Ronald Flores

Even though Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire (1962), often viewed as the masterpiece of emerging postmodern fiction (according to John Burt Foster Jr.), can be considered an innovative and disruptive discourse, it follows a tradition established by Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Modernity’s seminal fiction.

These two novels, standing in the opposite spectrum of the Modern Era, have many characteristics in common. It is the relationship between these two novels, that which will be briefly explored hereon.

In 1952, ten years before Pale Fire was published, Nabokov was asked to dedicate a series of lectures on Don Quixote at Harvard University; these lectures were later published as Lectures on Don Quixote, a book that Nabokovian scholars should re-examine, since it reveals as much of Cervantes’, as of Nabokov’s, aesthetics of the novel.In it, Nabokov writes: ‘Through the other novelist that we shall read, Don Quixote will, in a way, remain with us all the time (11).’ That statement should serve, as much as Nabokov’s advice to become re-readers, as an axis to any developing critical work on this elusive Russian-American author.

Don Quixote helps us understand the origins of the inconclusive debate about the narrator identity that Pale Fire has provoked. Boyd (114) distinguishes four main positions in the critic’s struggle to define Pale Fire’s ultimate narrator; theories oscillate between the single author –be that Shade, Kinbote or Botkin- and multiple authors –be that Kinbote and Shade, Shade and Hazel, so on-. Over the centuries, Don Quixote’s scholars have had the very same question.

Unable to find a definitive answer in this narrative gap Cervantes, the author, deliberately created in his work, contemporary Latin-American writer Carlos Fuentes asks (95):

“Esta es la última pregunta de Cervantes: ¿quién escribe los libros y quién los lee? ¿Quién es el autor de Don Quijote? ¿Un tal Cervantes, más versado en desdichas que en versos, cuya Galatea ha leído el cura que hace el escrutinio de los libros de Don Quijote? Un tal Saavedra, mencionado por el cautivo con admiración, en razón de los hechos que cumplió y todo por alcanzar la libertad?

Cervantes, como Don Quijote, es leído por los personajes de la novela Quijote, libro sin origen autoral y casi sin destino, agonizante apenas nace, reanimado por los papeles del historiador arábigo Cide Hamete Benengeli, que son vertidos al castellano por un anónimo traductor morisco y que serán objeto de la versión apócrifa de Avellaneda…”

Fuentes mentions a smaller trick, within the larger trick, that Cervantes and Nabokov perform: a referral to their previous fictions. Cervantes mentions Galatea, one of his best know shorter works. Nabokov, in Pale Fire, includes allusions to Lolita (1955) and Pnin (1957). In the rest of the statement, Fuentes is eloquent enough, and yet it lacks the profundity of a previous review done by Borges, who, besides introducing other works of fiction that have played the game, claims (668):

“También es sorprendente saber en el principio del novelo capítulo, que la novela entera ha sido traducida del árabe y que Cervantes adquirió el manuscrito en el mercado de Toledo, y lo hizo traducir por un morisco, a quien alojo mas de mes y medio en su casa, mientras concluía la tarea.

Pensamos en Carlyle, que fingió que el Santor Resrtus era versión parcial de una obra publicada en Alemania por el doctor Diogenes Teufulsroeckh; pensamos en el rabino castellano Moisés de León, que compuso el Zohar o Libro del Esplendor y lo divulgó como obra de un rabino palestino del siglo III. Este juego de extrañas ambigüedades culmina en la segunda parte; los protagonistas han leído la primera, los protagonistas del Quijote son, asimismo, lectores del Quijote”.

Unlike Boyd, for whom this inquiry appears to be central, the game of the narrator’s unreliability is, for Borges, venial and futile. According to Borges, who contributed to the ambiguity by adding Pierre Menard as another possible author, the real poignancy of Don Quixote is the reflection it produces on the reader (669):

“¿Por qué nos inquieta que Don Quijote sea lector del Quijote y Hamlet, espectador de Hamlet? Creo haber dado con la causa: tales inversiones sugieren que si los caracteres de una ficción pueden ser lectores o espectadores, nosotros, sus lectores, o espectadores, podemos ser ficticios”.

Even though he does not mention the possible influence of Don Quixote or Borges or Wittgenstein in Nabokov’s novel, Boyd proposes that Nabokov’s Pale Fire is, also, one that launches the reader into some kind of artistic discovery.

The similarities between Don Quixote and Pale Fire do not end in the unreliability of the narrator. Both works are about or have to do with characters, Don Quixote and Kinbote, who have gone mad, characters that the readers can “mock”, as well as sympathize with. In the Lectures on Don Quixote, Nabokov refers to Don Quixote’s appeal to others in way that resembles Kinbote’s appeal: “as a crazy sane man, or an insane one on the verge of sanity (17)”.

That characterization of Don Quixote reminds us of the words of a “certain ferocious lady” in Pale Fire’s Foreword, which obliquely describes Kinbote’s state of mind: ” ‘You are a remarkably disagreeable persona. I fail to see how John and Sybil can stand you,’ and, exasperated by my polite smile, she added: ‘What’s more, you are insane’ “(25).

Both Don Quixote and Kinbote are learned men, suffering from some sort of scholarly madness: analogously affected by their readings, and their “imaginary” lives. Therefore, both are considered rather amiable or passive lunatics, as Shade’s patient attitude towards Kinbote evidence or the various attempts that Don Quixote’s friends do to bring him home without harm.

The relationship between Pale Fire’s main characters, Kinbote and Shade, is also a “contrapuntual contrast”, Nabokov’s term referring to the Don Quixote and Sancho pair. Both Don Quixote and Kinbote try to pull their “side-kicks” into their game: Kinbote tries to convince Shade to write a poem about “his” epic, and Don Quixote tries to convince Sancho to see the world in the way that he does.

Don Quijote de la Mancha and Pale Fire are both concoctions of techniques and genders. Both are novels based on “languages games”, games pertinent to the language they were written on; the opening words of Don Quixote are a taken from Spanish ballads, as the title of Pale Fire is taken from a line of Shakespeare, continuing previous word-plays.

In that sense, Cervantes and Nabokov are authors that expand the legacy of their tradition, constituting their works of fiction as an open field of dialogue, consent and dissent, with previous works of the Spanish and English canons, respectably. Although Cervantes charges specifically against the Chivalry gender and Nabokov seems to have a broader aim, Don Quixote and Pale Fire parody the “purple prose” of their times.

As it has been explored, in the “game” of World Fiction, Spanish Don Quixote has a definitive relationship with English Pale Fire. Lyotard has claimed that: “Each language partner, when a ‘move’ pertaining to him is made, undergoes a ‘displacement,’ an alteration of some kind that not only affects him in his capacity as addressee but also as sender (16)”. Nabokov’s move, presenting the novel in a new form, seems as an appropriate response to Cervantes’ challenge.

Works cited

Borges, Jorge Luis. Obras Completas. Buenos Aires: Emece, 1974
Boyd, Brian. Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. New Jersey: Princeton, 1999.
Fuentes, Carlos. Cervantes o la critica a la lectura. Mexico: Joaquin Mortiz, 1976.
Lyotard, Jean Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1989.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Don Quixote. London: Weindenfeld & Nicolson, 1983.

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