Shades of Grey

In her blog for Tuesday’s class, Shelby described how she woke up with the opening lines of Pale Fire (the poem) stuck in her head. I couldn’t help but connect her experience to a night a few weekends ago when I had a similar encounter with Nabokov’s Pale Fire. It was a very cold night spent in a sleeping bag high in the Pioneer Mountains, and each time I awoke the same three word phase would course through my mind: “shades of grey.” I had done a lot of thinking the previous day about the significance of the characters’ names in Pale Fire, so no doubt this expression that came to me in my frozen daze was a reference to John Shade and his killer Jack Degree (alias de Grey). It seemed novel to me at the time that the names of two of the principle characters in the text could be combined to produce a phrase that is commonly used to represent the middle region between two extremes, or the gradations (Gradus ~ gradations) between two opposites. Of course, Nabokov’s work is full of such word play – an example that immediately comes to mind is the reversals of the syllables in Kinbote to produce Botkin – but this concept of shades of grey appears to permeate Pale Fire in several ways.

First, the various shades of grey can be seen as an analog for how Pale Fire is read and understood, as there are several levels on which to examine the book. Initially, the reader will be inclined to take everything for face value and will see little meaning or richness to the text. This can be symbolized by the darker shades of grey, or toward the black end of the spectrum. But as the reader digs deeper into the subtleties and connections that slowly become apparent, a new world will open up in which a vast expanse of networks and texture is visible. The lighter shades of grey represent this deeper reading of the book in which transparency replaces the murky obscurity of the darker shades. Thus, as readers make discoveries they are, in a process that invokes Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, led out of the darkness and into a lighted realm full of connections and allusions via ascension to higher levels on the ladder of shades, the ladder of grey.

Grey is a color often associated with age and death, and in this sense Pale Fire is packed with smudges of varying shades of grey. The death of Hazel Shade is an event that greatly impacts John Shade, and there are a multitude of references to Hazel throughout the poem. There seem to be shades of Hazel at every turn in the book, and her presence is portrayed as one of quiet omniscience – tirelessly warning her father of his impending fate. Consequently, her more subtle, obscure role in Pale Fire means that her portrayal as a brighter color would be inappropriate; in other words she does indeed exist in shades of grey. Additionally, there are shades of other grey figures in the book that are not strictly characters in Pale Fire. For example, the shadow of Shakespeare falls upon the text in numerous occurrences, the most obvious being that the title of the poem was taken from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. Also, as Madeleine discussed in class Tuesday, various shades of The Tempest appear throughout the text in great abundance. Shakespeare, a giant in the world of literature and the embodiment of the Elizabethan era, thus serves as a silhouette from the past, a unique shade of grey time that reminds readers of Pale Fire’s fundamental connection and relevance to literature itself.

As stated earlier, shades of grey can also be understood to represent the middle region between two opposites, the gradations between black and white. In Pale Fire, Kinbote and John Shade are the black and white characters – polar opposites that become entwined through one’s obsession and another’s pity. Kinbote is the exile from imaginary Zembla, tall and well groomed but slightly paranoid, while Shade is the homegrown poet from New Wye, homely and unimpressive in appearance but generous and sympathetic in spirit. What, then, are the shades of grey between Kinbote’s black and Shade’s white? Are there other characters in Pale Fire that represent this middle ground between the two opposites? Perhaps Nabokov himself is one of these shades of grey, part delusional Kinbote and part down-to-Earth Shade. This, however, seems unlikely because from what I know of Nabokov, he was much more Shade than Kinbote (there are even parallels between Nabokov’s wife Vera and Shade’s wife Sybil to support this interpretation). At the same time, there is still some of Kinbote in Nabokov, seeing how Nabokov himself experienced exile twice in his life (first with the Bolshevik Revolution and second with Nazi Germany). I suppose that if Nabokov is a shade of grey, he is closer to Shade’s end of the spectrum – a darker shade of white rather than true grey. As far as there being other characters in Pale Fire who represent the middle region of grey, it appears uncertain. Perhaps Sybil can be considered to be a shade of grey seeing how she seems to have two personalities, loathing Kinbote for most of the commentary yet endorsing his publishing of the manuscript towards the end of the book. Of course, this is merely speculation and the subject deserves further consideration. What is clear, however, is that Pale Fire is not purely black and white; rather it exists in the more subtle shades of grey. And it is these shades that make reading Nabokov’s work such a rich, rewarding, and enlightening experience.