DISSENTING IN AN AGE OF FRENZIED

HETEROSEXUALISM: KINBOTE'S TRANSPARENT CLOSET

IN NABOKOV'S PALE FIRE
Kinbote's homosexuality ... is a metaphor for the artist's minority view of a bad world, of "our
cynical age of frantic heterosexualism." If one dared risk a guess at correlative idiosyncrasies in
Nabokov himself, one would have to point to his intellectual disgust with Freudianism or
remembering that he is a member of the Russian emigre minority, his loathing of Marxism.
(Kermode 671-72)[1]
This remark from Frank Kermode's 1962 review of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire typifies the way in
which "homosexuality" has functioned in literary critical discourse (if not necessarily in literature
itself) until recent years: never as a nexus of experience, a material reality, a specific subject position,
but always as a "metaphor" for something else, a signifier for more compelling signifieds, a place
marker occupied by nothing and no one of consequence. For what Kermode seems to be suggesting is
that, though Pale Fire is mediated by an explicitly gay narrator, the more comprehensive issue at hand
is the opposition of "artist" to "bad world," and that there are various sub-categories of this opposition,
one of which stands, in Nabokov's fiction, as an analogue for the others, which directly concern
Nabokov in his life. Thus, the necessarily political conflict between "homosexuality" and "frantic
heterosexualism" in Pale Fire is not, in Kermode's account, to be considered for what might be its
literal implications (implications for gay men in a homophobic culture), but rather to be read as a figure
for the more pressing issues of Nabokov's "idiosyncratic" opposition as an "intellectual" to
"Freudianism," or as a "Russian emigre" to "Marxism."
Much recent work in the arena of gay and lesbian literary studies has suggested that to read the
presence of "homosexuality" in a work of fiction as a figural or metaphorical index to something else is
to engage, whether implicitly or explicitly, in avoidance tactics, and to collude with, rather than
scrutinize, a prevailing heterocentric imperative. It is scarcely surprising that such reading practices
prevail in the case of writers, like Nabokov, who have not been identified as "gay." I would suggest,
however, that precisely by exploring Pale Fire as being, in some crucial ways, about its protagonist's
(proscribed) homoerotic desire, we might see how the novel resists and is complicit with the way
sexuality is constructed in twentieth-century Western culture. What do critics have to say, if anything,
about the specific sexuality Nabokov has assigned to his apparently insane literary commentator? Or,
more importantly, what tone or affect has inflected critical references to Charles Kinbote as
homosexual? Do they betray a homophobic nervousness, and if so, does it mean that Nabokov's novel
encourages such a response?
It might at first seem unreasonable to question such remarks as John Haegert's observation that Kinbote
is "Nabokov's incurable pederast and lunatic commentator."[2] Pale Fire is, after all, constructed around
the gradual revelation of its narrator's insanity, and seems to invite us to link his sexual with his mental
"deviance." A brief synopsis will clarify this for readers unfamiliar with the novel. It opens with a
preface, in the voice of Charles Kinbote, who introduces to us the first "edition" of a poem by his late
friend John Shade. The poem, a four canto lyrical reflection informed by the poet's grief at the suicide
of his daughter, Hazel Shade, takes up the next thirty-three pages. The bulk of the book, however,
consists of Kinbote's copious commentary on the poem, during the course of which he fills us in on two
"stages" of his own autobiography. On the one hand, Kinbote tells us of his life in the academic
community of New Wye, where he has come to teach for a year, inhabiting the house next door to John
Shade and his wife Sybil. Kinbote, clearly something of a social outcast in New Wye, does his best to
foster a friendship with Shade, who is in the process of writing the poem that opens the novel. On the
other hand, he tells of his life prior to his arrival in New Wye, a life in which he was the (gay) King of
Zembla, where he ruled happily despite unsuccessful attempts to force him to couple with a young
lady-in-waiting, Fleur de Fylar, and then with Disa, the woman he is forced to marry. Eventually,
however, he is dethroned, and forced to escape to the United States. In New Wye, he understands
himself to be living in exile, in disguise, and to be the target of an assassination plot. Little by little, he
discloses his "royal past" to John Shade, in the hopes that Shade will immortalize it in the poem he is
writing. Inadvertently, Kinbote reveals to us that his delusions of royalty make him an object of ridicule
and pity in the New Wye community. By the end of the narrative, we gather that Shade has been
mistakenly shot by a local psychopath who has escaped from prison and come in search of the judge
who put him there. Kinbote, convinced that the assassin from Zembla has arrived (and missed his
mark), takes possession of Shade's poem, and proceeds to write the commentary that will reveal its
"true," but hidden, meaning, that is, the story of his life.[3]
As I have suggested, critics have, for the most part, insisted on metaphorizing or pathologizing
Kinbote's sexuality. While sketching out some of the typical instances of these critical appraisals, I
shall elaborate the parameters of a more culturally specific reading of homoeroticism in the novel, one
that treats it for its material rather than its figurative ramifications. My reading of Kinbote is, in this
sense, informed by Gayatri Spivak's reading of the Mahasweta Devi story "Stanadayini"
("Breastgiver"). Spivak points out that Devi herself has said she intends the story to function as a
"parable of India after decolonization"; this requires that its protagonist, Jashoda, be read not as a
realistic character, but as a stand-in for "Mother India" (244). But Spivak wants to resist such a "too
neat reading" of Jashoda as place marker for India in order to explore the way in which the story helps
to articulate the subject-position of the gendered subaltern in India. Similarly, I shall explore the ways
in which readings of Kinbote have depended for their validity on such a "too neat" metaphorization of
his character, and a refusal to consider how he functions as another kind of gendered, or what Jonathan
Dollimore would call "sexually dissident," subaltern.[4]
HOMOSEXUALITY AS PATHOLOGY
A number of critics have addressed the way in which Kinbote is doubly marginalized in the New Wye
community by, on the one hand, his sexuality and on the other, his delusions of royalty. But while the
links between Kinbote's sexual orientation and his madness are ambiguous in the novel, they have been
variously articulated by critics, depending on how they perceive homoeroticism to participate in the
overlapping discourses of pathology, morality, and aesthetics. Generally, Kinbote's insanity has been
connected with his homoerotic desire as a sort of interchangeable substitute for it. Indeed, in many
cases, Kinbote's mental state is understood to be inseparable from, or synonymous with, his sexual
orientation. Such an equivalence is facilitated by the assumption that both insanity and homosexuality
belong to the same class of phenomena insofar as they are understood to be pathological disturbances
that define the subject as (in this case incurably) ill. Hence, statements like the one I quoted from
Haegert earlier: that Kinbote is an "incurable pederast and lunatic commentator" (405).
