I
In a much-quoted observation, Francis Bacon notices that ‘there is no excellent
beauty, that hath not some strangeness in the proportion’.1
In the essay from which this citation is taken, Bacon discusses the way in which painters should compose portraits: ‘by a kind of felicity’, and not ‘by rule’. Proficiency does not make an artist. A successful work of art is marked by striking qualities, striking because of the originality and imagination the artist has employed in selecting its subject and rendering it with artistry, thus presenting the viewer or reader with knowledge, with ‘things unknown’, which
would have gone unnoticed without the artist’s creation.2Originality, imagination
and artistry make the distinction between a mere representation and a true work of art, and it is the difference between these two which piques the spectator’s curiosity. Of the characteristics of ‘states of being where art… is the norm’,
‘curiosity’ is the first one which is mentioned by Nabokov (LO 315). ‘[W]hy
imitation pleases, is,’ writes Hazlitt, ‘because, by exciting curiosity, and inviting a comparison between the object and the representation, it opens a new field of inquiry, and leads the attention to a variety of details and distinctions not
perceived before.’3 One device to arouse curiosity can be achieved by using an
unusual point of view. ‘To a person lying with his face close to the ground on a summer’s day, the blades of spear-grass will appear like tall forest trees’, writes
Hazlitt.4 He might have been thinking of The Great Piece of Turf (1503) by
Albrecht Dürer in which such towering blades and petioles are depicted, or of Marvell’s ‘unfathomable grass’ with its ‘green spires’, which show that an original
perspective might serve painter and poet alike.5 In Bend Sinister, Nabokov
chooses an opposite position: ‘[p]hotographed from above, they would have come out in Chinese perspective, doll-like, a little limp but possibly with a hard wooden core under their plausible clothes… and the secret spectator… surely
would be amused by the shape of human heads seen from above (BS147)’. Shifts
of perspective can also be observed in Laughter in the Dark, which frequently
amount, as Leona Toker writes, ‘to turning aesthetic distance into physical
distance’.6 Selecting an exceptional angle to gaze at grass and people implies a
degree of deception because stalks are not as high as trees and human beings do not look like puppets. This disproportion is an indispensable element in works of art. Leonardo, for example, observes that ‘those who want to produce a deceptively real imitation of nature must not copy nature, but deceive the
observer’.7In order to heighten the consciousness of their public, artists have to
fluster it, to remove the familiarity with which the world is viewed, or even to replace the familiar world with another. ‘The true measure of genius is in what
measure the world he has created is his own’, says Nabokov (LRL 106). Art
requires a degree of deviation from everyday reality, which amounts to a sort of
deception. ‘All art is deception,’ Nabokov says (LL146). For the composition of
his chess problems which, he says, possess ‘the same virtues that characterize all
worthwhile art’ (PP 15), this holds as well: ‘[d]eceit, to the point of diabolism,
and originality, verging upon the grotesque, were my notions of strategy’ (SM 289). Not only in chess but also in nature, in the ‘mysteries of mimicry’, Nabokov notices the same dissimulation as in art: ‘[b]oth were a form of magic,
both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception’ (SM124/5).
The pictorial arts have their own particular genre of mimicry: the trompe l’oeil painting. A trompe l’oeil painting differs from a realistic picture because it gives
the spectator the impression that the objects he sees are real, not painted.8The
artistry required for executing trompe l’oeil paintings is of an exceptionally high level, and this is one of the reasons why Nabokov admires these works of art: ‘a good trompe l’oeil painting proves at least that the painter is not cheating’ (SO 167). Such an artist is Zembla’s court painter, Eystein, ‘a prodigious master of the trompe l’oeil’, whose mastery is shown in ‘the fallen petal or the polished panel that he rendered with such love and skill’ (PF 130). In some of his paintings, as Nabokov relates in Pale Fire, Eystein had ‘resorted to a weird form of trickery: among his decorations of wood or wool, gold or velvet, he would insert one which was really made of the material elsewhere imitated by paint’ (130). One of Eystein’s paintings is described in detail, a portrait of Count Kernel, a former Keeper of the Treasure. As in the course of the novel two Soviet experts are searching for Zembla’s crown jewels, this portrait catches their attention, as the Count was portrayed ‘with fingers resting lightly on an embossed and emblazoned box whose side facing the spectator consisted of an inset oblong made of real bronze, while upon the shaded top of the box, drawn in perspective, the artist had pictured a plate with the beautifully executed, twin-lobed, brainlike, halved kernel of a walnut’. Although the ‘Soviet professionals could be excused for assuming they would find a real receptacle behind the real metal… it contained nothing, however, except the broken bits of a nutshell’ (131).
