Blue Magic and Pale Fire
The magic of writing and reading
Really flared up today, so I’ll share someone else’s words. Finished Pale Fire this week, and am once again blown away with Nabokov’s multilanguage word play (across English, French, and Russian, and sometimes made-up words). It’s delicious. Take this discourse on reading (and writing) from this novel and its narrator:
We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students). Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not verse—I am a miserable rhymester), I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do—pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web. Solemnly…for a moment I found myself enriched with an indescribable amazement as if informed that fireflies were making decodable signals on behalf of stranded spirits, or that a bat was writing a legible tale of torture in the bruised and branded sky.
—Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
“The bruised and branded sky”. Oh my.
“The forgotten butterfly of revelation”? This novel is the source of the title of the gorgeous and heartbreaking My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell. A Dark Vanessa in Pale Fire is a Red Admirable butterfly:
Come and be worshipped, come and be caressed,
My Dark Vanessa, crimson-barred, my blest,
My Admirable butterfly! Explain
How could you, in the gloam of Lilac Lane,
Have let uncouth, hysterical John Shade
Blubber your face, and ear,
And shoulder blade?
—Pale Fire
The idea of “blue magic” as a deviant of black magic and white magic…perhaps referring to the blue ink of a pen?
This quote is from Lev Grossman’s Magicians’ series; I hate those book hypes that compare other works—I recently received one that shouted out a novel as “Heathers meets The Secret History” and those things are not like the other. *screams in Gen X frustration*.
However, I am getting ready to say it, and I hate myself for it…this amazing series is for those who love Narnia, and who did love Hogwarts…but with the sex and drugs that was missing from Hogwarts. Oh. I think I pulled something. There’s my first and last comparative elevator pitch. But it is true without being derivative. It’s dark and delightful and terrifying and nostalgic but definitely for adults, and for kids warped by Stephen King and V. C. Andrews. I wouldn’t just randomly gift it to a 11-year-old, is what I am saying.
I really think Nabokov—and his character quoted above—would agree with this luscious definition of magic.
series order:
