him of the perils of falling back to earth. The events of the microcosm reflected in the macrocosm depict a worldview where the cosmos and earthly events are literally mirrored—a concept eerily reminiscent of Pale Fire.
The first canto of Shades poem begins with the line “I was a shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane”. Shade opens his poem with the image of a reflected death in which the mirrored reality and real become one. In an act that echoes Icarus’ futile movement to the sun, the waxwing slain in the window pane mirrors the confusion between the blue azure of the limitless sky and the limits of the ocean or glass that only mirrors the desired “azure”. In a similar vein, Shade’s later descriptions of furniture superimposed in the snow through reflection describes this same concept of reflection and actuality as one—the concept inherent to the past conception of a universe divided into twin reflective spheres of microcosm and macrocosm—or as life reflected in art.
The movement “Burnt Norton” from Eliot’s Four Quartets sheds new insight on the microcosm macrocosm theme as it reflects the theme of the four elements as described by the philosophy of Herakleitos. Herakletios’ theory of cosmic change dictates that all matter is in a state of flux in which there is a downward tendency which makes the highest element (fire) turn into water, and water into earth. However, this movement is balanced by a corresponding movement. Earth moves in the opposite direction through its tendency to move upwards through water and into fire (Bodelsen 33). This concept is also a reflection of the two movements of the soul’s separation from the corporeal and eventual union with the divine as both the way up (heaven) and the way down (hell) will eventually lead the soul to God. In “Burnt Norton”, Eliot speaks of blood still singing (“trilling” like a telegraph wire) in a song subdued by its course flowing under “inveterate scars”. This line speaks of the time where corporeal bodies have come to occupy the human mind less because the wounds of the world have been healed and humanity is less sensitive to physical attacks—instead, the earthly body is seen to function as part of a larger pattern. Life is seen “as from a distance or height” (Bodelsen 48) and viewed in conjunction with the movement of the heavenly spheres. Earthly events and corporeal life are viewed as a reflection of the cosmos. The events that take place “on the sodden floor below” reflect the “boarhound and the boar” pursuing their endless pattern in the night sky. This eternal mirror ceases to perplex the human mind and is instead viewed as a component of a harmonious whole “reconciled among the stars” (Bodelsen 48).
This reflection of the microcosm in the macrocosm is a concept common to great minds. In Foucault’s The Order of Things, The Axis Mundi was believed to be center of the world that separated the heavens and earth into two spheres, so that whatever happened in the world below was reflected in the cosmos and the events of the heavens held sway over the events of the earth. Foucault’s The Order of Things describes the concept of the microcosm as important in the sixteenth century because of the emphasis on resemblance and similitude in the structure of knowledge at the time:
“Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them. The universe was folded in upon itself: the earth echoing sky, faces seem themselves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man” (Foucault 63).
Foucault goes on to state that this notion of resemblance later in human history relinquishes its relation with knowledge and disappears “from the sphere of cognition” (Foucault 63). The conception of the earth reflected through a science of resemblance in the cosmos creates an overreaching worldview that unifies man’s present actions with his universe and allows the cosmic a place in the corporeal, the earthly a role in the aether; in this game of mirrors, the way up and the way down are the same way.
PAINTING
“England where poets flew the highest, now//Wants them to plod and Pegasus to plough” (Pale Fire 270)
In Peter Bruegel the Elder’s painting Landscape of the Fall of Icarus, Icarus is depicted not as a venerated explorer attempting to push human boundaries, but as a helpless pair of thrashing legs in the corner of the painting. Bruegel’s version of Ovid’s myth treats this rebellion against the natural order of things as retaining little influence on the dutiful followers of cosmic laws; the ploughman and fisherman remain oblivious and the shepherd continues to attend to his flock. This small detail is not the focus of the painting. Bruegel instead depicts the ploughman as larger and in the forefront of the painting in order to reflect his own moral views on the subject of hubris and overreaching the boundaries of human limitation. While Ovid’s myth depicts the humans starting with the primary image of Icarus in flight and moving sequentially to the fisherman to the shepherd to the plowman to a fallen Icarus, Bruegal’s reverses this concept: his painting is a mirrored reflection. He depicts the plowman as monumental and enlarged in the central foreground, then follows the small shepherd, smaller fisherman, and finally ends with the almost invisible Icarus in the right corner. Rather than celebrate the fall of a man who defies his human reality, Bruegel elevates the community of common men of the earth as the focus of the painting. The humans on earth do not look up “to see the pair float through the sky, And taking them for gods, stood still in wonder” (Ovid 221), but instead remain largely indifferent to the flight of the duo and the eventual fall of Icarus (Hunt).