Although Phyllis A. Roth is one of the few critics to explore Kinbote's sexuality for what she
understands to be its particular implications as a specific sexuality, her analysis nevertheless adheres
too strictly to a pathologizing psychoanalytic conceptualization of the homoerotic. Drawing from Otto
Rank's psychoanalytic account of the double or doppelganger in literature, Roth "diagnoses" Kinbote's
sexuality as a "neurotic 'adjustment' to an Oedipal situation" (222). According to this scheme, Kinbote
treats Shade as a positive father figure, and invents Gradus (the imagined assassin) as a persecuting
double (these are the Rankian doppelgangers), thus demonstrating that he "feels guilt for his
homosexuality" (225). To be a homosexual is, according to the medical prognosis, to be guilty: "Only
by self-destruction," says Roth, "can that guilt be exorcised for him" (227). Naturally, then,
homosexuality is inevitably accompanied by a suicidal impulse.
Roth's account is plausible in much of its elaboration of Kinbote's psychic state only because it fails to
contextualize that state within the over-arching cultural apparatuses that produce and punish it. To say,
as Roth does, that Kinbote cannot "approve of himself" is to say, surely, that he has internalized his
culture's homophobia. Roth's reliance on Rank's oedipal "etiology" of homosexuality as a means of
"diagnosing" Kinbote, however, portrays that guilt as an essential rather than culturally produced
component of a sexual desire that is not strictly hetero-identified. Such an account forecloses the
possibility of finding something like a social critique implicit in Kinbote's fantasmatic narrativizing of
his sexual history. Roth focuses on how psychoanalysis can illuminate the "disastrous failures" of
Nabokov's "central characters." But if this psychoanalytic theory is accompanied by a cultural analysis
of the social context for the "psyches" of these central characters, then it is something like the "age of
frenzied heterosexualism" that must be understood as a "disastrous failure" in Pale Fire.
Kinbote, in his transgression of sexual, literary, social, and rational codes, has challenged the
heterosexual imperative insofar as he refuses to occupy the subject position of one who is sick and
thereby seeks a cure.5 If he were the only character in the novel to be abjected by the hetero hegemony
in Pale Fire, we might assume that the novel does nothing to call this hegemony into question. But
surely it is precisely such a hegemony that also annihilates Shade's daughter, Hazel. At least one critic
has explored some of the implications of the way in which Hazel Shade suggestively parallels Kinbote,
though without, I think, making the necessary next step towards suggesting what their commonality
reveals about the culture that marginalizes them. Taking his cue from Roth, David Galef inserts
Kinbote into the oedipal family narrative, where he joins Hazel in "a childish bid for [the] attention" of
the father (figure), John Shade (430). Also like Roth, Galef emphasizes what he sees as a compelling
suicidal impulse in Kinbote--an impulse that finds its analogue in Hazel's suicide. Both "suffer
ultimately from a lack of relevance to their surroundings" and are propelled by the "burden of
maintaining" their fantasies toward self-annihilation. In this respect, they are both "freaks, in Nabokov's
artistic conception and in their own artistic dreams. The author extends his appreciation for their art,
sympathy for their lives" (435).
Insofar as both Kinbote and Hazel deviate from certain fairly rigorously prescribed social norms, they
can, indeed, be identified as "freaks"; Galef does little to delineate, however, the way in which the
frontier between normal and freakish is erected and policed in this novel, beyond implying that to be
normal is to be "in touch" with reality, regardless of what that reality entails or how it has been
constructed. Thus, though acknowledging that Nabokov feels "tenderness for [his] creatures,
particularly those who seem too frail for life" (435), Galef reifies the "normalcy" of that "life," taking
for granted the "naturalness" of the heterosexual imperative that plays itself out across the bodies of
both Kinbote and Hazel.