In Laughter in the Dark Nabokov calls this kind of threefold cunning a ‘Hegelian syllogism of humour’ (143). Transferred to Eystein’s painting, the following phases can be distinguished: thesis: the bronze oblong which might hide a repository containing the jewels is only a painted oblong; antithesis: the metal is not painted but is real and conceals a receptacle; synthesis: the repository doesn’t contain the jewels.
These multiple layers under which the final answer is hidden is symptomatic for
Pale Fire, which has been called by Mary McCarthy ‘an infernal machine, a trap
to catch reviewers, a cat-and-mouse game’.9Its contents comprise references to
the paintings of Hogarth, Leonardo, Picasso and Teniers. Fictitious painters are
presented as well: Aunt Maud, Eystein, Fra Pandolf and Lang.10Pale Fire covers
many themes, important ones being the probing of the permeability of the screen between this world and the otherworld. These themes are woven into a superb story about the last of Zembla’s kings, who, imprisoned after a revolution, escaped and fled to the USA. He is persecuted by Gradus, a vengeful revolutionary. The exiled king, assuming the name of Kinbote, settles in New Wye, and becomes the neighbour of John Shade, whose poetry he admires immensely. Shade is, at that time, composing a poem about his life, his marriage, his deceased daughter, Hazel, and about the ‘consciousness beyond the tomb’ (39). By mistake Shade, and not Kinbote, is shot by Gradus. Kinbote edits Shade’s poem, adding an abundance of adscititious comments, which constitute the main body of the novel. The search for Zembla’s crown jewels is a minor theme and, as is so often the case in Nabokov’s fiction, this quest is a metaphorical one. The jewels denote, as Brian Boyd says, ‘the intangible richness
of consciousness’.11 These riches, the fruits of spry observation and lusty
imagination, have their origin in the human brain. The Soviets who disregard the painted ‘brainlike’ kernel, will never be able to find the jewels, and they deserve to stumble upon the empty nutshell.
The reference to William Hogarth concerns the appearance of Shade, who reminds the narrator ‘of a fleshy Hogarthian tippler of indeterminate sex’. Selecting the obscurity of sexes as a feature of Hogarth’s paintings is a typical example of Nabokov’s eclectic skill; many of Hogarth’s elderly figures have this gender, as do youngsters, like the epicene players in Marriage à la Mode, IV: ‘the
Countess’s Levée’. (See colour illustration 11.)
Hogarth was a contemporary of Alexander Pope’s, Shade’s favourite poet. Hogarth and Pope both satirised the moral decay of their times, which was regarded as having the same root as the decay in art, of which Grub Street became the proverbial symptom. Pope’s ethical poems were published (by
Warburton) as Moral Essays, and have objectives comparable to those of Hogarth’s moralising pictorial series like A Harlot’s Progress, The Rake’s Progress and Marriage à la Mode. The ‘Modern Moral Subjects’ or ‘Novels in Paint’, as these strip cartoons avant la lettre were called, show incidents which can also be
found in Pope’s poetry.12The postulated bawd, Mother Needham, for example
appears in A Harlot’s Progress, I and in The Dunciad (I, 324) (and might also be the reincarnated Shakespearean ronyon, the ‘slapdash disheveled hag who ladles
out the mash’ in Pale Fire [267].)13
Apart from adding some chequered threads to the texture of Pale Fire, the reference to Hogarth also serves its main theme, that of timelessness. According to his wife Véra, ‘a strange otherworldliness, the “hereafter”,’ permeates all that
Nabokov has written.14Especially in his pre-American poetry, this dimension is
assayed intensively, culminating in a ‘kind of resurrection of the dead or survival
of life after death’ as a recurring theme.15
In this respect, Hogarth’s famous Self-Portrait (1745) is of importance. This portrait is adorned with an empty palette above which lingers a line. Written on the palette is the text ‘The Line of Beauty and of Grace’.
