NPPF commentary line 149, p. 143- continued

[Michael Joseph]

To continue and conclude my analysis of this part of the commentary, I'd
like to touch back to my last, and sort of go on selectively from there.
Much thanks to Jasper for keeping us on track and for counterpointing my
riffs with his own notes.

> The policeman's interrogation:  "What's your real name Charlie," is
> reminiscent of the soldier, Bernardo's interrogation "Who's there?" the
> first line of Hamlet, which is of course another text that probes
> questions of identity, and, like this the narrative at the bottom of p 144
> (the nadir of the verso), deals directly with the apparition of a king.
>
Kinbote of course is the masquerading Botkin, recalling Hamlet's sol.

	      For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
              Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
              The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
              The insolence of office, and the spurns
              That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
              When he himself might his quietus make
              With a bare bodkin?

Kinbote's suicide, attested by Nabokov and debated by scholars, would seem
to evolve from these or like considerations, and Hamlet's synecdoche, his
specific concern with time, mirrors Nabokov's.

Hamlet is also called "The glass of fashion and the mould of form,/Th'
observ'd of all observers-" a description that suggests Nabokov's
investment in "mirrorplay and mirage shimmer," as well as Kinbote, through
whom the novel is ultimately focalized. Kinbote's description of Charles,
following the text >>cited above<< seems to parody Ophelia's description
(above) of the young and sartorially splendid prince:

"The King walked on; the top of his blue pajamas tucked into his skiing
pants might easily pass for a fancy shirt. There was a pebble in his left
shoe ... ." [sidebar: the pebble suggests remorse; is it Shade's?]

That Charles's motley appearance arouses no suspicion or curiosity among
the promenaders at Blawick testifies to Kinbote's own sociopathy. Despite
his jewler-like descriptions of scenery, he cannot see people correctly,
beginning with himself. He cannot see the foolish figure he cuts.  We can
invert Hamlet's description of Laertes, "his semblable is his mirror," and
see Kinbote's own bizarre aspect within his mirror projections.

Robert Silhol says of Hamlet in "Hamlet and his Other" in A Hyperlink
Journal for Psychological Study of the Arts,"

"Perhaps it's only normal, after all, that this insistence on resemblance
should follow on a question about identity. After, "Who's there?", a
possible echo of "Who am I?," which would be more precise only if it were
conscious, the idea, the wish, to look in a mirror seems perfectly
natural."

(http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/articles/psyart1999/silhol01.htm)


Extrapolating from Silhol, one could suggest that, while Shade is
tormented by mutability, and Kinbote by identity, both find solace in
mirrors, by which both are betrayed. Kinbote's doublegangers oppress him,
Charles's misogyny and oafishness make him ridiculous, disgusting, while
Shade's mirrorplay engenders reflections, meanings, he never meant.

For each, Odon-as-The-Newspaper-Reader's mosaic mutilation seems an apt
metaphor: Both poem and identity are shattered into various incompatible
parts. That he is clearly a comment on the theme of identity or reflection
is suggested in the comment that "an explosion at the Glass Works" caused
his apparent disfigurement: he is the result of catastrophic mirrorplay,
apparently. His plight, his phantom-of-the-opera-like repulsiveness
suggests a kind of warning against mirrors.

The second (more reflective) description of Odon seems to comment upon
_Pale Fire_ as Jasper Fidgets has observed already, as well as the
phenomenology of reading _Pale Fire._ (The "observer of observers" is also
the reader.)

"... a hideous tessellated texture with parts of pattern and parts of
outline seeming to change, to fuse or to separate, like fluctuating cheeks
and chins in a distortive mirror." (146)

We cannot once and for all fix "Pale Fire" as this "distortive mirror"
however because, like other reflections, it is merely a semblance, a
disguise. The newspaper reader is Odon (i.e., the text encompasses the
reader, and presses him or her into its phantasmagoria.) As a mere
reflector, the King's man, just as the King is Kinbote's man, Odon cannot
stabilize the text, establish its identity, or reflect it in an essential
way. He can merely participate in its mirrorplay on the level of texture,
or participate in poststructuralist "freeplay." In other words, whether
one perceives the tesselated pattern as a truer reflection of being than
the clownishly garbed King, neither carries a greater ontological weight,
because one cannot settle meaning in any ultimate sense on either
reflection. All reflections are temporal.


Michael