John Shade--writing and projecting onto his daughter from firmly within a heterosexual hegemony--can
imagine no other future for her than a sexually prescribed one. It is a foregone conclusion that her
erotic desire will be directed toward men, and since she has never conformed to the ideal of the
heterosexually desirable (and desiring) woman, her parents take it for granted that she is doomed to a
life of unfulfillment. This is not to imply that Hazel, like Kinbote, is "really" gay, and simply needs to
recognize and act upon an attraction to women: such a positivistic account of her sexuality is
effectively unavailable to us. Hazel, like Kinbote, is what Judith Butler would call culturally
unintelligible" in the world of Pale Fire, insofar as there is a constructed (and suspect) system by which
one comes to understand one's (sexual) identity in that world. As Butler has pointed out
It would be wrong to think that the discussion of "identity" ought to proceed prior to a discussion of
gender identity for the simple reason that "persons" only become intelligible through becoming
gendered in conformity with recognizable standards of gender intelligibility. (16)
In a way, Kinbote as a gay man and Hazel as a (potential) lesbian, are impossible in Pale Fire precisely
because, in Butler's words,
The cultural matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible requires that certain kinds of
"identities" cannot "exist"--that is, those in which gender does not follow from sex and those in which
the practices of desire do not "follow" from either sex or gender .... Indeed, precisely because certain
kinds of "gender identities" fail to conform to those norms of cultural intelligibility, they appear only as
developmental failures or logical impossibilities from within that domain. (17)
It is important to point out that by and large, the women in Pale Fire function primarily as
heterosexually prescribed erotic objects (Fleur de Fylar, Disa, and certain coeds for whom other faculty
members express lust), or the enforcers of heterosexuality (Fleur de Fylar's mother), or rivals in the
pursuit of male sexual objects (Sybil). The only significant female character who falls outside these
categories--indeed, who seems herself to be victimized by them--is Hazel, whose sexuality can only be
understood by others around her negatively, as a dismally failed heterosexuality. Insofar as there is no
positive alternative for her, she is intelligible only as what Butler would call a developmental failure" or
a "logical impossibility." Lesbianism, in the world of New Wye, in the world of Pale Fire (and
doubtless in the world of 1950s middle America) is invisible--not even on the map of erotic
possibilities.
HOMOSEXUALITY AS (COMIC) INVERSION
Following from the assumption that to be homosexual is, by definition, to be a psychological deviant
are those discussions of Kinbote's homosexuality that tie it to insanity as a paradigm of a perfect and
symmetrical inversion of the norm, which is useful in producing comic literary effects. Andrew Field,
for instance, tells us that "[a]s an inversion or direct opposite, homosexuality provides a perfect
negative image with which to project normal feeling" (35). We needn't dwell on the fact that, as he
says, "[t]he sexuality in Pale Fire happens to be pederasty," since "it merely takes the proper
positioning of a mirror to translate this into the perversion of Humbert Humbert, or the potentialities
inherent in all sexual practice or fantasy" (34). Field's impulse here is to gloss over the specificity of
Kinbote's sexuality. This requires that it first be figured as a direct and symmetrical inversion of
"normal feeling," and then that the critic perform a mirror trick to translate it into some universally
experienced "sexual practice or fantasy," albeit via the questionable, but at least heterosexual, byroad of
Humbert Humbert's desire. Moreover, "perverse sexuality by its very nature satisfies one of the most
basic precepts of comedy from the time of Aristophanes: the world turned on its head, tragedy and pain
softened (but not lessened) by the presence of the absurd and the ludicrous" (35). Homosexuality is
primarily, according to Field, an instrument of humor, an "absurd" and "ludicrous" inversion of the
norm.
While David Rampton echoes Field's observation about the deployment of homosexuality as a comic
literary strategy, he doubts whether a whole novel can rest upon such a device, since for him,
homosexuality is a sexuality "arrested at the adolescent stage," and can only give rise to tedious and
repetitious jokes at Kinbote's expense "every time a male character is mentioned" (151). What Rampton
calls the "welter of sexual detail" in the novel should (if the novel is to have any artistic or
epistemological value) "lead us through the twists and turns of the psyche to some truth about the inner
self" (151). Kinbote's sexual life--precisely by virtue of its being imbued by the homoerotic--is,
according to Rampton, identical to his deranged mental life, and thus constitutes "a fantasy world
which has relatively little to do with our own" (154). For this reason, then, it fails to tell us anything
about "the inner self," which is, after all, presumed to be heterosexual. According to Rampton,
The imaginary exploits of most of the Commentary ... identify the world of Pale Fire as another version
of adolescent wish-fulfillment reconstructed by the over-ripe imagination. [In Lolita and Ada] other
links with the world of common experience give us a sense of solidity and depth that Kinbote's frolics,
as funny as they are, do not. (155)
That it is primarily the homoeroticism in Pale Fire that, for Rampton, deprives it of "solidity and depth"
is confirmed by the junctures to which he points as restoring some epistemological value to the novel.
He is reassured, it would seem, by Shade's heterosexual presence in the poem, since his life, as
Rampton puts it, "simply blows Kinbote's away .... [Shade's] earthy humour and robust physical
presence break the Kinbote spell and leave him and his paranoid patterns spinning in a self-contained
void" (154-55). Elsewhere, Rampton notes
At some point [Nabokov] must have ... realized that readers might tire of chuckling at his narcissistic
invert. With a view to extending the range of Kinbote's interests, and involving the reader in a more
meaningful way, he includes a detailed account of a meeting with Queen Disa on the Riviera and of the
reflections occasioned by it. (152)
As we shall see, Rampton is "involved" as a reader in a "more meaningful way" because he interprets
this passage as being primarily about a heterosexual expression of desire. But it is this passage, more
than any other perhaps, that marks Charles's desire as uncompromisingly gay, and that demonstrates
just the extent to which he will be made, by a homophobic culture, to suffer for this desire. In the Disa
dream passage, Kinbote has just described the nature of their marriage, the result of the efforts of
"representatives of the nation" to persuade him to give up his copious but sterile pleasures and take a
wife. It was a matter not of morality but of succession" (173). Whether Zembla is understood to be an
invention of Nabokov or of Kinbote, it simultaneously reflects and transforms a system of compulsory
heterosexuality in contemporary American culture as inhabited by both Nabokov's characters and his
readers. As in American culture, Zembla seems to be made up mostly of an exclusively male
homosocial society; the difference is that in Zembla--or in Kinbote's fantasy of Zembla in his childhood
and young adulthood--the homoerotic element is explicitly acknowledged, sanctioned, and celebrated.