In was only eight years later that Hogarth, in his Analysis of Beauty (1753), explained the meaning of this puzzling line, the key being that a ‘serpentine curve’
is at the basis of all beautiful forms.16In his self-portrait, this curved line has the
shape of a mirrored S. However, it is the curvature which matters, not the angle from which it is looked upon; in the engraving, The Analysis of Beauty, I (1753), the
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miniature number 50 (enclosed in the engraving’s frame) shows a number of S-
shaped curves.17 As early as 1745 it was known that Hogarth attached much
significance to ‘the inimitable curve of beauty of the S undulating motion line.’18
This S-shape is of importance to Nabokov’s art as well, especially in connection with his metaphysics. In Pale Fire, Shade’s preoccupation with the question of what ‘awaited consciousness beyond the tomb’ (39) was so dominant that he
decided ‘to explore and fight’ this mystery (39). He learned how to behave when
… you’re made a ghost:
Sidle and slide, choose a smooth surd, and coast, Meet solid bodies and glissade right through (53/4)
The second line cited here is quite remarkable in that every verb and noun contains an S, which makes this letter the most likely candidate for the ‘smooth surd’. In Invitations to a Beheading the same image can be found; ‘it was as if one
side of his being slid into another dimension’ (IB121). And in the story ‘Ultima
Thule’, the painter and draughtsman Sineusov is also involved in solving this eternal riddle. D. Barton Johnson calls attention to this name as it evokes the
Latin ‘sinus’, meaning ‘curve’.19 A trigonometric sinusoidal curve is a perfect
representation of the letter S.
As has been mentioned, the hereafter is a theme very often addressed in Nabokov’s poetry. Johnson has investigated the frequency of the words employed in his poetry, especially those related to the barrier between the two worlds. In respect to this latter theme, he concludes that: ‘two roots are of remarkably high frequency in the poetry: -skvoz- ‘through,’ and -skol’z- ‘slip’. With 57 and 27 occurrences respectively, they may be associated with transition through the barriers
between worlds.’20Note that both words, like -smert’- ‘death’, start with the letter S.
Nabokov had no interest in the mobs and the populous gatherings Hogarth so often painted. And Hogarth did not reveal any interest in his paintings beyond the concrete setting of his pictures. He ‘only transcribes or transposes
what was tangible and visible, not the abstracted and intelligible’, says Hazlitt.21
Their beliefs differed widely. In Hogarth’s very last picture The Bathos, the
finality of everything, the arts included, is made most painfully clear.22 Even
Father Time is expiring. Two miniatures illustrate the description; the right-hand one shows a line encircling a cone. What is visible is the S-shaped ‘line of beauty,’ which ceases where the cone ends. In Nabokov’s thinking the contrary happens: ‘[t]wirl follows twirl’ and every new arc in the spiral is ‘still ampler’ than the
previous one, suggesting an eternal movement (SM 275). Apart from these
fundamental differences, they share a scholarly interest in their respective arts,
The pictorial arts provide another illustration of Shade’s attempts to bridge ‘the inadmissible abyss’ (39). In Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode I, an interior is shown with many paintings, one a portrait of a gorgon. The best-known gorgon is Medusa, of whom Kinbote is reminded when he looks at a picture of his land- lord, ‘a Medusa-locked hag’ (83).
He replaces this picture ‘by the reproduction of a beloved early Picasso: earth boy leading raincloud horse.’ This oil, Boy Leading a Horse, shows a boy with a horse and a vague background in which the livid shades in the top left-hand corner may suggest clouds.
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Pablo Picasso, Boy Leading a Horse, 1905
The removal of the Medusa-like head might be interpreted as a sort of decapitation. In Greek mythology Medusa was beheaded by Perseus, thus giving birth to Pegasus, who sprang from her body. Pegasus, the winged horse, was beloved by the muses for whom he created the Hippocrene well by stamping his moon-shaped hoof. Still unbridled, it was tamed by Bellerophon, a mortal,
which might explain the adjective ‘earth’ Nabokov uses.24That Picasso’s horse is
a wingless Pegasus is very likely as it is an exact replica of the Pegasus painted by Andrea Mantegna in his Parnassus (1497); both horses are depicted as approaching head on, their heads turned towards their companion and with their left forelegs gracefully upturned, their hooves elegantly finishing the rounding thus made. In Mantegna’s painting the cascading waterfall, which has its source high in the mountains, can be seen behind Pegasus. It is this spring which justifies the reference to the painting by Picasso.
