NPPF - Foreword - Summary / Commentary (2)

[Jasper Fidget]

Page 15:
Another contrast between Shade and Kinbote on p. 15: Kinbote has a
"long-limbed gait", while Shade has a "jerky shuffle".  For contrasts
between K and S, we have the following (by the end of the Foreword):

Kinbote: distracted, crazed, unstructured, homosexual, vegetarian,
prose-oriented, religious, Zemblan.

Shade: meticulous, ordered, structured, heterosexual, carnivorous,
poetry-oriented, agnostic, American.

In terms of appearance, they are each the opposite of their writing.
Kinbote is a reversal, a *mirror* of Shade.

Thesis: Shade -- writes the poem.
Antithesis: Kinbote -- writes the commentary.
Synthesis: VN??? -- writes _Pale Fire_....  But also Gradus.

It's a full-time occupation picking out mirrored pairs and their
syntheses/transformations in this book.  At the very start we have a poem
and a commentary (although the latter would seem to depend on the former, we
have them both at once), Shade and Kinbote are in many ways mirror images,
and often there will be some third part that supplies the synthesis (for
instance Gradus as the third part to the Shade-Kinbote pair -- see Index).
Is it the wings that make the butterfly?  Could the butterfly exist without
the body?  Could tennis exist without the net?

Also involved with the mirroring is the process of combining the parts in to
some new whole, as with VN's _Speak Memory_ quote concerning the spiral.
K's advice to merge the commentary and the poem (manually!), or otherwise
purchase "two copies of the same work which can then be placed in adjacent
positions". (pg. 28).  Hegelian dialectic -- thesis & antithesis = synthesis

For VN's quotes on spirals and synthesis see: 
http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0306&msg=81867&sort=date

"died July 21" (pg 13)
"hearing my poor friend's own voice proclaim on the evening of July 21 the
end" (pg 15).
VN's father died on July 21

K asserts on p. 15 that only one line of the poem remained to be written,
and that it was intended to be identical to line 1.  Given the way this
assertion is set up, with K and S's apparent friendship, the reader is
likely to assume the veracity of this statement.

The poem, as described by Kinbote on p. 15, would be structurally
symmetrical if the final line had been added.  Thus more mirrors: the last
line mirroring the first, Cantos One and Two mirroring Cantos Three and Four
as halves (as with a butterfly), but also in size: Canto One mirroring Canto
Four and Canto Two mirroring Canto Three (a mirror within a mirror).

Does the missing final line make "Pale Fire" structurally unsound?  "Pale
Fire" is a spiral, falling in on or out of itself.  Note too that the last
line of the index: "Zembla, a distant northern land" (315) is also
incomplete: there are no page number references.

Page 15: 
"deform the faces of his crystal" (15)
"He consulted his wrist watch.  A snowflake settled upon it.  'Crystal to
crystal,' said Shade." (22)
Also see line 12 of "Pale Fire": "Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!"

Crystals supply a linkage between structure and time.  They are a simple
example of how the patterns discovered in the natural world may be employed
in order to locate and define abstract concepts.  A crystal will also cause
refraction when light passes through it, and this furthers the idea of
filtration in PF, of things mutating when passing through filters like
translators, commentators, historians, the very act of communication from
one to another.

"(See my note to line 991.)"  The only cross-reference in the Foreword.  A
reader who follows it and the subsequent ones from that note returns with a
very different impression of Kinbote and PF than if they had not.  There is
therefore a kind of bifurcation of readers that takes place here.  Also a
kind of filtration or refraction of the audience.

This cross-reference is also the first of several indications that the
Foreword has been written last or close to last, after the Commentary.  This
becomes somewhat significant later, as contradictions begin appearing.

Page 16:
"and that on publication day the manuscript would be handed over to the
Library of Congress for permanent preservation."

This idea of permanent preservation must be attractive to Kinbote.  If "Pale
Fire" is to forever preserve Zembla and its former King, then something
else, some other container, must preserve the physical matter of the book.
He travels to the Library of Congress at some point later, perhaps to look
over the site of his future entombment.