Indeed, acts of gay sexuality are referred to as "manly Zemblan customs," and thus understood to be
coextensive not only with accepted models of masculinity, but even with "customary" expressions of
national identity. This is partly what makes Zembla a utopian ideal for Kinbote: he seems to participate,
by virtue of his sexuality, in a political hegemony, and is linked by that sexuality to others who share it
with him. But there is a flaw in this apparent hegemony, and here is where Zembla resembles, after all,
its American counterpart. The very perpetuation of the monarchy in Zembla depends upon an
institutionalized disruption of its customary system of pleasures: King Charles is compelled to "take a
night off" from his erotic life, and "lawfully engender an heir."
This injunction ushers in an altogether different Zembla, one that insists upon a sexuality inseparable
from reproduction, which seems to be in the custody of the female half of the population. With an
unsuspecting and hopelessly heterosexual Disa, then, King Charles is forced into a marriage that, in
turn, translates his mode of erotic pleasure into an instrument of torture. In spite of the optimistic
portrayal of his sexuality before the marriage, Charles has internalized the imperatives of the
"heterosexualist" law that prescribes his coupling with, and indeed, his loving, Disa, so that the painful
dynamics of this marriage look uncannily like those of the closeted gay man's marriage of convenience
in contemporary America. What Charles discovers in this marriage is that his sexuality is not
negotiable, that he is not bisexual, that he cannot satisfy both his own needs and the needs of his culture
(as it is represented by Disa). This would not be so unbearable if the continuation of his sex life outside
of the marriage did not, by the internal logic of the marriage itself, constitute the means by which pain
should be perpetually inflicted upon Disa. Hence, a series of uneasy pretenses, disclosures, denials,
subterfuges, and recriminations is set in motion. At the beginning, he still tries "strenuously to possess
her but to no avail" (207). His explanations that he is inexperienced, or that he is incapacitated by "an
old riding accident" serve temporarily to keep Disa in the dark about his sexuality, but only until "the
inevitable rumors reached her" and she "read books, found out all about our manly Zemblan customs,
and concealed her naive distress under a great show of sarcastic sophistication" (208). That Charles
now makes an attempt to "give up the practices of his youth" points to the extent to which he has
internalized the system of compulsory heterosexuality that has consigned "manly Zemblan customs" to
the realm of an adolescent past that must be renounced in adulthood. From then on, his sexuality must
stay in the transparent closet that pretends to hide it from his wife, while she, in turn, finds herself in
the closet of the long-suffering wife who must hide her dismay in the presence of outsiders. Indeed,
what troubles Charles most deeply about these circumstances is the way in which his closeting seems to
result in her closeting:
One might bear--a strong merciless dreamer might bear--the knowledge of her grief and pride but none
could bear the sight of her automatic smile as she turned from the agony of the disclosure [of his
unfaithfulness] to the polite trivialities required of her. (211)
Most excruciating of all for Charles is the guilt that has been inculcated in him for his inability to
maintain the heterosexual imperative, a guilt so deeply instated that it makes it impossible for him to be
reconciled with his own admission to Disa one day that he does not love her as the culture would have
him love her. Instead of putting an end to the series of deceptions that have marked their union, this
admission, within the logic of the institution he is now a part of, functions as an agency by which
health and well-being are seriously and irrevocably threatened. Disa's sinking "down on the lawn in an
impossible gesture" conveys to Charles the unforeseeable import of his confession, so that
he had taken his words back at once; but the shock had fatally starred the mirror, and thenceforth in his
dreams her image was infected with the memory of the confession as with some disease or the secret
aftereffects of a surgical operation too intimate to be mentioned. (210)
These dreams, as a defense mechanism, manufacture for him the love that he imagines he ought to be
feeling, which would provide the way for a reconciliation with Disa and an expiation of his monstrous
crime against both social and "natural" law.
According to Rampton, however, what we find in the Disa passage are the "old Nabokov themes,"
which he specifies, curiously, as
love as a permanently frustrated desire for a still unravished bride; the crudeness of contingency when
compared to the fabulous attractions of the past; the difference between a desperate longing to take
responsibility for one's actions and an ability to do so. (153)
What is striking about this characterization of the Disa passage is Rampton's substitution here of a
heterosexual for a gay desire, and his reification of a culturally inculcated guilt into a morally charged
inability to "take responsibility for one's actions" (as though Kinbote's actions are separable from a
certain heterosexually prescribed destiny).
Curiously, it is only in his "Zemblan" existence that Kinbote's is the classic story of the closeted gay
man whose marriage helps to preserve that closet. For in the New Wye stage of his life, the closet he
inhabits is more explicitly designed to conceal his "secret" identity as King Charles than as a
homosexual. It is in the terms of this double closeting that we might most effectively come back to the
question I posed earlier about the relationship between Kinbote's sexuality and insanity, and what
makes this multi-layered text so rich in the dynamics of what Eve Sedgwick has termed the
"epistemology of the closet."
THE TRANSPARENT CLOSET
Through deft readings of earlier modernist novels, Sedgwick investigates the peculiar yet endemic
epistemological situation arising from and depending upon the transparent closet inhabited by the man
whose homosexuality he believes he has concealed from the public gaze. Proposing that "many of the
major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole are structured--
indeed, fractured--by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male,
dating from the end of the nineteenth century," Sedgwick argues that "an understanding of virtually any
aspect of modern Western culture [and by extension, of its literary productions] must be, not merely
incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical
analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition" (1). Sedgwick brilliantly delineates the politics of the
specularization of the gay subject in a homophobic culture, and thus it will be useful to rehearse here a
few of the crucial junctures in that delineation, particularly those that so persuasively evoke the
positioning of Kinbote in relation to the New Wye community, and to the readers he addresses.
