NPPF Comm3: Secret Passage (1)

[Jasper Fidget]

p. 126-127

Like the "natural shams" that fascinate Shade (ln 712-715), the secret
passage follows the pattern of its surroundings: "in its angular and cryptic
course it adapted itself to the various structures which it followed" (126).
It is also described in terms of writing, "here availing itself of a bulwark
to fit in its side like a pencil in the pencil hold of a pocket diary,"
drawing the reader back out of the narrative to an image of its internal
author scribbling away; then joining other dark passageways in the "cellars
of a great mansion."  Kinbote's style and vocabulary have taken on a Poe
feel (as one wonders what bones have been bricked up in those dark cellars),
and he speculates that "certain arcane connections had [possibly] been
established between the abandoned passage and the outer world [or] by the
blind pokings of time itself."  He says, "for here and there magic apertures
and penetrations, so narrow and deep as to drive one insane, could be
deduced," recalling similar descriptions from Poe's _Narrative of Arthur
Gordon Pym_ (1837) and the land where the rocks of chasms hint at arcane
mysteries that can only be solved outside of the text (pointing ultimately
back to their author) -- part of the journey into art where the artist must
arrange, devise, and determine his course before discovering the white
cataract of creative imagination at the journey's end.

At this point in Charles' life he is too interested in Oleg's "shapely
buttocks encased in tight indigo cotton" for him to follow the secret
passage all the way to its ultimate penetration into art, the mysteries of
sex still fascinating him enough to ground him in this world, saying
"[Oleg's] erect radiance [...] seemed to illume with leaps of light the low
ceiling and crowding walls" (126-127), and by the time the passage reaches
its end at 1,888 yards and the green door, he is too frightened by what he
hears beyond it to step through: the "two terrible voices" rehearsing in the
dressing room of Iris Acht.  Curiously, what's "more eerie than anything
that had come before" for Charles is the "man's murmuring some brief phrase
of casual approval ('Perfect, my dear,' or 'Couldn't be better');" in other
words it's not the art that frightens him so much as its critique and its
commentator, Charles Kinbote's very own future occupation and the activity
in which he is presently engaged.

Jasper Fidget