NPPF: Summary Line 286

[Scott Badger]

> Line 286: A jet's pink trail above the sunset fire
>
> Lotta' red in this book. A marker of the King and, in its many shades
> (gradatively?), a repeating intersection point in the paths of our two
> lemniscating bicycle writers, but is it a clew, or a lure? Or
> texture? The color red can also be a trigger for an epileptic
> seizure, particularly epilepsy in children....a-and Synesthesia
> can cause seeing the color red....The line also echoes the title,
> the only instance in the poem according to Boyd. (I thought
> Boyd's Shade-as-ghost reading of this section, especially the
> clasped hands across the ocean passage, engaging, compelling
> even, in certain regards, but I remain unconvinced that any
> single neat theory excludes all others. Keep your Doyle, I'll
> take Chandler....Charles Albert's Kinbote as an epileptic fugue
> state manifestation has some interesting features as well...)
> Kinbote tells us this is the last line on the twenty third card
> (Anyone counted the blank lines and canto breaks and checked the
> math?). Kinbote also tells us that Gradus, on the same day, flies
> from Copenhagen to Paris, ending the paragraph with, "[e]ven in
> Arcady am I, says Death in the tombal scripture". An allusion to
> the fatal approach of death-by-Gradus, but is it also a
> suggestion of some more premonitory connection between Shade's
> line and Gradus' own jet-trail? On the other hand, maybe evidence
> of some "sinister" influence. "Who could have guessed?", asks
> Kinbote...who could have guessed, indeed...
>
> Gradus is on a Mission, he seeks the location of the exiled King,
> and his leaders believe that Oswin Bretwit, former counsel in
> Paris, has that information (rightly so, according to Kinbote).
> Bretwit, composer of chess problems, now seems to be the
> composee. But the moves enacted are entirely witless. Both
> misapprehend the other's tricks and each, in turn, repeatedly
> blunders their own. "I defy anybody to find in the annals of plot
> and counterplot anything more inept and boring" says Kinbote.
> Hardly worth our attention, it would seem....except that it's
> Nabakov, and we know to be suspicious of his word....but doesn't
> N know that, by now, we know?....and, of course, we can know that
> N knows that we know...."Never go in against a Sicilian, when
> *death* is on the line!"....
>
> Gradus hopes to exchange a "bundle of precious family papers" for the
> whereabouts of the King. But, as the "Latin tag" to the note from
> Baron B suggests, the letters prove empty of any revelation for
> Bretwit; already of public record and not even the originals.
> Gradus changes tactics at this point and in a pantomimic scene
> tries to bribe Bretwit into giving him the information he is
> looking for. Accidentally, and unknowingly, he's partly
> successful, but fails to seize the opportunity, and the comedy of
> errors continues. Bretwit's next move is to mis-identify Gradus
> as a fellow Karlist and Gradus, briefly, has the key, literally
> in his hands, that could give him what he is after – a possible
> checkmate. But at the crucial (climatic!?) moment, a moment
> verging on a fugue-like transcendence for Bretwit, Gradus
> displays his chronic impotence and fumbles his chances away. He
> buttons up and Bretwit, in a final act of misapprehension, misses
> his oppotunity to
> thwart the falsely exposed assassin.
>
> Of course, the accidental and farcical nature of Gradus' and Bretwit's
> meeting, and its fateful outcome, stands in sharp contrast to the
> clockwork progression towards Shade's assassination that Kinbote
> sets up at the beginning of this commentary (just as Shade counts
> down the moments, complete with clock, preceding Hazel's death in
> the poem; another aspect of, "even in Arcady am I", the
> suggestion that throughout Life we are ghosted by Death). But
> maybe there's some _Hamlet_ to this scene as well; Hamlet's
> production of his father's murder. Gradus and Bretwit enact a
> pantomime, and mirrored, performance of Kinbote's efforts to make
> Shade's poem his own. The "batch of eighty cards[...]held by a
> rubber band" becomes the bundled "precious family papers" tied
> with a string. The index cards are kept in a plain "manila
> envelope" (another cocoon/butterfly image) while the letters are
> "prefixed" by a note which suggests that they are empty words -
> shells of meaning... There is also the "neat pile" of letters and
> the "tidy [...] hand" that the "text of [the] poem is written
> in". Finally, the wastepaper basket that Bretwit flings the
> letters into might correspond to the "backyard auto-da-fe'" that
> incinerates Shade's drafts, but while Gradus deliberately picks
> up the string, fallen at his feet, and adds it to the worthless
> letters in the trash, Kinbote "religiously" puts back the rubber
> band after examining the "precious" cards for the last time (see
> as well, line 533: "this slender rubber band/Which always forms,
> when dropped, an ampersand". Also, "[M]ysterious bits of string"
> show up as one of the "'psychokinetic' manifestations of Aunt
> Maude" on pg. 165). Question is, who does this performance
> expose, or is the mirror-play intended, instead, to hide?
>
> One more notable aspect of this commentary is Kinbote's tenderness for
> Bretwit - an unlikely attraction that parallels the relationship
> between Shade and Kinbote. He describes Bretwit as "sickly" and
> "featureless", a "pallid gland", and, intellectually, a dolt. But
> Kinbote then expresses a sense of profound connection between
> them, "a symbol of valor and self-abnegation", that veers towards
> some sexual attraction, "I could have spanked the dear man".
>
>
> Scott Badger