through the looking-glass – pale fire as anamorphosis

Nabokov Online Journal, Vol. VI (2012)
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controlled distortion of Shade’s poem does not serve the piece he is studying, but only his
mad fantasies.
Anamorphosis may even appear as a linguistic key to Pale Fire in that Nabokov’s
language can be viewed as anamorphic. I shall start by briefly drawing the reader’s attention
to a curious grammatical distortion at the very beginning of the Foreword which I have found
in all the editions of Pale Fire I have consulted (Vintage, Penguin and Library of America)
but have seen no critic address:
This fact would be sufficient to show that the imputations made (on July 24, 1959) in a
newspaper interview with one of the Shadeans – who affirmed without having seen the
manuscript of the poem that it ‘consists of disjointed drafts none of which yields a definite
text’ – is a malicious invention on the part of those who would wish not so much to deplore
the state in which a great poet’s work was interrupted by death as to asperse the
competence, and perhaps honesty, of its present editor and commentator. (14, my
emphasis)
This could (and maybe should) be discarded as a simple typo of course: just suppress
the “s” in “imputations” and everything is fine. But this distortion, voluntary or not, in a
sentence whose long central parenthetical clause may yet again evoke the composition of The
Ambassadors and its central anamorphic skull, appears to me as an emblem of the novel’s
frequent attempts at destabilizing its reader’s linguistic perceptions.
Probably more notable is the poem’s insistence on “mirror words.” Word twisting is
introduced in Canto Two as Hazel’s habit:
She twisted words: pot, top,
Spider, redips. And “powder” was “red wop.”
(45, 347-348)
These lines induce a short note by Kinbote:
One of the examples her father gives is odd. I am quite sure it was I who one day, when we
were discussing “mirror words”, observed […] that “spider” in reverse is “redips,” and “T.
S. Eliot,” “toilest”. But then it is also true that Hazel Shade resembled me in certain
respects. (193)
Hazel’s habit is foreshadowed in the description of Aunt Maud’s room in Canto One
where “Moor” (36, 95) mirrors “room” (36, 90), and somehow spreads in the Commentary
where mirror-words also abound in Kinbote’s Zemblan tale. Sudarg of Bokay, the “mirror
maker of genius” (314), is a reflection of sinister Jakob Gradus. Similarly, if Odon is the
king’s most faithful friend, his half-brother Nodo has to be “a cardsharp and a traitor” (311) in
Zembla’s mirror-world. Lastly, but my list of course is not exhaustive, when Kinbote
contemplates suicide, he mentions as the likeliest weapon a “bodkin,” alluding to Hamlet’s
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