NPPF Comm2: Primal

[Don Corathers]

Line 57: The phantom of my little daughter's swing (p 94)

Kinbote is remarkably oblivious to the emotional freight of this line.

Primal Scene: That would be the child witnessing his parents in flagrante
delicto. Clearly Shade shares Nabokov's contempt ("future patient of the
future quack") for Freud.

Wikipedia entry for Freud, without which I would not have known that the
Great Man's middle name was Schlomo:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud

The seven variant lines Kinbote includes in the note might have actually fit
after line 60-replacing the "TV's huge paperclip" business with a
continuation of the description of the interior of the house that begins the
stanza. The narrative flow would have also worked nicely, if a bit
perversely, at the end of the variant, with the reference to the "Primal
Scene" preceding "I was an infant when my parents died." (Although another
line would have been required to complete the last couplet in the variant.)

One could surmise that Shade abandoned the variant because he decided the
arch and flippant assault on psychoanalysis was too abrupt a mood change
from the melancholy invocation of Hazel in line 57. Or more darkly, the
Oedipus/Electra thing was just a little bit too close to the bone.

The Keithians would want me to point out that if Shade himself had observed
the Primal Scene as a child, he would have been walking in on Maud. And
somebody.


Line 61: TV's huge paperclip (p 94)

Kinbote argues, with no apparent basis other than his dislike for Sybil and
Hurley, that they have misdated a short poem in which Shade mourns his
daughter's death. Actually it is quite plausible that Shade wrote "The
 Swing" in June as a sort of a study for a part of the larger poem.
Certainly Sybil is in a better position than Kinbote to know when it was
written.

It's true, as Kinbote suggests, that the images in the short piece-the
television antenna, the chirping bird, and the swing-were transplanted more
or less intact into "Pale Fire," two of them into the space that would have
been occupied by the variant that's included in the line 57 note. The one
image in "The Swing" that also occurred in the variant-the doorknob-was
abandoned. Does this mean something? Not as far as I can tell.

There is something curious about this whole swing business, though. In "Pale
Fire" it's a "phantom of my little daughter's swing" that "gently seems to
sway." That is, it's not there any more. In "The Swing," it's "the empty
little swing that swings under the tree," a real object hanging from a
branch. Hazel was 23 when she died. Doesn't it seem likely the swing would
have been taken down long before then? Or the rope rotted through?

D.C.