In probing the hereafter, Shade’s interest concentrates inter alia on the exact transition from this life to the next. During a near-death experience he has the vision of a ‘white fountain,’ and then he reads that a lady has seen this very same vision. Perplexed by the coincidence he visits her, only to learn that the report was not accurate. What she saw was not a white fountain, but a white mountain. After having swallowed his disappointment, he realises the bounty the combination of the two visions yields. The spring on the mountain alludes to the Hippocrene, the source of inspiration for poets, proving that it is his art which enables him best to investigate ‘the foul, the inadmissible abyss’. (The specification of Medusa’s tresses by Nabokov suggests another link between the arts and immortality. Medusa had serpents for locks, which recalls Hogarth’s
serpentine curve, the basis of all beautiful forms.)25
Another Picasso painting is mentioned in Pale Fire as well: a still life, Chandelier,
pot et casserole émaillée, adorning the wall of the King’s Zemblan pied-à-terre,
above ‘a shelfful of calf-bound poets, and a virginal-looking daybed’ (76), thus
combining the three arts, painting, literature and music, as part of his ménage.26
The oil represents its three objects highly stylised by the strong, bleaching light, so strong that the taper’s flame casts a shadow and that the jug reflects a figure eight while the mouth is reshaped in a triangle, thus adding two more instances to the numerous eights and threes in his novel. Nabokov, who had a copy of this painting on his writing desk in Montreux, when asked what aspects of Picasso he
admired, said: ‘the graphic aspect, the masterly technique, and the quiet colors’.27
Leonardo is referred to, when a young university instructor is excusing him-
self while ‘spreading out his palms like a disciple in Leonardo’s Last Supper’ (268).
the two cultures, Russian and Anglo-Saxon, whose interconnections are so crucial
to Pale Fire.28
The juxtaposition of the two cultures might explain the reference to Teniers as well. In the room in which the king was confined two engravings hang on the east-side wall, one a ‘shabby and lugubrious Fête Flamande after Teniers’, the other showing the ‘blurry shapes of melancholy sheep’ (122). David Teniers the Younger painted several pictures with a Fête Champêtre or a Vlaamse Kermis, two of them showing an identical nobleman – the same pose, the same clothes – visiting different fairs, prefiguring the different positions of the king in Zembla
and America.29
This nobleman reappears in Landscape with Noble Family and Fortress, enjoying a walk near his castle, a many-towered bulwark built on a pointy hill. The romantic setting is not unlike that of Pale Fire’s Onhava Palace with its many gates, linden copses, bastions and pleasure grounds, situated in a mountainous
area as Mt. Falk is within view.30Many of the peasant fairs Teniers painted show
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an inn with a flag put out. These flags invariably display St. George, who was often the patron saint of the guilds of archers which prevailed in Western Europe for many centuries. In honour of their patron saint, the guilds celebrated his feast day with a fair. In Bruegel’s Kermis at Hoboken, which is compositionally
related to his St. George Kermis, the archers can be seen in the foreground.31One
of the earliest fairs by Teniers, Sint Joriskermis (St. George Fair) has been regarded
as a pendant of The Liberation of St. Peter by an Angel.32
Both companion pieces are relevant. St. George’s feast day is April 23, which is Nabokov’s birthday. In many of his books, Nabokov’s presence can be noticed in many different disguises and St. George as his representative is discerned as well
in Pnin and ‘Spring in Fialta’.33The Liberation of St. Peter by an Angel shows the
interior of an ancient building, four soldiers gambling around a table, their halberds resting against the wall. In the background, beyond a hall, the prisoner can be seen. This spectacle is very similar to the events which precede King Charles’s escape in Pale Fire. Here we have four guards as well, visible by the
prisoner, playing ‘lansquenet’.34 The word ‘lansquenet’ is derived from the
German Landsknecht, coined in the sixteenth century; soldiers typically armed with long pikes or lances. ‘Lansquenet’ is also a card game in which players bet David Teniers the Younger, Village Fair, 1649
on single cards. Having alluded to Teniers, Nabokov evokes The Liberation of St.
Peter by an Angel by one single, archaic word: ‘lansquenet’, its soldiers armed
with lances, their gambling by cards and the ancient setting.35 Along with
lending King Charles’s story a pictorial vividness, the reference to Teniers’ lifelike