Ovid’s Latin term novare means “to alter or change”. This term is used in reference to Daedalus’ ability to change the natural order of things through the creation of wings that give humans the ability to fly and defy cosmic laws. However, the term novat also carries the connotation of the “renewal of nature” by its verb form, ager novatus: “to break up fallow ground in a field prepared by plowing”. By depicting the ploughman as the main visual image of the painting, Bruegel is attaching greater value to a renewal of nature through man’s labor rather than Daedalus’ “altering” of nature and the order of things. Bruegel reworks Ovid’s myth to suit his own desires; in Kinbote fashion, he imposes his own beliefs and interpretation on the myth rather than simply depict what he has observed.
W.H. Auden’s poem Musee Des Beaux Arts describes the fall of Icarus depicted by Bruegel’s painting in these terms: “that even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot” (Auden). This poem is highlighting a fundamental component of Bruegel’s interpretation of Ovid’s myth: the most important detail—the subject of the painting—is placed in an unnoticed corner, hidden to the casual observer. Like a scientist, the Master Craftsman Daedalus, or the reader of Pale Fire, the viewer of Bruegel’s painting must carefully observe the banal detail in order to glean understanding of the piece as a whole.
EXILE
Both Kinbote and Daedalus function in their respective literature as exiles, homesick and longing to fill the yearning for their lost homeland. After Daedalus grows weary of exile in his prison at Crete, he becomes homesick for his native Athens. Within the confines of his prison walls, Daedalus reasons “‘Through Minos owns this island, rules the waves, The skies are open: my direction’s clear. Through he commands all else on earth below His tyranny does not control the air’” (Ovid 230). In contrast, when King Charles is trapped when a revolution led by the Extremists breaks out, he manages to escape not by air but by tunneling after being imprisoned by revolutionaries who desire knowledge of where the crown jewels are hidden. However, for the King of Zembla flight “had more aesthetic than practical value” (120). His father and family’s affinity for flying machines allows the revolutionaries to suspect escape by air. The past tense of “to flee” is “flight”: for both exiles, flight would seem the obvious choice to flee entrapment. However, while Daedalus is escaping exile, King Charles is only embarking on his own exile from his homeland.
Trapped in a reality separate from their own, the figure of the exile can be seen to represent the artist himself. Kinbote’s compulsion for invention through imagination and reconstruction of the past may be considered the effects of exile, but these qualities are no less comprehensible as conditions natural to the artist in an indifferent world (Dembo 16). Because the artist sees distance between the “real” and his own longing, he creates to fill this gap. Shade writes “Between the mountain and the eyes The spirit of the distance draws A veil of blue amourous gauze, The very texture of the sky…But we all know it cannot last, The mountain is too weak to wait—even if reproduced and glassed in me as a paperweight” (Pale Fire 115). Distance is desire: all of us live with our paperweight mountains held within us, pretending they are real mountains to ease the pain of yearning. The artist’s love is felt most keenly as homesickness and the desire to create art in order to fulfill longing for a reality that cannot exist in corporeal existence. The reality the artist exists within “is neither the subject nor the object of true art which created its own special reality having nothing to do with the average “reality” perceived by the public eye” (Pale Fire 130). In an act reminiscent of the singer’s work in the “Order of Key West”, the artist/exile grows homesick and engages in an act of poesis using his current reality simply as an environment that he in which her creates in order to ease “that cold hard core of loneliness which is not good for a displaced soul” that Kinbote experiences in exile (Pale Fire 95). The line “He suffers and conjures in two tongues The nebulae dilating in his lungs” (Pale Fire 56) may refer to the duel nature of the artist in exile. Speaking the tongue of his physical reality, he is also influenced by another aspect of his status as artist and speaks the language separate from his corporeal existence. In order to be in touch with the real while still confined to the limits of corporeal life, the artist must draw upon divine inspiration.
