NPPF - Foreword - Summary / Commentary (4)

[Jasper Fidget]

Page 25:
"I overheard a young instructor in a green velvet jacket, whom I shall
mercifully call Gerald Emerald, carelessly saying in answer to something the
secretary had asked: 'I guess Mr. Shade has already left with the Great
Beaver.'"  

Here we meet Gerald Emerald for the first time.  There's something about
Emerald....  He seems more important than the amount of text he's given.
Kinbote has a particularly fierce amount of animosity toward him; it's
implied in the index that some brief tryst took place between them:
"[Kinbote's] loathing for a person who makes advances, and then betrays a
noble and naïve heart, telling foul stories about his victim and pursuing
him with brutal practical jokes" (309); Emerald is linked to the greater
shadow that gives Gradus the general location of King Charles: "He [the
shadow] was a merry, perhaps overmerry, fellow in a green velvet jacket.
Nobody liked him" (255); Emerald produces the photograph of Charles II for
Kinbote's Wordsmith colleagues (267); he reads best-sellers (lowbrow to
Kinbote) and takes Gradus to the Goldsworth château (283) -- thus also
giving Gradus the *specific* location of King Charles.  There's also some
evidence that Emerald himself is Zemblan (see 268-269 where Emerald spreads
his palms before offering to shake hands, a Zemblan custom linked to Gradus
on page 197).  I don't know where this all leads, there's just *something*
about Emerald....  If anyone has an idea about his real name and identity I
would love to hear it.

Page 26:
The description of Shade as "his own cancellation."  On page 176 Oswin
Bretwit is described in similar terms.

"I have one photograph of him."  

A present tense passage frozen in the image of the photograph, where one of
Kinbote's hands remains "half-raised -- not to pat Shade on the shoulder as
seems to be the intention, but to remove my sunglasses which, however, it
never reached in *that* life, the life of the picture", quickly digressing
into the betrayal of bad Bob, but returning on the next page: "He is looking
from the terrace (of Prof. C.'s house on that March evening) at the distant
lake.  I am looking at him.  I am witnessing a unique physiological
phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in
and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of
storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic
miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse."

One of my favorite passages in PF; Shade is given VN's own sense of what
makes good fiction: magic, combining the elements of the world to create
art.  We later learn much more about that lake, and about other lakes off in
other distances.  This one is really "three conjoined lakes called Omega,
Ozero, and Zero" (p. 92), so when Shade looks out from Prof. C's terrace,
he's looking out beyond time, beyond Omega, beyond the Zero [allusion for
Doug]; from that frozen moment in the photograph off into eternity.  See
also, Gulf of Surprise on 138, and Dim Gulf on line 957.

Page 27:
"bad Bob": Bob is a mirror name, two 'b's surrounding an 'o', has the feel
of a butterfly, in this case two, since "bad" is another mirror word.  See
more Bob on p. 97

Page 28:
"I stared at [the conjurer's] powdered cheeks, at the magical flower in his
buttonhole where it had passed through a succession of different colors and
had now become fixed as a white carnation"

White is associated with creative forces, while black is associated with
destructive forces (see p. 15).  Rainbows of colors are employed as
transformations from one state to another.

"Shade's poem is, indeed, that sudden flourish of magic."

Page 28-29
"Let me state that without my notes Shade's text simply has no human reality
at all since the human reality of such a poem as his [...] has to depend
entirely on the reality of its author and his surroundings, attachments and
so forth, a reality that only my notes can provide"

Synthesis of poem and commentary; the commentary provides the patterns that
are essential to the essence of the poem, but could not exist without it;
each side is unfinished, but the synthesis makes them whole.  A metaphor for
love/marriage?  Still it is interesting that Kinbote feels compelled to
insist upon the "human reality" that his contribution makes.