NPPF - Finishing commentary to canto two

[Jasper Fidget]

p. 215
"a BIC language", "crafty system (invented in the chief BIC country)"

BIC: Behind the Iron Curtain.


p. 215-16
"Headquarters thought it understood that letters from the King divulging his
whereabouts could be obtained by breaking into Villa Disa and rifling the
Queen's bureau"

This conclusion is reached through the inability of Gradus and Headquarters
to communicate -- and yet it proves accurate.  I doubt VN had any commentary
in mind regarding KGB code systems (which were anything but an "obstacle
race in the dark") but possibly on systems of communication intended to
obscure rather than communicate (not unlike some 20th century fiction).
That sometimes the interpretation proves valid is the result of chance
rather than design -- or possibly just a product of the reader? -- for it
may as easily prove false (as Gradus waits for his "consignment of canned
salmon").  Gradus' conclusion from this interaction is to prefer mediation
to direct communication.


p. 215 
"bureau", "letter"

The scene (a pair of scenes actually) concerning the theft of Charles'
letter from Disa's villa has some parallels in Poe's "The Purloined Letter,"
a story in which a letter is stolen from a Queen and a detective is hired to
retrieve it.  For a full summary of the story look here:

http://www.allpoe.com/pss.php?id=129

In Poe's story, the eponymous letter is from the Queen's lover, whom she
wishes to keep secret from the King.  Since she saw the Minister D-- steal
the letter from her table, she enlists the aid of the police to tear apart
the Minister's apartments.  They are unable to locate it, so the police
Prefect enlists the aid of M. Dupin to find the letter, who first has the
Prefect search the apartments again.  The police still can't find it, and a
month later Dupin produces the letter on his own.  He explains to the
Narrator how he visited the Minister at his hotel and wore green spectacles
to conceal his eyes so that he could socialize while covertly studying the
room's interior, eventually finding the letter in plain sight amid a
card-box of correspondence over the mantel-piece.  Later, during a
prearranged diversion in the street outside, Dupin replaces it with one of
his own.

The parallels to _Pale Fire_ are mostly fragmentary: The Queen's table and
Disa's "rosewood writing desk;" the police who tear apart the Minister's
hotel in their vain search for the letter and the two Russian experts who
tear apart the royal palace in Zembla in their vain search for the crown
jewels (and eventually find Disa's letter at the villa); Dupin's green
spectacles (a color associated with the greater Shadow Izumrudov who
produces Disa's letter for Gradus); even Gradus' communication with
headquarters: "G-- detailed to us his mode of searching the premises at the
Hotel D--."  Individually they don't impart much, but the Poe story itself
might be useful in offering a strategy for understanding Pale Fire as a
whole.  

In explaining to the Narrator his reasoning in locating the letter, Dupin
describes a puzzle game which uses a map: one player picks a name from the
map, and the other tries to guess which name it is.  "A novice in the game,"
Dupin explains, "generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them
the most minutely lettered names; but the adept selects such words as
stretch, in large characters, from one end of the chart to the other."  The
reason is that they are "excessively obvious; and here," Dupin says, "the
physical oversight is precisely analogous with the moral inapprehension by
which the intellect suffers to pass unnoticed those considerations which are
too obtrusively and too palpably self-evident."  The transparency and
simplicity of the case involving the purloined letter thwarts the police
Prefect because he is accustomed to opacity and complexity.  Dupin says, "a
certain set of highly ingenious resources are, with the Prefect, a sort of
Procrustean bed, to which he forcibly adapts his designs."  In seeking to
find what he expects, he ignores what is readily there.

Similarly (one might argue), understanding Pale Fire eludes the efforts of
experts who seek to discover more between its covers than exists there,
focusing on the most minute details while ignoring what is "too obtrusively
and too palpably self-evident."  Like Poe's police Prefect, like Andronnikov
and Niagarin, like Charles Kinbote, they ultimately fail to find whatever it
is they set out to discover.  And sometimes they realize they've built their
own private Zembla in the process.

Which is not to suggest PF is a simple read.  Just as Dupin has the Prefect
"re-research" the Minister's hotel before he can confidently settle on his
plain-sight theory, the diligent reader must work through Pale Fire's many
false leads and exterior and interior references before settling on the
obvious.  Sometimes one must pass through complexity in order to realize
simplicity.  Recall the glyphs at the end of Poe's "Narrative of Arthur
Gordon Pym" which seem to allude to great complexity but ultimately are
nothing more than a hoax on the part of the author.  Quite a few Poe stories
have a secret joke at the end as a reward for diligent and attentive readers
(and which often subvert the entire story).  

What's the secret joke at the end of Pale Fire?

In "The Purloined Letter," Dupin concludes his explanation to the Narrator
by anticipating Minister D--'s embarrassment when the letter in his
possession turns out to be from Dupin and not the Queen's lover.  "[It] did
not seem altogether right to leave the interior [of the replacement letter]
blank," he says.  "That would have been insulting."

http://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/plttrb.htm


p. 220
"falling, falling, falling is the supreme method"

As if distancing himself from the immediacy of it, Kinbote gives an
encyclopedic list of suicide methods.  Hamlet's "bare botkin [sic]" points
to Kinbote himself, while "drown with clumsy Ophelia" may suggest Hazel.  An
expert parachutist, he contemplates departing from some nearby ledge: "not
fall, not jump -- but roll out as you should for air comfort."  But
Kinbote's European politeness makes him reluctant to become somebody else's
problem, so he fears landing on someone; he says that landing on the "roof
of an old tenacious normal house" might be better, "where a cat may be
trusted to flash out of the way" (as with Hodge in the epigraph).  "The
ideal drop is from an aircraft" (p. 221), he notes, just as Charles the
Beloved arrived in America for the final phase of his exile (but this time
sans chute).

The three fallings are interesting though, since we've been trained to
associate thrice repetition with fairy tales in K's personal mythology, as
with the three nights at the Haunted Barn (p. 190).  Adding this to the
reference to "Grimm" earlier on the same page might give some cause for
suspicion.

Kinbote's residence in Cedarn and the three times repetition might reference
Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" (1798):

[...]

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

[...]

Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

The idea of weaving a circle thrice comes from an old practice of
emphasizing a prayer or sacred ritual (as with "three times the charm"), and
here implies an attempt by others to restrain or alienate the crazed poet as
he returns from his vision.  Kinbote may feel similarly exiled in the
presence of others who find him strange or even insane, not to mention the
social response to his homosexuality.

There's also a fountain in that poem similar to Poe's cataract and Shade's
"tall white fountain" (ln 707).  Also analogous to PF is the abrupt
intrusion of the author into the text: "A damsel with a dulcimer / In a
vision once I saw."  There is a loud amusement park right in front of my
present lodgings.

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Kubla_Khan.html


p. 220
"room 1915 or 1959"

1915 is the year of Kinbote's birth. 
1959 is the year of his probable death.

p. 221
"/shootka/ (little chute)"

Russian for "joke."


Jasper Fidget