DIVINE INSPIRATION
Nabokov states that “The greatest happiness I experience in composing is when I feel I cannot understand, or rather catch myself not understanding (without the presupposition of an already existing creation) how or why that image or structural move has just come to me” (Dembo 25).
In Plato’s Ion, Socrates reflects on the nature of a poet’s divine inspiration: “For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is not longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles” (Ion). In the image of Icarus and the waxwing slain, the artist must rise in flight symbolically in order to be in contact with something separate from this corporeal reality. In order to access the divine inspiration, he must be linked in a chain of inspiration: “The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer is not an art, but as I was just saying, an inspiration; there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet, but which is commonly known as the stone of Heraclea…” (Ion). The stone Plato refers to not only possesses the ability to attract other iron rings, but also imparts upon them the ability to attract similar rings. Together, they form a chain of inspiration and divine possession. This image of stones attracting other stones is reminiscent of points following along the spiral, as all points are relative to another on the continuing curve in an endless chain of inspiration.
As Shade struggles to grasp his texture and coincidence in a “web of sense”, he maintains that “in life (he) could find/Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind/Of correlated pattern in the game” (Pale Fire 63). Both Plato and Shade are referring to a particular integral role of the artist: to function in a web of inspiration. While Ariadne herself was able to navigate the labyrinth with a thread—to construct her own “web of sense”, everyone in essence experiences art with the expectation of viewing the presence of the Master Builder’s handiwork. When Icarus watches his father construct the wings of wax, “His brilliant face lit up by his father’s skill, He played at snatching feathers from the air And sealing them with wax (nor did he know How close to danger came his lightest touch)” (Ovid 231). Daedalus’ artistic skills inspire his son to imitate his endeavors in the construction of art.
Of course, the theme of inspiration through a series of attractions is at the center of the book. In the novel, names, colors, and numbers are shades of others, a repetition in an altered form of resemblance. The title of Pale Fire is taken from Timon of Athens, act 4, scene 3:
The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.
Kinbote states that he has “in many cases have caught myself borrowing a kind of opalescent light from my poet’s fiery orb, and unconsciously aping the prose style of his own critical essays” (81). In engaging in literary theft from Shade’s work, Kinbote is embodying the conception of resemblances and theft of ideas that the Pale Fire’s namesake passage from Shakespeare seems to present. In her essay, Mary McCarthy points out that Pale Fire is about many kinds of theft, specifically literary theft. However, while Shakespeare’s passage describes theft, the primary image is of a cycle that is not quite circular. Because different things are stolen (water from the sea, light from both the moon and sun), the overriding image is not a perfect circle. Instead, Pale Fire’s namesake evokes the image of a continuing spiral of inspiration imparted through a chain of attractions.
POESIS AND THE ORDER OF THINGS
“So does the verse of galaxies divine Which I suspect is an iambic line” (Pale Fire 69)
Daedalus the Master Builder takes inspiration from nature when constructing his wings and the labyrinth; however, his work still stands with the status of poesis. The crucial difference between pure mimesis, a sole act of mimicry, and poesis, an act of creating separate from the artist’s “real” experience, is illustrated by these two integral lines: “So Daedalus turned his mind to subtle craft, And unknown art that seemed to outwit nature” (Ovid 230). Not mimic nature, not resemble nature—Daedalus’ act of creation outwits nature. In an act reminiscent of the singer in the “Order at Key West”, both Daedalus and John Shade alter the order of things by “perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse” (Pale Fire 27). Both Daedalus and Shade are singing beyond the genius of nature to craft a reality separate from their human existence. Through art, they are crafting a “real” reality that nature can only imitate.
