If the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson were not so apocalyptically hateful of postmodernism, I would congratulate him on writing the perfect postmodernist novel. A few pages into what is ostensibly a more-of-the-same sequel to his rugged, masculine self-help book 12 Rules for Life (2018), the narrative changes completely. Not since Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire has there been so much happening in that interesting borderland between the information the reader is given and the information the reader might apprehend; between order and chaos, as Peterson might put it.
Pale Fire is presented as a long unfinished narrative poem by an American poet named John Shade, with a commentary by his colleague and neighbour, Charles Kinbote, an obscure, provincial academic from a strange northern land. But Kinbote appears to have wilfully misunderstood the poem and superimposed his own mad fantasies on to it. Only occasionally do we see Nabokov’s true design: “If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation,” writes Kinbote, “our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.”
Content from our partners
