Read Writing on the Wall for Free Online

tenderness for human eccentricity, for the freak, the “deviate,” is partly the naturalist’s taste for the curious. But his fond, wry compassion for the lone black piece on the board goes deeper than classificatory science or the collector’s chop-licking. Love is the burden of Pale Fire, love and loss. Love is felt as a kind of homesickness, that yearning for union described by Plato, the pining for the other half of a once-whole body, the straining of the soul’s black horse to unite with the white. The sense of loss in love, of separation (the room beyond, projected onto the snow, the phantom moves of the chess knight, that deviate piece, off the board’s edge onto ghostly squares), binds mortal men in a common pattern—the elderly couple watching TV in a lighted room, and the “queer” neighbor watching them from his window. But it is most poignant in the outsider: the homely daughter stood up by her date, the refugee, the “queen,” the bird smashed on the windowpane.
    Pity is the password, says Shade, in a philosophical discussion with Kinbote; for the agnostic poet, there are only two sins, murder and the deliberate infliction of pain. In the exuberant high spirits, the wild laughter of the book, there is a cry of pure pain. The compassion of Nabokov stops violently short of Gradus, that grey, degraded being, the shadow of a Shade. The modern, mass-produced, jet-propelled, newspaper-digesting killer is described with a fury of intimate hatred; he is Death on the prowl. Unnatural Death is the natural enemy of the delicate, gauzy ephemerids who are Nabokov’s special love. Kinbote makes an “anti-Darwinian” aphorism: “The one who kills is always his victim’s inferior.”
    Gradus in his broad-brimmed hat, with his umbrella and black traveling bag, figures as a kind of Batman out of children’s comic books, whirring darkly through space; yet he is also Mercury (the mercury stands at so many degrees in the thermometer; there is a headless statue of Mercury in the secret passage leading from the palace to the theatre), conductor of souls to the underworld, Zeus’s undercover agent, god of commerce, travel, manual skill, and thievery. In short, a “Jack of small trades and a killer,” as Kinbote calls Jacques d’Argus, who was a pharmacology student at one time (the caduceus) and a messenger boy for a firm of cardboard-box manufacturers; Mercury or Hermes was the slayer of the giant Argus put to watch on Io by Juno-Hera; the hundred eyes of Argus were set in the tail of the peacock, Juno’s familiar. Hermes, born and worshipped in Arcady, is simply a stone or herm; he is thought to have been in early times the daimon that haunted a heap of stones (the Steinmann or grave-ghost), also the place-spirit of a roadside marker or milestone; as a road god, he was the obvious patron of traders and robbers. He was often represented as a rudimentary stock or stone with a human head carved on top and a phallus halfway up. The beheaded Gradus-d’Argus has reverted to a rudimentary state of insentient stoniness—a sex-hater, he once tried to castrate himself.
    Not only Hermes-Mercury, most of the nymphs of Arcady and gods of Olympus are glimpsed in Pale Fire, transformed, metamorphosed into animal or human shapes. Botkin is identified by Sybil Shade with the botfly, a kind of parasitic horsefly that infests sheep and cattle. Io, in cow form, was tormented by a gadfly sent by Hera; one of the Vanessa butterflies is the Io, marked with peacock eyes. Another is the Limenitis Sibylla, the White Admiral, and the Red Admiral is the Vanessa Atalanta, which feeds on wounded tree stems, like the scarred hickory in Shade’s bosky garden. Atalanta was another Arcadian. The sibyls, on the other hand, are connected with Apollo, and Shade with his laurel trees is an Apollonian figure. But Sibyl was born Swallow; the land of Arcady was drained by swallow-holes, and the first sibyl was daughter of Dardanus, ancestor of the