NPPF Commentary to line 162: With ihs pure tongue, etc.

[Michael Joseph]

"With his pure tongue her abject thirst to quench."

Made manifestly uneasy by Shade's conspicuously erotic sexual imagery,
Kinbote diagnoses Shade's strange, stop-time trance as "a mild form of
epilepsy" (147). This seems an incurious pronouncement (implying perhaps
Nabokov's contempt for positivism), which, nevertheless, hints at the
attack's mysterious nature. Epilepsy has been traditionally associated
with the unknown, e.g. the early Greeks called it "Herakliea nosos," the
illness of Hercules (Euripides "Madness of Hercules"), and the Romans
"morbus demoniacus," and "morbus sacer." (And, of course, Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar has an epileptic seizure in act 1, scene 2--perhaps another
in the play's sequence of "signs.") Seemingly normalizing a "sign" of
Shade's abnormalcy, or his election, "epilepsy" actually muffles analysis,
a point underscored by the fact that le petit mal bears absolutely no
resemblance to Shade's outward or inward experience.

Kinbote's second cut at commentary is metaphoric. "[A] derailment of the
nerves . . . on the same curve of the tracks, every day, for several weeks
. . . " (147). Given Shade's age, he has just turned 11--significantly,
two ones, one doubled--as well as (a rather telling detail) the repetition
of the apparently inconsequential derailment, we might construe these
tracks as model train tracks, whose shape is a (lemniscate) figure
eight--one of two conventional circles. Perhaps Kinbote has momentarily
transformed Shade's toy into a set of model trains?

In any case, having offered the metaphor of a train as an explanation of
Shade's neurological incident, the metaphor takes on a life of its own.
"Who can forget the good-natured faces . . . of . . . railway workers . .
.  following with their eyes the windows of the great express cautiously
gliding by?" (147) Thus, Kinbote lightly abandons the abstruse text in two
steps: first by offering the vague image of a train derailing (if not a
child's train, then a childish illustration), and next by falling into the
imaginary world of the metaphor--much as the reader as newspaper reader
falls into KInbote's imaginary world in the preceding note (by becoming
Odon, a shape-shifter, an emanation of Charles/Kinbote/Botkin). Perhaps,
the blatant intrusion of the metaphor into the text (a link between two
worlds, therefore another implied lemniscate) recovers Odon's grisly
"tesselated" mask, the blatant metaphor for _Pale Fire_ or perhaps the
intrusion of the explicit (if obscure) sexuality of Shade's metaphor.
Kinbote's description of "faces, glossy with sweat, of copper-chested
railway works leaning upon their spades" is suggestive in this regard.


Michael