On Apr 30, 2010, at 7:02 PM, R S Gwynn wrote:
Lines 931-38 may be ambiguously metaphoric in only the last two lines. The rest is Shade ranging outward imaginatively from "the country of my cheek" to the nearby highways and hilly roads, to ocean liners, to tourists disembarking in a foreign land. Maybe he, like me, sometimes likes to stick his big toe up the tap ("now a silent liner docks") ...
Lebanon was deeply troubled in the second half of 1958 ... Perhaps this is what Shade is alluding to in that remark on "sunglassers."
I can't see Shade's lines as much more than amusingly whimsical, just as the passage that comes before it catalogs a personal list of "evil" things. ...
As you say, and so we agree, the last two lines are oblique.
But so is silent liner. You say toe, I say cheek, someone else says rubber duckie. Is this not ambiguity?
The set of metaphors, as you point out, progresses, and each one possesses some semantic weight, but taken collectively what do they add up to? Whimsical amusement? And indeed we all like silly, but what was the reader promised at the outset of the canto? Revelations I think. This is revealing, but only as a silly kind of nihilism it would seem.
Indeed the succeeding stand-alone couplet interprets the passage for us! It is:
Man’s life as commentary to abstruse
Unfinished poem. Note for further use.
Which Kinbote glosses, correctly I believe, as:
If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation,
our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes
to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.
You see whimsy, but Shade seems to see significant cosmic insight.
Perhaps he thinks he's playing a game of worlds:
He nicks himself, a truck slides off the road!
The question then becomes how does Shade's shave comment upon the history or future of the cosmos?
Answer: Despite Shade's grandiose presumptions, it doesn't! Unless one is to see the cosmos as mere whimsy!
Man's imagination may illuminate, reorder and transform the universe, but has Shade's bit of rhyming about shaving achieved any of that?
Nihilistically yours,
–GSL
ps.: other difficult metaphors in Canto 4: Newport Frill, the mouth ... its wick.