NPPF: Commentary to Line 167, 169

[Michael Joseph]

Line 167

Number games apart, Kinbote here makes his inattentiveness very blatant.
His voice drops, he seems to mumble to himself.

Number games not apart, the reference to line "181" at this juncture seems
to recollect that Shade was 11 at the time of his "fall," 11 reappearing
in the line citation separated by an upright infinity sign, or, as we have
been referring to it, a lemniscate. The iconic splitting of Shade into two
selves corresponds to the idea of a fall from childhood into adulthood,
which is conventionally precipitated by a discovery that one is going to
die (though, it has also been argued by John Morgenstern and others, by a
mastery of language and hence a relinquishing of a "pure tongue"). This
fall is complicated by Shade's abject hunger for an afterlife, or for a
state of being one can argue signified by the infinity sign. Note that the
disjunction of selves also corresponds to the division of text here into
Canto One and Canto Two (= Shade One, Shade Two).

Line 169 Survival after death

Again Kinbote defers a response to a later note. The dispersal of
commentary suggests the signature event of Canto One, Shade's
"distribution through space and time." Nabokov seems to reinterpret
Shade's seizure (ironically, his "distribution") as a metaphor for
composition, or to translate Shade's sense of the "sublime" (a
suggestively nineteenth century term referencing Burke, et al.) into a
kind of technique of articulation.



Michael