NPPR: Commentary Line 137 Lemniscate

[Michael Joseph]

Kinbote's weary dictionary defines lemniscate as "A unicursal bicircular
quartic." (Perhaps in "weary" we see Nabokov's amused sympathies for his
own put-upon readers--having to bear with his goetic nebulations and
helical comedos--and/or perhaps his (pre-Derrida) sense of language's
deferral of meaning.)

The OED defines "unicursal" thusly: "Having, traversing, or being on one
course or path," certainly bike like. OED defines bicircular:  "Applied to
a class of quartic curves each of which passes twice through each of the
circular points at infinity, and thus resembles (analytically, and
sometimes in form) a pair of circles."

Not having yet seen a compelling explanation for why a lemniscate should
so enrapture Shade ("the miracle of a lemniscate"), I am more engaged by
the idea that the shape is placed before us and emphasized in the
commentary so that readers might track it within what Kinbote calls the
"mirrorplay and mirage shimmer" of the book. A lemniscate for example
suggests a single mother cell more than half way divided into two daughter
cells (birth imagery worthy of Shade's "envy?" "miraculous?" Does Shade,
like Leo Bloom, wish to have been a mother?). In a sense, one can think of
_Pale Fire_ as a very mitotic composition. Nabokov splits into two
imperfectly separate selves, Shade himself splits into shadow and waxwing,
(Heidegger's being in the world and being ahead of oneself); likewise
incompletely severed, Kinbote splits into Kinbote and Charles (or is it
Botkin who splits? or is it King Charles who splits, like the egg in the
hands of Lear's fool into Kinbote and Botkin . . .).

A lemniscate is produced when one draws a semi circle and positions it
beside a hand mirror, so that the open edges are made contiguous; not just
a reasonable metaphor for the poem and commentary in an ideal sense (the
open part of the circle represented by the missing line 1000, which is
mirrored in turn by Kinbote's/Botkin's foreboding on p. 301), or because
its mask-like shape connotes the identity game and name game which readers
are led to play, but, along those lines, for the enterprize of a kind of
interpretation in which the creative essence of the original narrative is
preserved, at the expense of its particular uniqueness. (Wilde's idea that
criticism should excite the reader to no less a degree than the poem that
has excited the critic.) B/K 'lemniscates' Shade's elliptical poem in the
process of reimagining himself and his history, and the reader
'lemniscates' Nabokov's novel through playful conjecture (for which
Nabokov's lemniscatic Psyche imagery serves as a persistent and
self-referential symbol). Without intending damage toward Nabokov's
Olympian detachment, one might even ask whether (lemniscatic) mirrorplay
isn't being offered as an alternative to competition and violence. (See,
for example, Mihai I. Spariosu's "The Wreath of Wild Olive." (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1997), in which are examined texts by Nabokov as well as
Dostoevsky, Eliade, Devi and Lowry (review link:
http://collection.nlc-bnc.ca/100/201/300/literary_research-ef/n28-n36/old28/spariosu.html

In hs review, Andrew Brown notes, "For Spariosu, criticism should indulge
the "ludic-irenic perspective" that literature presents. Literature can
have a salutary effect on culture at large by virtue of its connection
with the ethos of a community. As Spariosu argues, "by playfully staging a
real or an imaginary world and presenting it from various perspectives,
literature contributes to a certain community and hence can assume an
important role in bringing about historical change."

This conceptualization of Nabokov's mirrorplay opens up what might
otherwise seem stale solipsism (i.e., this is my opinion and if ya don't
like it, t.s., buddy boy), and shades nicely into the notion of
contrapuntal texts, a musical collaboration in which creativity calls
forth creative response, becoming consensual validation, which, perhaps,
is what Shade longs for when he first sees the lemniscate described in the
sand. (As distinct and opposite to the competitive play "with other
chaps.")


Okay, enough, go away Michael.