NPPR Commentary Lines 131-132: par. 1

[Michael Joseph]

Lines 131-132: I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by feigned remoteness
in the windowpane.

Shade's poem returns to its beginning, though elegantly varying "the false
azure" with "feigned remoteness." Kinbote does more than a competent
analysis, noting "the repetition of that long-drawn note" ['-ain'] and
finding "a kind of languourous pleasure" in it. He declares that the note
is "saved from monotony" by the additional repetition of the sound in
"feigned," which strikes us as sensitively attuned to the sound of the
poem, and nicely self-revelatory, in that Kinbote's choice of
"languourous" seems to distinguish his own palate (palette?).

(It's worth noting that, providing the playful assonance, Shade twists the
meaning of his preceding line "I never bounced a ball or swung a bat." In
fact, his quantitative meter and assonance suggests a kind of verse play
for which bouncing a ball and swinging a bat might serve as metaphors.)

Kinbote's ghostly simile "as would the echo of some half-remembered
sorrowful song whose strain is more meaningful than its words" transits us
into his 'history' of Gradus, but allows us to experience the refrain's
underlying sense of loss (and of course "strain"), which clings to the
first canto.  [See WB Yeats's "I am of Ireland"  for another example of a
poem that uses this device to achieve a similar effect
http://www.plagiarist.com/text/?wid=3372]. In Kinbote's response perhaps
lurks an allusion by Navokov to Shade's "contrapuntal theme;/. . . not
text but texture . ..."

Kinbote's response then indeed grows "topsy-turvical" when he conflates
Shade and Gradus: "We feel doom, in the image of Gradus, eating away the
miles and miles of 'feigned remoteness' between him and poor Shade. He,
too, is to meet, in his urgent and blind flight, a reflection that will
shatter him. [etc.]" Were there actually a Gradus the image would be
trite, but since he exists merely as a phantom of Kinbote's imagination-or
not merely, but a phantom produced within Kinbote's imagination by the
force of his collision with the poem, we cannot easily dismiss it. Fact,
in Kinbote's proferred description of the animated Gradus "The force
propelling him is the magic action of Shade's poem itself, the very
mechanism and sweep of verse, the powerful iambic motor," there is a
succinct evocation and demonstration of Kinbote's own fluxion. Re-reading
lines 131-32 against a reading of Kinbote within "the image [!] of Gradus"
as a transposed Shade, we see that Kinbote is himself implicated. The
"feigned remoteness" now may be seen to refer to Kinbote's false pretence
of objectively commentating on Shade's poem (feigning the critic's stance
of detachment in order to read the poem as a method of self-invention).

Kinbote's relish of his own imagination is subtly mocked in the bombastic
praise he lavishes upon the obscure "form."("NEVER BEFORE [caps mine] has
the inexorable advance of fate received such a sensuous form," he
exclaims, embracing the "form" while completely parting company with the
actual poem.) But his rapture, asinine though it is, is agreeably
spirited, and I think we are moved into sympathy with Kinbote because we
think we recognize a tremor of dread at what he perceives as an image of
his own death. Looking into Shade's glass -- the "mirrorplay and mirage
shimmer" of lines 131-32-- Kinbote spies his own "shattering," that is,
not only his own fragmenting (into subpersonalities - Gradus, Charles,
etc.) but his death.

"(for other images of that transcendental tramp's approach see note to
line 17)."

My last comment on this note: as well as snapping off his own commentary
(without touching upon lines 133-136--Kinbote's erasures may be as
important as his dilations), Kinbote's odd, merry alliteration rings
against another alliteration three quarters of the way down p. 77 in the
Vintage paperback ed., under note to line 17: "We find him next engaging
in petty subversive activities--printing peevish pamphlets, acting as
messenger for obscure syndicalist groups, organizing strikes at glass
factories, and that sort of thing." I have to confess that it is my nature
to see authors writing themselves into their texts in ways sometimes only
slightly more subtle than Hitchcock filming himself into his own movies,
and it may be that you have to share this vantage point in order to agree
with me here.  Nevertheless, I want to throw out for your possibly dubious
consideration (too), the idea that in this highly self-conscious use of
alliteration (remember, the note began with Kinbote doing prosody),
Nabokov is invoking himself, that it is really he and not any other
character who qualifies as a "transcendental tramp," since it is only he
who operates above the plane of action, and, while Nabokov is certainly
not "printing" or causing to be printed pamphlets which are "Morose,
querulous, irritable, ill-tempered, childishly fretful" (OED), it may be
pointed out that, in "Pale Fire" he is causing to be printed somethng that
is "headstrong, obstinate; self-willed." (OED) And of course he does
"organize a strike at [a] glass" {grin} if not a glass "factory."



Michael