Charles Kinbote comments, on lines 939-40 from Shade's poem
Pale Fire [ "Man's life as commentary to
abstruse/Unfinished poem. Note for further use.]:
"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."
Years before, Vladimir Nabokov opined that “these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of
consciousness” (Lectures on Literature, 374).*
My hunch is that Nabokov is making an observation about those patterns in
human life which people, by themselves, cannot easily discern. They
must be non-utilitarian embellishments empowered to please an artistic
Eye¨
Material footnotes are often appreciated by Charles Kinbote:
"In a black pocketbook that I fortunately have with me I
find, jotted down, here and there, among various extracts that had happened to
please me (a footnote from Boswell’s Life of Dr. Johnson, the inscriptions on
the trees in Wordsmith’s famous avenue, a quotation from St. Augustine, and so
on), a few samples of John Shade’s conversation..." I
can only imagine that the novel's epigraph about Samuel Johnson's cat was copied
by Kinbote from his black pocketbook. I cannot make up my mind if I'll pay more
attention to Hodges' not being shot, or to the reference to a cat. There
are enough mysterious cats in other Nabokov's novels (with the permanent shadow
of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" Cheshire cat). In
"The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" there's a cat with celadon eyes who
takes a dislike to milk (do Europeans feed milk to their cats? It's most
unhealthy). Kinbote must feed Judge Goldsworth's intriguing cat, who one moves
about the house with a bow. I cannot remember now if Pnin had to share
rooms with any cat, but Nabokov certainly did.
Other kinds of footnotes
are unavoidable but disgraceful: "Translators of Shade’s
poem are bound to have trouble with the transformation, at one stroke, of
'mountain' into 'fountain': it cannot be rendered in French or German, or
Russian, or Zemblan; so the translator will have to put it into one of those
footnotes that are the rogue’s galleries of words."
(Jansy)
..............................................................................................................................................................................................................
* - The full quote returns to the vertical theme about a "brief
crack of light" (
SO) and to
"our awareness of being is not a dot in eternity, but a slit, a
fissure, a chasm..." (
Ada) Cf:
https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi.../wa?...
"
"I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling
down from the roof...and noticing on the way that a sign-board had one word
spelled wrong...In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story
of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal
Alice in onderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to
wonder at trifles - no matter the imminent peril - these asides of the spirit,
these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness,
and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from
commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good...considering that
the main delight is the sway accorded to a seemingly incongruous detail over a
seemingly dominant generalization..."
(in this lecture Nabokov
connecta indeterminism to the gods when they are playing havoc
with men's lives!) Cf. The Art of Literature and Common Sense, Lect. on
Lit. -Bowers.