According to Sedgwick, the transparent closet is not simply erected by the gay subject who wishes to
remain concealed, but also by those who would be his spectators. This structure of containment, but not
concealment, is facilitated by a community of spectators primarily in order to maintain their
epistemological superiority over the gay man as inhabitant of the closet. Thus the closeted gay man
becomes "that person over whom everyone else in the world has, potentially, an absolute
epistemological privilege" (232). As Sedgwick remarks of the Baron de Charlus in Proust's A la
Recherche,
if [a gay man's] being in the closet means that he possesses a secret knowledge, it means all the more
that everyone around him does; their incessant reading of the plot of his preserving his secret from
them provides an all the more eventful plot for them to keep secret from him. (225-26)
In Pale Fire, as in Proust, we find "the establishment of the spectacle of the homosexual closet as a
presiding guarantor of rhetorical community, of authority--someone else's authority--over world-
making discursive terrain that extends vastly beyond the ostensible question of the homosexual" (230).
Indeed, the Baron de Charlus, particularly as he is understood through the lens of Sedgwick's analysis,
seems a likely precursor to Charles Kinbote, who devotes an impassioned tirade to what he calls
"Proust's rough masterpiece," and seems to object specifically to the self-closeting of its narrator. (He
calls the novel "a sexual travestissement" containing "an absurd, rubber-and-wire romance between a
blond young blackguard [the fictitious Marcel], and an improbable jeune fille who has a pasted-on
bosom, Vronski's [and Lyovin's] thick neck, and cupid's buttocks for cheeks" [162]. Kinbote belongs,
presumably, to the generation of Proust commentators who understand Albertine to be the transparently
gender-reversed stand-in for, among other men, Proust's chauffeur.) As Sedgwick remarks, "in Proust . .
. it is the law--that characters in general take on vitality and momentum to the degree that they are
mystified about their own involuntary, inauthentic, or unconscious motivations." Kinbote, like Charlus,
is "not an exception to the law but its blazing sacrificial embodiment, the burning bush, very flesh of
that word" (226). In other words, it is around Kinbote that the New Wye community guarantees its own
authority over "world-making discursive terrain" via its preservation and exploitation of the transparent
closet that gives its citizens a privileged perspective onto his "secret" existence.
The same goes for readers who align themselves with this community: the pleasure of this kind of
reading comes from "seeing through" Kinbote's closet, penetrating it before he voluntarily opens its
door to us, indeed, penetrating Kinbote himself as though his identity were transparent to all but
himself.
But as I have indicated, the correlation between Kinbote and Charlus is not a direct one. After all, what
is concealed and revealed by Kinbote's closet is not primarily his sexual life, but his mental life.
Kinbote's secret is not that he is gay (in fact, he frequently refers to events in his erotic life as though he
assumes our prior knowledge of, and perhaps even that we share, his sexual orientation. Never does
anxiety circulate around the question of whether someone knows he is gay, at least not in his post-
Zembla existence) but that he is the deposed and exiled king of Zembla. Since the veracity of that
secret is put into question, what is both hidden and displayed by the closet is Kinbote's madness. What
the New Wyans know about him, and what we are invited to share with them, is precisely what he
cannot know about himself: that he is insane, is living a delusion, is epistemologically exiled from both
the world and from himself.
Consider, for example, a scene that offers an almost paradigmatic instance of how this closet is
structured. Kinbote, at a party, sees Shade speaking to Mrs. H, and approaches them just in time to hear
Shade "object to some remark she had just made" about the "delusion" of an "Exton railway
employee":
"That is the wrong word," he said. "One should not apply it to a person who deliberately peels off a
drab and unhappy past and replaces it with a brilliant invention. That's merely turning a new leaf with
the left hand."
I patted my friend on the head and bowed slightly to Eberthella H. The poet looked at me with glazed
eyes. She said:
"You must help us, Mr. Kinbote: I maintain that what's his name, old--the old man, you know at the
Exton railway station, who thought he was God and began redirecting the trains, was technically a
loony, but John calls him a fellow poet." (238)
Shade's "glazed eyes" would seem to indicate that Kinbote is the "loony" in question, but Mrs. H, in
what is ostensibly a tactful coverup maneuver, shifts the discourse so that its object becomes something
other than it was before, thus effectively denying Kinbote access to the public knowledge of his
identity. In this manner, Mrs. H, as member of the New Wye community, retains epistemological
superiority over Kinbote, and ensures that he shall not know what she (and everyone else) knows about
him. Critics frequently cite this passage as evidence of how Shade's attitude of compassion and pity
towards Kinbote contrasts with the disdain and intolerance evinced by the rest of the New Wye
community: Kinbote is not a loony, he says, but a fellow poet. Yet, insofar as Shade shares in the
diagnostic or evaluative discourse circulating around Kinbote's psyche while simultaneously excluding
Kinbote from that discourse (except as its object--never as its subject, or as an interlocutor), he is
complicit in maintaining the transparent closet that keeps Kinbote on display.
Thus, though Kinbote is not primarily a closeted homosexual in the New Wye community, but a
closeted deposed king, the structure of his closet mimics the closet of the Proustian "invert" insofar as it
is the mechanism by which subjectivity is denied the inhabitant of the closet. The "secret exile," like
Proust's invert, is ignorant, and stands outside the community of shared knowledge. He is ridiculous
because he is the one who does not know. And as inhabitant of the transparent closet, he can only be
condescended to, never communicated with. But it is not only through the structuring of the closet that
homosexuality is invoked by this novel. Because Kinbote is also, literally, himself a gay man, though,
as I've suggested, not as explicitly concerned about closeting his sexuality as he is about closeting his
royal background.
