through the looking-glass – pale fire as anamorphosis

Nabokov Online Journal, Vol. VI (2012)
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who had supposedly disappeared but is actually omnipresent since she wrote the text we are
reading.
Designating Hazel Shade as Pale Fire’s internal author also agrees with a chess-
oriented interpretation of the novel. Hazel’s “resurrection” might be viewed as a literary
transposition of the rule of promotion at chess: when a pawn reaches the final rank of the
chessboard, it transforms itself into the piece that the player chooses (except the King),
usually a new Queen, the most powerful piece on the board. Here Hazel, reaching the final
square of her personal board (the lake) is also promoted to a Queen (the queen of the book).
This idea of promotion is evocative of the passage where the poet depicts himself “playing a
game of worlds, promoting pawns/To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns” (63, 819-820). If we go
back to what appears as the central issue of the poem (can we envisage some sort of life after
death?), promotion does indeed deliver a possible answer: in certain conditions a pawn can
become a Queen and enjoy another, more powerful, existence. When Hazel dies, she
surprisingly promotes, albeit through a coded message, to grand author of the novel.
This reading could be connected to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and Through the Looking-Glass (the latter being itself a story of promotion), as Beatrix Hesse
has shown. 41 Nabokov, who translated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into Russian in
1923, obviously knew both novels inside out, and the possible links between them and Pale
Fire are numerous. The narrative of Hazel’s final day, marked by a series of encounters which
inexorably take her to the lake where she comes to grief, evokes the narrative structure of
both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. And more specifically, her death
by drowning might evoke – although the outcome differs – Alice’s crossing of “the Pool of
tears.” Similarly, Chapter 4 of Through the Looking-Glass, in which Alice is caught in the
exchange between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, might be subtly transposed in Pale Fire
where Hazel’s status as the real author of both the poem and the Commentary is masked by
the rivalry between Shade and Kinbote, the novel’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee. One final
clue may also lie in the fact that the question of internal authorship already appears in L.
Carroll’s novel. Tweedledum and Tweedledee question Alice’s reality and suggest that she is
just an element of the Red King’s dream, prompting a reflexion on who is real or invented.
The question resurfaces in the final chapter, “Which dreamed it?”
41 Beatrix Hesse. “‘The Moon’s an arrant thief’ – Self-reflexivity in Nabokov’s Pale Fire,” Self-Reflexivity in
literature, Werner Huber, Martin Middeke and Hubert Zapf eds., Würzburg: Königshausen &Neumann, 2005,
113-124.
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