NPPR Commentary Line 149: gloss p. 137-142

[Michael Joseph]

Kinbote's commentary from page 137 until the middle of page 147 comprises
part of the escape story of Charles, the last king of Zembla (var, King
Charles, Charles Xavier, Charlie). Nabokov leaves the artificia of
clockwork toys and lemniscates for the naturalia of the mountains;  after
a descent into the underworld of Shade's basement comes an ascent into the
Bera Range. Kinbote stages the flight of Charles and, briefly, his man
Friday, the actor Odon (left off on p. 135), with a strident command of
geographical detail. Replacing the peevish, distractible Kinbote (e.g., "I
cannot understand what this has to do with cycling" (p. 136);  "but never
mind, now the rusty clockwork shall work again, for I have the key" (p.
137)) is Kinbote the capacious if somewhat tedious travel writer.

After parting with Odon, and several paragraphs of exact topographical
description, and struggling along alone in the dark, Kinbote's Charles
comes upon a farmhouse, where he meets a "gnarled farmer and his plump
wife" (p. 140). The story of Charles's sojourn here is a version of the
Tale Ovid tells of Philemon and Baucis in book viii of his
"Metamorphosis," a tale appropriated by Swift and Goethe, and in its
broader aspect, the ancient theme of showing kindness to strangers, a
theme repeated throughout the Odyssey and the Bible. So, for example,
there's the story about a Samaritan city not accepting Christ and his
disciples because they were going toward Jerusalem; James and John wanted
to obliterate them by calling fire down from heaven (cf. 2 Kings 1), but
Christ rebuked them for being of the wrong spirit (Luke 9.51-56).
There's also the O.T. story of the reception of the angels in Sodom
(Genesis 19) and of the Levite in Gibeah (Judges 19).

Discussing the category of tales as "saints wander on Earth," Stith
Thompson notes:

"Sometimes the unknown holy men are lodged, but the host, not realizing
who they are, mistreats them. In the tale of Christ and Peter in the Barn
(Type 752A), they are not allowed to sleep in the house, and the peasant
forces theem to rise early and help with the threshing in order to pay for
their lodging. Christ separates the grain miraculously by means of fire.
When the peasant tries to imitate, he burns his barn down. This tale was
retold by Hans Sachs in the sixteenth century; as an oral tradition it
seems to be confined almst entirely to the Baltic area. It has been
reported, but only sporadically, from Flanders, Denmark, and Roumania.

"The two elements in ths tale are paralleled elsewhere. The boorish
treatment of the guests by the host is found in another poem of Hans
Sachs, the Story of the Savior and Peter in Night Lodgings. Here Christ
and Peter are sleeping in the same bed. The drunken host returns home and
beats Peter, who persuades Christ to change places with him. The host then
comes in to beat the other lodger, and Peter again receives the blows."
(The Folktale 150-51)

Nabokov plays comically on the theme of the incognito wandering of saints.
Charles Xavier goes unrecognized by Griff, his greedy wife, and their
sluttish daughter, Garh, who, nevertheless, treat him charitably.
Apparently, the story partly derives from Kinbote's deluded, meglomaniacal
sense of his own glorious clandestine identity. He goes among the rustics
of New Wye just as Charles Xavier goes among the peasants in the
godforsaken Brera mountains. But although the coarse and doltish Griff is
an amusing burlesque of John Shade, the parallel of Garh, "a mere
mechanism of haphazard lust" (p. 142) with Shade's romantically desolated
daughter is an outrage. Kinbote's smug and unfeeling depiction of Garh is
a variation upon the rejection that leads Shade's daughter to take her
life.


Kinbote's retelling of this "old tedous tale" concludes thusly:

"She was about to proceed with her stripping but he stopped her with a
gesture and got up. he thanked her for all her kindness. He patted the
innocent dog; and without turning once, with a springy step, the King
started to walk up the turfy incline."

Nabokov's ferocity toward Kinbote is revealed candidly here, particularly
in the detail of the "innocent dog," an unmistakable example of what he
considered "poshlust." In his monograph on Nikolai Gogol, copyrighted in
1944 and reprinted in 1959, VN spends a few pages describing poshlust, a
term of singular contempt, which he calls "that fat brute of a word."
That he makes KInbote an emissary of poshlust is a marker of Nabokov's
contempt for him.

P. 63 "The Russian language is able to express by means of one pitiless
word the idea of a certain widespread defect for which the other three
European languages I happen to know possess no special term.. . . I find
it preferable to trasncribe that fat brute of a word thus: poshlust--which
renders in a somewhat more adequate manner the dull sound of the second,
neutral "o." Inversely the first "o" is as big as the plop of an elephant
falling into a muddy pond and as round as the bosom of a bathing beauty on
a German picture postcard."

P. 64 "English words expressing several althoug by no means all aspects of
poshlust are for instance: 'cheap, sham, common, smutty, pink-and-blue,
high falutin', in bad taste.' My little assistant, Roget's Thesaurus ...
supplies me moreover with 'inferior, sorry, trashy, scurvy, tawdry,
gimcrack' and others under 'cheapness.' All these however suggest merely
certain false values for the detection of which no particular sherewdness
is required. . . . but what Russians call poshlust is beautifully timeless
and so cleverly painted all  over with protective tints that its presence
(in a book, in a soul, in an institution, in a thousand other places)
often escapes detection.

P. 65-66 " . . . Gogol, in a chance story he told, expressed the immortal
spirit of poshlust pervading the German nation and expressed it with all
the vigor of his genius. The conversation around him had turned upon the
subject of Germany, and after listening awhile, Gogol said: 'Yes,
generally speaking teh average German is not too pleasant a creature, but
it is impossible to imagine anything more unpleasant than a German
Lothario, a German who tries to be winsome. . . . One day in Germany I
happened to run across such a gallant. The dwelling place of the maiden
whom he had long been courting without succeses stood on the bank of some
lake or other, and there she would be every evening sitting on her balcony
and doing two things at once: knitting a stocking and enjoying the view.
My German gallant being sick of the futility of his pursuit finally
devised an unfailing means whereby to conquer the heart of his cruel
Gretchen. Every evening he would take off his clothes, plunge into the
lake and, as he swam there, rightunder the eyes of his beloved,he would
keep embracing a couple of swans which had been specially prepared by him
for that puirpose. I do not quite know what those swans were supposed to
symbolize, but I do know that for several evenings on end he did nothing
but float about and assume pretty postures with his birds under that
precious balcony. Perhapshe fancied there was somehing poetically antique
and mythological in such frolics, but whatevber notion he had, the result
proved favorable to his intentions: the lady's heart was conquered just as
he thought it would be, and soon they were happily married.'

"Here you ahve poshlust in its ideal form, and it is clear that the terms
trivial, trashy, smug and so on do not cover the aspect it takes in ths
epic of the blond swimmer and the two swans he fondled... ."

P. 70 "From the various examples collected here it will be I hope clear
that poshlust is not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely
important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely
attractive ... ."


Michael

P.S. For references to King and peasant girl in Pynchon, see V, P. 77.