This double closeting makes Kinbote the focus of a two-pronged persecution in the New Wye
community, a persecution perhaps best embodied by Gerald Emerald, who has been portrayed as a
tormentor of a specific kind throughout Kinbote's commentary: he is an instructor whom Kinbote has
experienced as one who "makes advances and then betrays a noble and naive heart, telling foul stories
about his victim and pursuing him with brutal practical jokes" (309). Emerald, then, would seem to be
the gay-baiter who, in order to shore up and maintain as stable and normal his own sexual status as
hetero, must needle and provoke the gay man, or effectively keep visible and fresh a sexual distinction
between himself and Kinbote by seducing Kinbote into revealing his desires, then humiliating him for
doing so. Just as he plays with Kinbote's sexual identity, so he plays with his "royal" identity, never
explicitly revealing that he "knows" but threatening, in public situations, to make it known (seemingly
inadvertently) to others. The episode in the Faculty Common Room, when a German visitor
unwittingly remarks on Kinbote's resemblance to Zembla's King Charles, can, in this sense, be read as a
protracted scene of group torment, with Emerald the chief instigator. Emerald turns the visitor's remark
into an opportunity to make Kinbote the butt of a private joke for the group, the humor of which will
arise over his attempt to hide his anxiety about being exposed. Emerald pushes the joke to its limits as,
by going to look up the picture of King Charles in the encyclopedia, he risks blowing Kinbote's
"cover." Effectively combining homophobic insult with a sadistic threat to "reveal" Kinbote's royal
identity, he remarks of the photo he has found of young King Charles that he was "Quite the fancy
pansy," to which Kinbote retorts, "And you . . . are a foul-minded pup in a cheap green jacket" (268).
Kinbote's position as inhabitant of the transparent closet does not remain static. In Pale Fire, the
narrative depends on the efforts of the inhabitant of the closet to disclose his secret in such a way as to
command the proper regard for it by the larger community. Unaware that his closet is transparent,
Kinbote's plan is to "come out," indirectly, to the tolerant Shade, a member of the community who
already commands considerable discursive authority. Kinbote's hope is that this already respected
colleague will, through the power of his authority, perform the public disclosure in such a way as both
to ratify and valorize, even consecrate, Kinbote's identity as he would have it constructed through a
compelling poeticized biography. In this academic community, truths that are conveyed through literary
constructions are more likely to be accepted, valued as universal. The tolerant and pitying humanist
must be appealed to as the means by which the alienated outcast will become admired and respected as
one who has authority, as a royal, rather than an abject, exception to the common rule.
This attempt to recruit Shade as willing literary ally in the "coming out" process is, from Kinbote's
perspective, frustrated when Shade prefers to write about his grief at the death of his daughter while
never, ironically, recognizing his own complicity with the system that prohibits her existence as an
intelligible subject. When Kinbote, on first reading, can find little trace of his Zemblan narrative in
Shade's poem, he must engage in a kind of scholastic guerrilla warfare, waged against a literary critical
establishment whose rules are designed to preserve the illusion of pure authorial integrity. In other
words, Kinbote transgresses the rules of scholarly commentary that ostensibly seek to render
transparent the author's "intentions" via supplementary notes--thus exposing, in the process, the way in
which all commentary directs reader response in an interpretive way. Insofar as it functions to preserve
the boundaries that define the "body" of the author's work against undesirable incursions from critically
deviant "bodies," this literary critical establishment is coextensive with the heterosexual establishment
that functions to preserve its ("normal," "healthy") integrity against the undesirable incursions of the
sexually deviant body.
KINBOTE AS SEXUAL DISSIDENT?
I suggested above that the reader who shares the perspective of the New Wye community derives her or
his pleasure from penetrating Kinbote's closet before he voluntarily opens its door to us. Insofar as
Kinbote bears many of the marks of the classically "unreliable narrator," I think that the novel solicits
us to read through his narrative. Teresa de Lauretis has observed (with special reference to Calvino)
that gender binarism has remained much the same in the transition from modernism to postmodernism,
insofar as
woman is still the ground of representation, even in postmodern times. Paradoxically, for all the efforts
spent to re-contain real women in the social, whether by economic or ideological means, by threats or
by seduction, it is the absent Woman, the one pursued in dreams and found only in memory or in
fiction, that serves as the guarantee of masculinity, anchoring male identity and supporting man's
creativity and self-representation. (82)
It could be argued as well that heterosexual identity is similarly anchored, via the deployment of the
"homosexual" as the "ground" of novelistic postmodern representation. In this sense, both Kinbote's
homosexually desiring body and his deluded psyche become the territory across which we are invited
to pleasure in Nabokov's ludic postmodernism. Indeed, the novel is at its most postmodernly titillating
when it is impossible to determine the register at which it is operating. When Kinbote is called into
Nattochdag's office, for instance, three of the novel's most pervasive social codes are evoked
simultaneously, as though they function interchangeably in the policing of Kinbote's behavior. Having
called Kinbote into his office, Nattochdag urges him "to be more careful." Kinbote, gathering that he
has transgressed some rule, but not sure of the nature of that rule, asks "in what sense, careful?"
