NPPF Comm3: The Magic Key

[Jasper Fidget]

p. 123 etc

In a trompe l'oeil nutshell, Kinbote escapes into art.

The key Charles finds in the "lumber room" opens three doors: thesis,
antithesis, and synthesis.  The first door is the door to the closet, which
holds old things, things from Kinbote's past, his memory.  The closet is a
kind of random mirror.  It also holds "the tiny volume of /Timon Afinsken/"
which will remain with Kinbote for the rest of his life "as a talisman" (p.
132), and the red clothes he'll require to affect his escape.

The second door is through the back of the closet to the secret passage
behind it, the passage that wraps around the stuff of the present, beneath
and through it all, spiraling outward from that dim origin in Kinbote's cage
(see also the highway on pg. 97).  

The last door is at the other end of the 1,888 yard tunnel, and leads to the
theater dressing room, the green door entrance into art and eternity, the
synthesis.  The dressing room once belonged to Iris Acht (8, infinity
upright).  The number of yards from the closet to the green door is a
concrete poem for a threshold or an origin followed by a series of
infinities: 1888: signifying death.  Iris Acht dies in 1888, as did Mathew
Arnold (as noted on p. 294, "still clutching the inviolable shade," a quote
from "The Scholar Gypsy," which suggests the immortality of art), as did
Nikolai Przhevalski, a Russian naturalist and explorer for whom a city in
eastern Kyrgyzstan is named (mentioned in VN's novel _The Gift_ I believe).
My (old) notes also indicate that in 1888 V.P. Botkin's essay on the British
theater appeared in the third volume of his work on Shakespeare, but I've
been unable to verify this.

http://www.win.tue.nl/~engels/discovery/prz.html

Jasper Fidget