Samuel Schuman: Also of great
interest in this concluding paragraph of Pale Fire, of course, is the blurring
of the line between Kinbote and his maker ("I may turn up yet, on another
campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile,
sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his
art"), coupled with the speaker's theist reference to another maker ("God will
help me..."). Who is the "me?" Who, for that matter, is the
"God?"
Jansy In a typical equivocation
we read about an "old, happy, healthy,
heterosexual* Russian, a writer in exile" and Vladimir Nabokov
hiumself seems to enter to overtake Kinbote. But Nabokov was
he then "sans fame, sans future, sans audience"? Certainly not. Another
Prof. Pnin dashing away in a little blue car?
....................................
* the insistent "h-sounds" and the
three "sans" that seem so familiar... where do they come from?
...................................
For those who are interested, a little more on Ashen
Glow, Earthshine and Leonardo, with a passage through icicles,
botkins...
Wrote C.Kinbote:
Lines 39-40: [Was close my eyes to reproduce the
leaves,/ Or indoor
scene, or trophies of the eaves.]
These lines are
represented in the drafts by a variant reading: and
home would haste my thieves,/40
The sun with stolen ice, the moon with leaves. One cannot help recalling a passage in Timon of Athens (Act IV, Scene 3) ...
for the purpose of quick citation to retranslate this passage into English prose
from a Zemblan poetical version of Timon...
The sun is a thief: she lures the sea
and robs it. The moon is a thief:
he
steals his silvery light from the sun.
The
sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.
Da Vinci's Explanation of
the lumen cinereum in the moon:
Having proved that the part of the moon that shines consists of water,
which mirrors the body of the sun and reflects the radiance it receives from it;
and that, if these waters were devoid of waves, it would appear small, but of a
radiance almost like the sun...[...]
Some have thought that
the moon has a light of its own, but this opinion is false, because they have
founded it on that dim light seen between the hornes of the new moon[...] And
that brightness at such a time itself is derived from our ocean and other
inland-seas. These are, at that time, illuminated by the sun which is already
setting in such a way as that the sea then fulfils the same function to the dark
side of the moon as the moon at its fifteenth day does to us when the sun is
set... Taken from The Notebooks of Leonardo da
Vinci edited by Jean Paul Richter, 1880.
......................................................
The theme of eaves, ice and leaves, now linked to sun
and moon as thieves, reappears in another set of variant lines( with
the sound of stillicide ringing in "still life in her style"?):
her room...
SHADE:
We’ve kept intact. Its trivia
create
A still life
in her style: the paperweight
Of convex glass
enclosing a lagoon,
The
verse book open at the Index (Moon,
Moonrise,
Moor, Moral),...
KINBOTE VARIANT:
We’ve kept intact. Her trivia
for us
Retrace her style: the leaf
sarcophagus
(A Luna’s dead
and shriveled-up cocoon)
I suspect Shade altered this passage because his
moth’s name clashed with "Moon" in the next
line.