Nattochdag answers that "a boy had complained to his advisor." But as soon as we understand this
private reproval as a warning about inappropriate sexual advances, the register shifts to the realm of
professional collegiality--the student's complaint is that Kinbote "criticized a literature course he
attended ('a ridiculous survey of ridiculous works, conducted by a ridiculous mediocrity')." When
Kinbote laughs at this "in sheer relief" and promises to "never be naughty again," we might suspect that
his relief is at not being chastised about his sexual conduct after all. It is perhaps only retrospectively
that we can grasp the third register that is evoked in the next lines as Kinbote salutes Nattochdag
because "[h]e always behaved with such exquisite courtesy toward me that I sometimes wondered if he
did not suspect what Shade suspected, and what only three people (two trustees and the president of the
college) definitely knew" (25). Here, of course, it is not his sexuality that is the focus of what Kinbote
imagines others "suspect" or "definitely" know, but his royal identity. And yet, Kinbote is not conscious
of his transgression of a third code here: not the (hetero)sexual code, nor the academic collegial code,
but only the code that distinguishes the crazy from the sane.
It is his unwitting transgression of the rules of sanity that solicits us to read his narrative like so many
symptoms, and that is responsible perhaps for the unrelenting critical diagnoses of his sexuality. And
yet, the style and tone of the novel are not always consistent in this sense. There are also passages
where a kind of camp libidinal identification is invited--where a reader would have to marshal an army
of homophobic defenses not to be seduced by the erotics of the narrative. The paradigmatic example of
this is the account of young Charles' discovery and exploration of the hidden passage with his
childhood beloved, Oleg.
Oleg is the "regular faunlet" whose "bold virilia" and "girlish grace" has prompted in young Charles an
awareness of his sexuality that is at once exhilarating and unnerving. Waiting for Oleg to arrive for a
visit on a rainy day, the young Charles decides to look for a toy circus that had amused them the Easter
before.
Less than a fortnight had passed since Oleg's last visit, when for the first time the two boys had been
allowed to share the same bed, and the tingle of their misbehavior, and the foreglow of another such
night, were now mixed in our young Prince with an embarrassment that suggested refuge in earlier,
more innocent games. (124)
Instead of the circus, however, which would allow the Prince to "take refuge" from his dawning
sexuality, he finds the hidden entry to a secret underground passageway that will serve as both prelude
to and metaphor for the thrilling and tender second consummation of his affection for Oleg.
Oleg arrives and Charles is reassured by "the downy warmth of [his] crimson ear and by the vivacious
nod greeting the proposed investigation, that no change had occurred in his dear bedfellow" (125).
Together they enter what Kinbote refers to as the "magical closet"; but this closet, instead of enclosing
them, gives access to the "stone-paved underground passage" that is at once separate from and part of
the city through which it runs:
in its angular and cryptic course it adapted itself to the various structures which it followed, here
availing itself of a bulwark to fit in its side like a pencil in the pencil hold of a pocket diary, there
running through the cellars of a great mansion too rich in dark passageways to notice the stealthy
intrusion. (126)
Their entry into and through the "magical closet" has launched them on a sexual journey that allows
them to be both inside and outside the official architecture of their culture. Their progress through the
long and labyrinthine passageway acts as a suggestive aphrodisiac on them as they become aware of
"magic apertures and penetrations, so narrow and deep as to drive one insane" (126). Oleg, leading the
way, becomes the focus of Charles' desiring gaze: "his shapely buttocks encased in tight indigo cotton
moved alertly, and his own erect radiance, rather than his flambeau, seemed to illume with leaps of
light the low ceiling and crowding walls" (126-27).
The tunnel comes to an end at a door that would deliver them once more to the official world, a world
characterized apparently by the sounds of an assaultive and violent heterosexuality:
Two terrible voices, a man's and a woman's, now rising to a passionate pitch, now sinking to raucous
undertones, were exchanging insults in Gutnish as spoken by the fisherfolk of Western Zembla. An
abominable threat made the woman shriek out in fright. Sudden silence ensued, presently broken by the
man's murmuring some brief phrase of casual approval ("Perfect, my dear," or "Couldn't be better") that
was more eerie than anything that had come before. (127)
Rather than entering into this world, the boys "veered in absurd panic" and "raced back the way they
had come" (127). The heterosexual imperative, which would seem to entail that a woman's "perfect"
compliance be extracted through a man's "abominable" force, has no attraction for Charles and Oleg.
They retraverse the passageway rather than pass through it to the official culture of gendered
heterosexual oppression. On their return to the palace, their lovemaking, by contrast to the drama at the
other end of the passage, is marked by the sounds of a less brutal ecstasy as they find themselves in "a
manly state and moaning like doves" (127). It is in passages like these, where Kinbote delineates the
erotics of a desire for which there is no official space in his (and our) culture, a desire that has "adapted
itself to the various structures which it followed," a desire that, "running through the cellars" of the
"great mansion" of sexuality, has proved that mansion to be "too rich in dark passageways to notice the
stealthy intrusion," that something other than an aestheticizing or a pathologizing response might be
elicited by Pale Fire. And even if Kinbote appears, nevertheless, as one of the "developmental, failures
or logical impossibilities" produced by the cultural matrix that defines him, he might also signify, for
some readers at least, the locus of a pleasure that begins to challenge, even to alter, that cultural matrix.
As Butler points out, the "persistence and proliferation" of subjects like Kinbote "provide critical
opportunities to expose the limits and regulatory aims of that [hegemonic] domain of intelligibility and,
hence, to open up within the very terms of that matrix of intelligibility rival and subversive matrices of
gender disorder" (17).
