On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 4:47 PM, Gary Lipon
<glipon@innerlea.com> wrote:
On Apr 30, 2010, at 4:26 PM, Simon Rowberry wrote:
I would take this passage's importance, rather than being a part of the poem that jars with the rest,
as being another set of clues for the reader to hunt down the presence of Nabokov throughout the text.
[...]
Shade begins the final canto with great resolve, promising great insight. The lines are though a grotesque overstatement of resolve. The grandiosity is itself symptomatic of mental illness. The belief that one possesses insights unavailable to others is both grandiose and pathological.
They're not unavailable to anyone else. The person I know of who had the most similar ideas was James Branch Cabell, who I've mentioned before, but doubtless there's a history of beliefs like Shade's, not that he seems to know it.
It also links Shade directly to Kinbote in that grandiosity is Kinbote's chief defining attribute. The reader is seeing Shade mutate into Kinbote right before his eyes.
I can't accept this as a "real story", if that's what you intend, because of the nature of the mental illness involved. One possibility is that Shade turns into a secondary personality, a Russian refugee named Botkin, who has two grand delusional systems. First, Botkin thinks he's the exiled king of Zembla now living incognito as Kinbote. Second, he thinks that as Kinbote, he was his primary self's neighbor and had many real interactions with that personality, his wife, and people who knew them both. This is too far beyond either real or literary psychology, as far as I know.
Also, Zembla looks like a delusion and Kinbote's life in New Wye looks "real" because of their different qualities. In Zembla, the king is the hero, he's usually one up, and his sexual and romantic wishes are fulfilled (except in the note about Disa, which must be one thing that led Brian Boyd to his theory). In New Wye, Kinbote's life is one frustration and humiliation after another. Even more tellingly, we often see through what he says to another interpretation of events. He invents a scene where he hears Shade and Eberthella H. talking about a madman in which he believes Eberthella's quick explanation that their subject is a railway employee, not him, as we at least suspect it is (note to line 629). He invents a scene in which a clubwoman calls him insane and he attributes it to envy (Foreword); he invents a letter in which Prof. Hurley calls him deranged and he attributes to his (K.'s) leaving a concert early (n. 376-277). I can see why someone would have the delusion that he's an exiled king, but I can't believe in someone who has the delusion that he transparent misunderstands things.
Sergei Soloviev pointed out another objection. He said Kinbote has a good feeling in the Gradus scenes for the paranoia of the emigre community, where anyone could be a Warsaw Pact agent, but there's no reason in Shade's biography should understand this. And if Kinbote has made up all his interactions with Shade, there's no real story left but Shade's biography.
On the other hand, maybe you're going from the multiple-personality idea to the idea that if Kinbote is so unreliable, no real story can be constructed. Jim Twiggs finds a real story problematic, and so do I (though we react to that difficulty in very different ways), so I would agree with you in that case.
Immediately after making his grand pronouncement, Shade loses his train of thought. Another sign of mental distress. He links to the preamble in a way that is notable for its clumsiness, And speaking of this wonderful machine, and its sudden shift of affect, from grandiose resolve to a desultory questioning. This shift of tone tends to confirms that Shade is mentally not well. These abrupt affective shifts recur throughout the canto, especially during the shaving sequence.
There are sudden shifts elsewhere in the poem, such as the shifts in subject in lines 119-130, or the shift in tone in 147-156 (from the sublime to the funnybone there are only ten lines).
If one accepts that Shade has lost his train of thought right after his preposterous preamble then the reader may well wonder why, given that this is a poem, and that poems are usually creatures of revision, why doesn't Shade just revise and smooth things out? Partly he knows his time is slipping away fast and there is no longer any time for editing.
Or he's working on the first draft and intends to revise later, not suspecting anything will prevent him.
But partly too because he is changing into Kinbote. Kinbote has said he's no good at versifying and the reason is simple: he, like so many other writers, (preeminently Jack Kerouac,) never revises. [...]
The fable of Shade's shoe, and the sense of triumph he derives from it, are also symptomatic of magical thinking.
The thrust of the poem is an argument for the supernatural.
Shade's continuation after his exposition on versification, his shaving travails, is another non-sequitur. Why would his reader want to know, in detail, Shade's shaving habits? Its purpose is to show Shade's derangement through his emotional and compositional absorption in mundane trivialities. Shade's litany of loathes is the climax of this nonsense as well as the dramatic climax of the poem, the symbolic collapse of Shade's persona, ( he still survives to write the envoy), and the fulfillment, by way of explication and analogy, of the abstruse waxwing metaphor that begins the poem.
I thank Matt Roth for pointing us to his post on Lycaon. I think that shows Shade is in excellent control. When he says he will speak of evil and despair as no one has, he means it literally. (Unfortunately it's not true in the figurative sense of speaking of evil and despair
better than anyone has.) He has carefully planted clues: the blood and foam around the mouth (what has that beside a mad dog or wolf?), comparison to a king, hair in him that's trying to get out--with the word "versipel" in the next paragraph to connect that to lycanthropy. Unfortunately nobody got the clues, as far as I know, till Matt did.
And the reason he sees himself as Lycaon is that Lycaon killed a child--in one version of the myth, his own son.
<
http://www.theoi.com/Heros/Lykaon.html>
Finally, shaving leads back to poetry through Shade's version of the Houseman quotation.
If the reader does not believe that John Shade is crazy, then the line, and a brown ament ... lie on the cement, must offer no shade of foreshadowing i.e without ament's second meaning of a demented individual one is left only with a catkin on the cement; what's the significance of that?
It's a startling example of the consonne d'appui or rich rhyme, leading into his next comment. It could also be a sly reference to Kinbote, the brown-bearded madman.
Also the other half of the two-fold metaphor the noun I meant to use, dry on the cement, how is this to be decoded? That an index card of unused key words has fallen out of the pack and lies on the sidewalk, (which technically I'm told is not cement but concrete.)
I've always seen this part as indicating that the noun has been
discarded, though I suppose Shade could have dropped a literal card.
Can cement be interpreted here metaphorically? My point here is that Shade's metaphors have become exceedingly abstruse, indicative of looseness of association.
Shade's litany of loathes rages out of the same imbalance: random, unprepared and trivial.
Not trivial to Nabokov.
Shade's shaving routine provides the trivial material needed to depict his descent into the madness that is Kinbote.
I think it's his most horrifying moment of guilt about his daughter's death.
Engagingly yours, I hope,
–GSL
[...]
It certainly got me engaged.
Jerry Friedman