At the end of Pale Fire, Kinbote muses on the absurd miracle that language presents and the relationship between the signifier and signified: “We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds, with live people, speaking, weeping laughing…I can do what only a true artist can do—pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web” (Pale Fire 289). In the Daedalus myth, the thread that Ariadne spins to navigate the labyrinth—to make sense of its twisting paths—could be seen as a metaphor for navigating both the labyrinth all artists create as well as a symbol for navigating life itself. In an effort to make meaning of the labyrinth beyond her comprehension, Ariadne observes her own path and the resulting web of her efforts. She is searching for resemblance in the web of her own making as she traverses the winding path. The act of interpreting art is a search for correspondence—for resemblance—in order to form structure and meaning. Humanity must insist that art contains a subject, when in reality there is only form; we see the face of our own image on reflective surfaces rather than understand what is truly present. On one of the many levels of the “shadow box” that McCarthy insists Pale Fire occupies, Nabokov is writing a parody of our human inclination to criticize and analyze literature. But Pale Fire is also a defense for literature and a way of life; Nabokov’s “narrative method…is the examination of a text (or vision of aesthetic order) by some real or imagined artist who vies with God in disordering a universe” (Lee 136). However, in Pale Fire the text and the universe come together if read correctly. In both Pale Fire and the Daedalus myth, art and life are intricately close. Just as Shade is “almost man” in Spanish (“Ombre”) (Pale Fire 174), he is both a man and a symbol of man, the physical and the universal in one. In a similar vein, Minos ordered the labyrinth built to hide the Minotaur, the grotesque “symbol of his wife’s mismating” (Ovid). The Minotaur is both a physical monster and a monstrous reminder of a queen’s infidelity. Shade speaks of “playing a game of worlds” (Pale Fire 63)—and by separation of one letter, he is simultaneously playing a game of words. The world of reality and the “real” world of art are one; in both novel and myth, life and art are inseparable.
As words bring worlds into being, the power of art creates a reality through the passion of the scientist—the observer of the real—and the precision of the poet: “ Words are ‘shells that hold a thimble and the sea” (Dembo 36). Nabokov is showing that the world and the language we use to create the world are intricately and inextricably interwoven. The artist captures the order of the world by observing nature enough to outwit and alter the order of things. Art both shows the form of and gives form to the world. In the final scene of Pale Fire, life imitates art: Shade composes poetry concerning “A man, unheedful of the butterfly—Some neighbor’s gardener, I guess—goes by Trundling an empty barrow up the lane” (Pale Fire 69) so too is the gardener present at the moment of his death in reality—Kinbote’s “good gardener” who witnessed the murder of Shade by Jack Grey. Both the presence of the gardener in art and life are a reflection of the gardener toy Shade played with before the occurrence of his seizures: “When I’d just turned eleven, as I lay Prone on the floor and watched a clockwork toy—A tin wheelbarrow pushed by a tine boy—Bypass chair legs and stray beneath the bed, There was a sudden sunburst in my head” (Pale Fire 38). Words create worlds; life imitates art. In the period where the worldview of microcosm and macrocosm was held as truth, there was believed to be an absolute connection between a word and what it represented. Later, this was rebuked in favor of arbitrary connections. However, in Nabokov’s literature “All tomorrows (were) in my funnybone” (Pale Fire 38). Remove the snake, and the cosmic becomes comic: the wordplay itself is important. The reader must observe the banal details of the smallest words if he is to understand the world housed in the labyrinth. However, there is also danger in the passion of the scientist without the precision tempered by the poet.