If a critic like Frank Kermode still searches for the "correlative" in Nabokov's life to the homosexual
protagonist of Pale Fire, I would suggest that it could be found in the person of the author's gay brother,
Sergey. The following passage from Brian Boyd's biography indicates both the ambivalence and the
depth of feeling Nabokov experienced with respect to his brother. I quote at length:
One night at the start of the academic year Nabokov dreamed of his brother Sergey. Although in
waking life he supposed Sergey to be safe in the Austrian castle of his lover Hermann, in the dream he
saw him in agony on a bunk in a concentration camp. The next day he received a letter from his other
brother, Kirill . . . Sergey, Kirill told him, had died of a stomach ailment brought on by malnutrition in a
concentration camp near Hamburg. He had been arrested in Berlin in 1943 because of his
homosexuality, but five months later his cousin Onya's efforts had secured his release. Hating Berlin,
he had managed to find a job in a half-Russian office in Prague. There he openly voiced his contempt
for Hitler and Germany and was promptly informed upon and arrested as a British spy. Vexed that
Sergey loved not only a man but a German-speaking one, Nabokov had spoken rather harshly of his
brother in recent years. Now he was appalled at Sergey's death, filled with admiration at his courageous
outspokenness, and mortified that it was too late to make amends. (88-89)
The heterosexism of Nazi Germany, insofar as it incarcerated its sexual as readily as its religious and
political dissidents, was a particularly harrowing reality of which Nabokov was clearly not unaware.
And yet, he had participated in this heterosexism by "speaking harshly" of his brother for his sexuality.
Though it was too late, after Sergey's death, to "make amends," I would suggest that Nabokov's
fictional construction, however ambivalent, of a specifically gay protagonist in Pale Fire was the means
by which the author could explore his own partial complicity with the cultural imperatives that
marginalized and eventually annihilated people like his brother. Whether it was his intention or not,
Nabokov, in his perceptive delineation of the structure of the transparent closet, made visible the extent
to which the heterosexual imperative of the post-war United States was in many ways consistent with
the fascism of Nazi Germany. And while it would be fanciful to characterize Kinbote as some kind of
pre-Stonewall gay activist, both the transgressive grafting of his "deviant" narrative onto Shade's hetero
lyric and his insistent delineation of the erotics of male-male desire make it possible to read Pale Fire as
the site of a sexual dissidence that begins to challenge "our cynical age of frenzied heterosexualism."
NOTES
1 Kermode slightly misquotes from a passage in Pale Fire where Kinbote, the narrator, pays tribute to
his dead friend Oswin Bretwit for his "courage . . . integrity, kindness, dignity" and "endearing
naivete." Kinbote evokes an image of their clasped hands "across the water over the golden wake of an
emblematic sun. . . . Let this lofty handshake be regarded in our cynical age of frenzied
heterosexualism as a last, but lasting, symbol of valor and self-abnegation" (176). It is precisely this
symbol--insofar as it contrasts with "heterosexualism"--that Kinbote has sought, in vain, in John
Shade's poem.
• 2 I was not the first reader to bristle at Haegert's remark: in the bound periodical where I read
the article, a previous reader had written in the margin "?Homophobia: are you an 'incurable
heterosexual'?" What is astonishing is that, other than this scrap of unofficial marginalia, I found
no other objections, in the reams of Nabokov criticism I read, to the patently heterocentric
treatment of his novels.
• 3 It should be noted that this is only one "version" of the plot. Alternatively, it has been
suggested that Zembla really does exist, and is not simply a delusion on the part of Kinbote, or
that Kinbote himself does not exist, but is an invention of Shade, who has written both poem
and commentary. See Field and Roth for their recapitulations of Pale Fire's plot.
• 4 In the "complex, often violent, sometimes murderous dialectic between dominant and
subordinate cultures, groups and identities" there is a "resistance, operating in terms of gender"
that "repeatedly unsettles the very opposition between the dominant and the subordinate,"
according to Dollimore (21). This resistance is the "sexual dissidence" that I understand to be as
politically ramified in Nabokov's text as it is in the texts by Wilde and Gide that Dollimore
explores.
• 5 I borrow here from the language of Monique Wittig:
All their testimonies emphasize the political significance of the impossibility that lesbians, feminists,
and gay men face in the attempt to communicate in heterosexual society, other than with a
psychoanalyst. When the general state of things is understood (one is not sick or to be cured, one has an
enemy) the result is for the oppressed person to break the psychoanalytical contract. This is what
appears in the testimonies along with the teaching that the psychoanalytical contract was not a contract
of consent but a forced one. (52)
WORKS CITED
Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.
De Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1987.
Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. New York: Oxford UP,
1991.
Field, Andrew. "Pale Fire: The Labyrinth of a Great Novel." Triquarterly 8 (Winter 1967): 13-36.
Galef, David. "The Self-Annihilating Artists of Pale Fire." Twentieth Century Literature 31 (1985):
421-37.
Haegert, John. "Author as Reader as Nabokov: Text and Pretext in Pale Fire." Texas Studies in
Language and Literature 26.4 (Winter): 405-24.
Kermode, Frank. "Zemblances." The New Statesman 9 November 1962: 671-72.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Putnam's, 1962.
Rampton, David. Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.
Roth, Phyllis A. "The Psychology of the Double in Nabokov's Pale Fire." Essays in Literature 2.2 (Fall
1975): 209-29.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1988.
Wittig, Monique. "The Straight Mind." Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Ed.
Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West. Cambridge: MIT.P, 1990. 51-57.
~~~~~~~~
By JEAN WALTON
Walton teaches theory and literature as assistant professor of English at the University of Rhode Island.
She has published on Samuel Beckett's film and fiction and her essay on Sandra Bernhard has just
appeared in The Lesbian Postmodern (Laura Doan, ed.). Walton is currently working on the
construction of racial difference in white psychoanalytic discourse, as well as a book-length study of
Beckett, No Gender Where None Intended.