Combinational Delight: The Poetics of Perception in Pale Fire

Abstract

"Let us admit what all idealists admit: that the nature of the world is hallucinatory... We (the undivided divinity that operates within us) have dreamed the world." So writes Jorge Luis Borges; one can see from this why he and Nabokov are often paired. Both are disciplined artists who believe in the supremacy of the imagination; both have created a body of work which seeks to replace the "hallucination" of "reality" with the true fictions of mind; and both, through exploring the intrinsic dichotomy between life and art, have achieved a measure of heroism through the success of this exploration. As Patricia Merivale has pointed out: "Artifice, the realest thing we can know, is the only thing that can make reality endurable."2l Artifex is perhaps the most appropriate title for game-master Nabokov; and making reality endurable through the poetics of perception is certainly the central focus of the poem Pale Fire. The poem's opening lines contain themes which are expanded .and developed throughout; death, nature, youth, percepiton, art.