Boyd II does not ask us to accept Shade as the author of Pale Fire. Shade does not line-edit Kinbote's sentences. He argues at all times for influence, not ghost-writing, and influence furthermore at the macro-level, so to speak. In fact, to separate the material of the commentary so crudely (this is Kinbote, this is Shade) amounts to a misreading of Boyd II's case. But Boyd II never maintains, as we have seen, that the Shade-supplied material is in fact better written than Kinbote's solo contributions.
Boyd II expresses this well, calling Shade's new perspective "a much deeper awareness, from the other side of the mirror, of the 'combinational delight' behind things." Does this add up, though, to genius at the level of sentences, of style? Perhaps we are free to imagine that survival after death does all sorts of good things to the survivor's talent. Similarly, one could imagine Shade improved, as it were, by death: From his new, highly privileged perspective, he may be able to shape both text and texture at a level of accomplishment that was impossible to him in life. Such things happen, but they are not automatically believable. Even so, we would have to view his masterpiece, Pale Fire, as a first novel springing de novo from the soul of an aging, possibly second-rate, poet. Now John Shade, to be sure, is a slightly more plausible genius. None of these back-stories seems likely to produce the astonishing literary gifts apparent in the commentary. Charles Kinbote, if he exists, is either a deposed Zemblan monarch, an insane Zemblan scholar, or an extremely insane Russian scholar. When we turn to the commentary, though, the issue of plausibility is most certainly raised, no matter whether we say, with Rorty, that Kinbote is the author or, with Boyd I, that it is Shade's impersonation or, with Boyd II, that it is a kind of unearthly collaboration.
What we know of John Shade the man, including his reputation, is an excellent match with the literary qualities we discover in "Pale Fire." But, as we have seen, a consistent and plausible case can be made that Shade is a fine poet who has written a fine poem. (Only a small part, however in the main, Rorty simply does not care for the poem, and expects the reader to feel the same way.) Boyd does not address them. These text-based reservations, coy though they may be, form part of the basis of Rorty's derogation of "Pale Fire" as poetry. Kinbote, too, after praising "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," rather maliciously points out that "With all his excellent gifts, John Shade could never make his snowflakes settle that way" ( PF, 204). On the other hand, as Shade himself says, his reputation follows "one oozy footstep" behind Robert Frost's ( Pale Fire, 48). But John Shade is a famous poet, and his work is taken seriously in the world of Pale Fire. Most first-person narrators simply do not come equipped with resumes that would plausibly permit them to write as well as their creators. 5 A narrator's history-his or her "back-story," to borrow a term from film-is one of the main reasons why, in more traditional fiction, we are forced to suspend disbelief in his or her narrative prowess. Two such bases may be relevant, I believe: first, the occupations and putative abilities of the authorial character(s), together with the careful "frame" VN provides to account for the texts of Pale Fire as actual written documents and second, the added richness and emotional depth that is given to Pale Fire if we accept John Shade as a genius, whether incarnate or ghostly. Suppose that, unlike Rorty and Boyd, we take a step back and ask, On what grounds might Pale Fire invite the good reader to treat Shade and/or Kinbote as serious authors, that is, authors who within the context of VN's fictional world are really supposed to be able to write superbly? Are there any bases for dropping the suspension-of-disbelief convention?
Genius and Plausibility: Suspension of Disbelief in Pale Fire