I never got around to posting this blog from last Tuesday. My apologies for these five tardy discoveries:
1. *The significance of Shade’s name (Shade is a shade; a shadow; a reflection).
2. “The one who kills is always his victim’s inferior” (234). Is this another hint towards transcendence?
3. “I maintain that what’s his name, old—the old man, you know, at the Exton railway stations, who thought he was God and began redirecting the trains, was technically a loony, but John calls him a fellow poet” (238). “None can say how long John Shade planned his poem to be, but it is not improbably that what he left represents only a small fraction of the composition he saw in a glass, darkly” (14). In the King James Bible (Cambridge Ed); “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known”. In this passage, the word “glass” is referring to a looking glass, or mirror. Shade is not viewing reality, but the reflection. However, the word “glass” implies that he cannot only see himself in reflection but also through in transparency?
4. Zembla: the land of mirrors and resemblances. “Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences” (265). Reverse the names? Nodo is “Odon’s epileptic half brother who cheated at cards” (150).
5. Man’s life as commentary to abstruse Unfinished poem. Note for further use. (ln 940) “Let me state that without my notes Shade’s text simply has no human reality at all since the human reality of such a poem as his (being too skittish and reticent for an autobiographical work), with the omission of many pithy lines carelessly rejected by him, has to depend entirely on the reality of its author and his surroundings, attachments and so forth, a reality that only my notes can provide” (29). Kinbote created Shade…Shade functions as a reflection of Kinbote, not the other way around.
Some brainstorming for the paper: the imprisonment and flight of Daedalus and Icarus: Icarus, wearing wings of wax designed by his father, flew too close to the sun and fell to his death in the ocean. Flight into the path of the sun produces a shadow on the ground or ocean...are shadows the same as reflection? What other shadow/reflections do we see in novel? Just as the commentary is a shadow/reflection of the poem the ocean functions as reflection of the sky…blue azure.
Kinbolt displays an early longing for both flight and the light of the sun; when equating John Shade’s talent for poetry writing to a Zemblan entertainer, he writes that the entertainer’s “marvelous fluid-looking fingers which could if he chose make his spoon dissolve into a sunbeam by twiddling it, or turn his plate into a dove by tossing it up in the air” (28). By the deft movements of his hands, he seemingly has the ability to conjure the impossible and create his own reality from his surroundings. Not only create it for himself—but share.
Daedalus designed the maze to confuse; “led the eye into a tortuous maze, by the windings of alternating paths” (Ovid, Book VIII). While the experience of reading or attempting to wring meaning from Pale Fire may bear similarities to the process of navigating a “tortuous maze”, I wonder if Nabokov’s novel holds this connection to the Icarus myth. Is there a maze? If so, who is the architect? And is there a minotaur? Speculations without foundation as of now…
Bk VIII:183-235 Daedalus and Icarus Meanwhile Daedalus, hating Crete, and his long exile, and filled with a desire to stand on his native soil, was imprisoned by the waves. ‘He may thwart our escape by land or sea’ he said ‘but the sky is surely open to us: we will go that way: Minos rules everything but he does not rule the heavens’. So saying he applied his thought to new invention and altered the natural order of things. He laid down lines of feathers, beginning with the smallest, following the shorter with longer ones, so that you might think they had grown like that, on a slant. In that way, long ago, the rustic pan-pipes were graduated, with lengthening reeds. Then he fastened them together with thread at the middle, and bees’-wax at the base, and, when he had arranged them, he flexed each one into a gentle curve, so that they imitated real bird’s wings. His son, Icarus, stood next to him, and, not realising that he was handling things that would endanger him, caught laughingly at the down that blew in the passing breeze, and softened the yellow bees’-wax with his thumb, and, in his play, hindered his father’s marvellous work. When he had put the last touches to what he had begun, the artificer balanced his own body between the two wings and hovered in the moving air. He instructed the boy as well, saying ‘Let me warn you, Icarus, to take the middle way, in case the moisture weighs down your wings, if you fly too low, or if you go too high, the sun scorches them. Travel between the extremes. And I order you not to aim towards Bootes, the Herdsman, or Helice, the Great Bear, or towards the drawn sword of Orion: take the course I show you!’ At the same time as he laid down the rules of flight, he fitted the newly created wings on the boy’s shoulders. While he worked and issued his warnings the ageing man’s cheeks were wet with tears: the father’s hands trembled. He gave a never to be repeated kiss to his son, and lifting upwards on his wings, flew ahead, anxious for his companion, like a bird, leading her fledglings out of a nest above, into the empty air. He urged the boy to follow, and showed him the dangerous art of flying, moving his own wings, and then looking back at his son. Some angler catching fish with a quivering rod, or a shepherd leaning on his crook, or a ploughman resting on the handles of his plough, saw them, perhaps, and stood there amazed, believing them to be gods able to travel the sky.
And now Samos, sacred to Juno, lay ahead to the left (Delos and Paros were behind them), Lebinthos, and Calymne, rich in honey, to the right, when the boy began to delight in his daring flight, and abandoning his guide, drawn by desire for the heavens, soared higher. His nearness to the devouring sun softened the fragrant wax that held the wings: and the wax melted: he flailed with bare arms, but losing his oar-like wings, could not ride the air. Even as his mouth was crying his father’s name, it vanished into the dark blue sea, the Icarian Sea, called after him. The unhappy father, now no longer a father, shouted ‘Icarus, Icarus where are you? Which way should I be looking, to see you?’ ‘Icarus’ he called again. Then he caught sight of the feathers on the waves, and cursed his inventions. He laid the body to rest, in a tomb, and the island was named Icaria after his buried child.
