NPPR Line 143 a clockwork toy

[Michael Joseph]

     Kinbote responds to the line "When I'd just turned eleven, as I
lay/Prone on the floor and watched a clockwork toy" with a recollection of
visiting Shade, that veers between being comical and creepy. Even though
the toy is the most trivial detail of this section of the poem, Kinbote
pounces upon it to the exclusion of more significant, substantive, text,
in a manner reminiscent of a pompous schoolchild: "By a stroke of luck I
have seen it!" Yet, the rest of this longish paragraph (by contrast, note
the 2 short paragraphs in the preceding lemniscate commentary: 2
paragraphs for 2 lobes of the lemniscate?), which tells the story of
Kinbote and Shade sort of fumbling around in Shade's basement, has an
undertone of a journey into the underworld.

     Is this a kind of (lemniscative) complement to the transcendental
fainting fit it circumvents?

     Note that Kinbote finds shade "gloomily waiting"--although, why
should the dinner party induce gloom? Shade then brings Kinbote to the
basement in search of a collection of pamphlets written by Shade's
grandfather, an "eccentric clergyman." (Kinbote says Shade "willingly
took" him, the shoehorned adverb betraying, possibly, Kinbote's suspicion
(duh) that his intervention in Shade's evening was inappropriate, and,
possibly, echoing "gloomily" ("him gloomily" / "He willingly"). Clearly,
descending into the dusty basement is the gloomy task, particularly in
contrast with the promise of a dinner party with the writing department
"and their wives."
     Spying the clockwork toy, Kinbote instantly forgets the reason or
pretext for his visit. Shade describes the object off-handedly "as a kind
of memento mori," and unshelves it from between 2 other echt gothic
memento mori--"a candlestick and a handless alarm clock"--symbols off
moribundity and the dissipation of time.

(See http://sallie.rutgers.edu/~triggs/WARD/Vertigo/07a.htm.)

     Kinbote's commentary supplies another chthonic image in his shocking
mention of Shade's "dead daughter," the superfluous "dead" urging us to
see that this basement is a place of the dead, and that Kinbote may
unconsciously have a sense of it.

     Describing the toy as having "no breadth to speak of," Nabokov
supplies another death image; by figuring the toy's face as "two more or
less fused profiles" he uses a lemniscate image folded in upon itself.
The toy focuses the attention of Shade and Kinbote here, with the fused
doubleness of its face symbolizing the convergence upon an aesthetic or
cultural object of various sets of opposition, such as Kinbote's
materialism and Shade's transcendence.

     Kinbote's observation that Shade "brush[es] the dust off his sleeves"
as he describes the toy as a memento mori also lends itself to a reading
that Nabokov is symbolically placing this scene below-stairs among the
dead; it even hints that Shade (and Kinbote) are themselves already dead
or transforming into something not quite lifelike:  the dust Shade brushes
off his sleeves may come from his own arms, his own corpse, the toy a sign
of death his morbid transformation has unwittingly sped by; and, notice
what is happening to Kinbote's memory, how his awareness seems to be
unraveling as well.

     "He said, brushing the dust off his sleeves, that he kept it as a
kind of memento mori--he had had a strange fainting fit one day in his
child-hood while playing with that toy." Kinbote seems to have lost track
of his purpose here; he has turned the central point of the lines he
started out to expound upon into a cursory note, a flabby tangent, almost.
(In terms of its errieness, I think of the misty, Ovidan metamorphosis
toward the end of the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of "Finnegan's Wake"
of the 2 washer-women into a tree and a rock, and something of Didi and
Gogo's chatter in Becket's "Waiting for Godot.") (Semantics is tricky
business. (See for example
http://members.tripod.com/adm/popup/roadmap.shtml?member_name=heldt&path=godot.html&client_ip=205.188.208.75&ts=1064455000&ad_type=POPUP&search_string=Didi+Godot&id=f6ffa5bc0b2fe3fdc33030f285cc6ce8)

     The sojourn below comes to an abrupt caesura: Kinbote writes "We were
interrupted by Sybil's voice calling from above." Okay, I anticipate your
objections here. The symbolism of Sybil's name is as obvious and therefore
as treacherous as the symbolism of Shade. But just suspend disbelief for a
moment and consider the appositeness of its obvious/treacherous symbolism
in this context.

     "Symbol's voice calling from above" (PF 137)
     "Sybil conjured up the spirits of the dead" (White Goddess 254)

     Graves also notes, "The visit of Aeneas, mistletoe-bough in hand, to
the Underworld to cross-examine his father Anchises must be read in this
sense. Aeneas sacrificed a bull and let the blood gush into a tough, and
the ghost of Anchises (who had married the Love-goddess Venus Erycina, and
been killed by lightning and was, in fact, a sacred king of the usual
Herculean type), drank the blood and obligingly prophesied about the
glories of Rome. Of course, the ghost did not really lap the blood, but a
lapping sound was heard in teh dark; what happened was that the Sibyl, who
conducted Aeneas below, drank the blood and it produced in her the desired
prophetic ecstasy. That Sibyls acted so is known from the case of the
Priestess of Mother Earth at Aegira ('Black Poplar,' a tree sacred to
heroes) in Achaea. The peeping and muttering of ghosts on such occasions
is understandable: two or three Biblical texts refer to the queer bat-like
voices in which demons, or familiars, speak through the mouths of prophets
or prophetesses. Bull's blood was most potent magic and was used, diluted
with enormous quantities of water, to fertilize fruit-trees in Crete and
Greece. Taken neat it was regarded as a poison deadly to anyone but a
Sibyl or a priest of Mother Earth; Jason's father and mother died from a
draught of it. So did ass-eared Kig Midas of Gordium." (WG 105)

Shade and Kinbote seem to have been summoned from the underworld by
Sibyl's call--and, perhaps, if we telescope this temporal moment with the
temporal moment upon which it is fused, Shade as a boy is released from
his poetic, death-like trance as well.

     In summary, just as it triggers the strange ecstasy of the younger
Shade, the clockwork toy magics Shade and Kinbote so that they achieve
a (Yeatsian) kind of death-in-life condition, from which they are
magically lifted by Shade's wife, the Sibyline Sibyl.

     Shade and Kinbote's sojourn constitutes an escape from time: the
candle, handless clock, broken clockwork toy, are all broken symbols of
time, or symbols of broken or stopped time. Thus, at the end of his
aimless and apparently marginal anecdote--perhaps the "outside" track of
the lemniscate--Kinbote declares, an odd hoo-ha of triumph, "*Now* the
rusty clockwork shall work again, for I have the key." (Stolen, as
Shade turned his head? And what would have been the Sibyline call, but
"Shade?")

     The key: Having re-entered an Aristotelian 'now,' clock-time can
resume. In its timelessness, the commentary no longer occupies a moment
contiguous to the moment it comments upon, but a moment that "fuses" the
two moments together. (We've discussed this temporal plasticity, Dave
Moris will recall, in the context of Nabokov's sense of time.) So, Shade's
transcendent experience as a child is reactualized in some sense within
the timeless moment burned into the commentary. Of course, "the rusty
clockwork toy" (note the iambic meter/motor) symbolizes Shade's poem as
well as Kinbote's commentary as well as "Pale Fire," and for the reader
the same transcendent moment is reactualized phenomenologically within the
creative hermeneutic that simultaneously valorizes the text and the
reader.

     Someone else shoudl feel free to mention Vaucasson's bird in "MD"
here, and perhaps Bongo-Shaftsbury, the mechanical doll of "V" (p. 78) and
point out the similarities to Nabokov's atemporal clockwork toy.


Michael