Footsteps

I loved Nabokov’s advice to a “budding literary critic”: “Learn to distinguish banality. Remember that mediocrity thrives  on ‘ideas’…Ask yourself if the symbol you have detected is not your own footprint” (Dembo 23). This advice was reminiscent of one of our earlier discussions—as the King escapes exile, he leaves a shoeprint behind to suggest the shape of an ampersand, lemniscate, or mobius strip. It also seemed appropriate advice for our class’s process for discovering meaning in the novel. True to Nabokov’s lepidopterist nature, his advice for understanding literature is to observe the most banal and obvious details; to discover through meticulous and impartial observation rather than noticing the symbols of your own imposing footprints as we walk through art’s landscape.

I was in time to overhear your brief fame

And have a cup of tea with you: my name

Was mentioned twice, as usual just behind

(one oozy footstep) Frost. (ln 426)

This passage could be seen as John Shade acting as a shadow of Frost as well as commentary on the “thieving” quality of art; always footsteps behind, Shade can only “steal” from Frost and the other poets that came before him (just as they “stole” elements from nature through mimicry). Kinbote adds to this passage a discussion of “one of the greatest short poems in the English language” that Frost ends with “two closing lines identical in every syllable, but one personal and physical, and the other metaphysical and universal…With all his excellent gifts, John Shade could never make his snowflakes settle that way” (Nabokov 204). The manner in which Kinbote describes the two closing lines of Frost’s poem seems to reflect the relationship between himself and John Shade—mirror images of the other, Kinbote can be understood by observing what Shade is not. If Shade is matter, Kinbote is antimatter. They are irrevocably linked by this mirrored relationship. Perhaps Kinbote with his excess of divine inspiration represents the “metaphysical and universal”. But it’s also quite possible that I’m caught up in my own ideas—maybe I’m only observing the interesting pattern my footsteps make as I trample over the details in order to pursue a imagined fleeting “meaning” in the distance.