In A.S. Byatt’s Biographer’s Tale, the dominant metaphor is the Maelstrom, a spiraling entity capable of producing in the unwary traveler sucked into its unfathomable depths the vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration. Similarly, a reader of Pale Fire may find herself overcome by the possibilities of endless correspondence; in this novel everything relates to everything, just as every point on a spiral is related and connected to all others joined by the form. Nabokov’s exclusion of the final line in Pale Fire evokes the image of a structure that falls in or out of itself—an image evocative of the spiral. The shape of the novel itself suggests a spiral, of past inaccessible yet present, of time changed and unchanging. Similar to the concept of all times made one through art (Lee 139), in Pale Fire, all exists and is related—just as the points on all segments of a spiral exist and correspond. In Nabokov’s world, the vicious, all-consuming circle is a symbol of eternity; but so is the image of the spiral. The difference between the two lies in a question of transcendence.
The myth of Daedalus, the Master Builder, evokes the image of the spiral in many ways. After the loss of his only son, Daedalus manages to reach Sicily, the domain of King Cocalus, and seeks sanctuary at his kingdom. In an effort to discover the master craftsman, King Minos devises a plan to flush Daedalus out of his hiding place. Minos sends a challenge to all the kings of the known world in the form of a puzzle: whichever of the king’s subjects can string a thread through a conch shell would be richly rewarded. King Cocalus hears of this challenge and asks Daedalus to solve the puzzle. Daedalus pierces a hole in the tip of the conch shell (a kind of portable labyrinth itself), smears the hole with honey, than ties a thread around an ant. The ant winds through the spirals of the empty shell in order to reach the honey. This is an act reminiscent of Ariadne navigating the labyrinth using a piece of red thread—in order to make sense of the art’s landscape, she must follow a string that traces her own footsteps. Ariadne must retain an awareness of where she has tread before to not follow the path of past mistakes; she must discover the path of intention laid out by the Master Builder rather than continually loop her own focused journey with the imposition of her footprints. In a line reminiscent of both Ariadne’s navigation through the labyrinth and the ant’s journey through the spiral shell, John Shade writes in Canto One that “A thread of subtle pain, Tugged at by playful death, released again, But always present, ran through me” (Pale Fire 38). Just as the string travels through the spiral path of the shell, our own corporeal mortality pulls us through the labyrinth of art and life and into abyss and the oblivion that remains beyond.
SPIRAL
“How to keep sane in spiral types of spaces” (Pale Fire 38)
In our understanding of literature, it is integral to observe and understand the inherent mythology, the archetypes hardwired into our collective unconscious. In order to understand, we must myth the point: it is the one beside the point that matters as this is the point corresponds with all other points on the continuing, transcendent spiral. By exploring the Icarus and Daedalus theme in Pale Fire, the reader can understand the collective unconscious that underlies Nabokov’s art. Art, like the image of the spiral or labyrinth, is the way by which man controls time and space. True to the Icarus myth, art is the way by which he can examine the real and transcend his humanity.
In a statement that reflects the shape of a lemniscate or the twin mirrored wings of a butterfly (the symbol of eternity and an entity inclusive of both past and future), Shade’s poem includes the lines “Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and Infinite aftertime: above your head They close like giant wings, and you are dead” (Pale Fire 37). Shade is referring to Nabokov’s twin walls of oblivion referred to in Speak, Memory; the unknown before and after that encloses this corporeal existence. While always existing in the present, humankind cannot help but acknowledge these twin walls of oblivion, the constant rise between the watery abyss of the past and the aerial abyss of the future that both Icarus and the waxwing slain encounter. In their very human desire to break out of the perfect symmetry of cycles, both Icarus and the waxwing are fulfilling their fate: in rising in an attempt to transcend their corporeal limitations, they must fall back to earth, back to meet the mirrored desire and the loss of their physical bodies. However, this urge to transcend the circle is accomplished. By falling, both Icarus figures shed the corporeal bodies that confine them to earthly reality and move into limitless oblivion. They move beyond the boundaries of human limitation. On wings of poetry, the Icarus figure reduces the physical world of man to a mere invention, an imitation of the real that only the fallen can reach.
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