After mentioning that Victor Fet noted that "walnuts do not have a single
kernel.", you proceeded from walnut/brains to bring up "strokes"
with an unexpected meaning. Like Cinderella's clock chiming
twelve.And yet, even before a twelfth stroke became necessary, Shade had
been spared another metamorphosis - like the one suffered
when he was eleven ( he was then treated by "old doctor Colt". I wonder,
do young colts, when aged, grow any wiser? -line 164).
Probably, as it was hinted by Kinbote, Shade suffered under different kinds
of "strokes". But still, as in the scene you mentioned, we find that the
images he creates mix body and geography: "now I plough/ Old Zembla's
fields where my gray stubble grows" - just like his feeling at eleven, that
he was "distributed through space and time: one foot upon a
mountaintop..."
Shade's various recurrent "conflagrations" were described
as: "the attack, the trance,/ Or one of my old fits... And blood-black
nothingness began to spin/ A system of cells interlinked within/Cells
interlinked withing cells interliked/ Within one stem..." (lines
690-706)
Also his Aunt Maud suffered a stroke when she lost the ability to
speak because "imposters (?!) took the place of words". Differently from
Shade her cells were not linked to one stem and they gave no rise to
anything close to a fountain, Shade's white fountain
and "what it did replace"...
Now let's compare these words about "strokes" and: "I could
isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded,
yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies -
every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed
yellowly blurred, illusive, lost." as we discover in the concluding
paragraph of Vladimir Nabokov's "Vane Sisters", whose narrator was led
astray by icicles that have formed on the eaves ( Shade and
stillicides?).
No Aunt Maud, but there we find a certain Sybil Vane (
she committed suicide) and her older sister,
Cynthia, now dead, who had been fascinated with the
occult and maintained that when someone dies they like to play tricks
on the living. The narrator, himself, doesn't believe in the occult
nor in acrostics that reveal messages by a deceased.
And yet the last paragraph that concludes his story does spell out a
message, as follows: "Icicles by Cynthia/ Meter/ From me, Sybil".
Sybil is also referred in one of T.S.Eliot's poems, among a group of
profetic sisters. The Cumaean Sibyl, who guided Aeneas through Hades, had
been granted immortality by Apollo but she forgot to ask for eternal youth
and withered progressively until she had to be kept inside a vase. She is
mentioned in T.S.Eliot's 1922 poem, "The Waste Land" quotes Petronius (
Satyricon) in its epigraph, set down in Greek and translated as: " I
have seen with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked
her "What do you want?" she answered: " I want to die".
In short,
there are direct or indirect references to various
sorts dellusions, some of which acquire the status of a fictional
"truth".
There are messages from the dead hidden by acrostics, there
are unhappy immortal Sybil's wishing to die and turn into a shadow,
there is a brown shoe in the gemmed turf that bears the Shade imprint.
Although Kinbote informs us, in
his commentaries to line 991, that Sybil Shade was "speeding townward" to a
dinner meeting at her club while the two guys will drink Tokay and "a
knackle of walnuts", Shade himself observed in his poem ( line 989-90) "I can
see/ Part of your shadow near the shagbark tree", meaning a
half-Sybil. This is the same tree that holds dead Hazel's phantom
swing and that was mentioned both at the occasion when she was engendered and on
the night she died ( beside other hints, such as "I love you when you're
standing on the lown/ Peering at something in a tree.." on lines 281-2, for
example).
The former episodes refer to "an empty emerald case" and
a happy linguist in Nice feeding seagulls (lines 235-240) and to a March
night in Nice with a man crumbing bread for the sea gulls, "visited in
thirty-three,/Nine months before her birth."(lines 430-440). For me, also
mysterious because I never saw a cicada's "emerald case".
In the end, what do we get besides learning that
the dead like to play tricks on the living? Or that sometimes we
discern one kernel where two should have been found?
Jansy