Subject
Boyd on Pale FIRE: ament catkin botkin]
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Date
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"Brian Boyd (FOA ENG)" wrote:
from Brian Boyd
Kinbote is our only source for much of Pale Fire: not only for the
Zembla story, but for the relationship between himself and Shade, and
his insistence that Shade
write about Zembla. Although Kinbote records Shade▓s talking to him on
numerous occasions, Shade himself of course never writes about Kinbote.
There is
nothing independent of Kinbote▓s own testimony to indicate the nature
of Shade▓s relationship with Kinbote, or even that Shade thought of him
or called him
⌠Kinbote.■
If, as some parts of Pale Fire seem to suggest, Charles Kinbote (or
Charles II or Charles Xavier Vseslav) of Zembla was actually V. Botkin
of Russia (see my
Nabokov▓s Pale Fire, pp. 90-93, for a summary of the evidence), how
did Shade address Kinbote? Are Kinbote▓s reports of Shade calling him
⌠Charles,■ and
referring to him as ⌠Professor Kinbote■ (note to line 894), mere
fabrication, along with other elements in this note, where the habituйs
of the Faculty Club seem not
only to accept the existence of Zembla, but the name Kinbote, and the
resemblance between Kinbote and the recently deposed Charles II of
Zembla? We have no
other evidence, and the question of the identity this exile, Kinbote
or Botkin, really has in New Wye, remains as mysterious and irresolvable
as the true relationship
of Antiterra and Terra on Ada (does another late passage, in Pt. 5 Ch.
5, undermine the apparent distinction between the two planets?).
But perhaps there is one passage in Shade▓s ⌠Pale Fire■ that does
refer, albeit obliquely, to Kinbote, or more likely, to Botkin.
Throughout Canto Four, Shade
muses on the process of writing and the nature of inspiration. He
dwells particularly on the ideas that come to him at odd moments, as in
the morning, his ⌠best
time■ for composition, and especially as he shaves:
. . . Better than any soap
Is the sensation for which poets hope
When inspiration and its icy blaze,
The sudden image, the immediate phrase
Over the skin a triple ripple send
920Making the little hairs all stand on end. . . .
A few lines later, he describes his imagination roaming everywhere,
outside the house, to other lands, as he continues to shave:
And while the safety blade with scrape and screak
Travels across the country of my cheek,
Cars on the highway pass, and up the steep
Incline big trucks around my jawbone creep,
And now a silent liner docks, and now
Sunglassers tour Beirut, and now I plough
Old Zembla▓s fields where my gray stubble grows. . . .
This, of course, is not Kinbote▓s Zembla, but the Zembla so often
invoked in eighteenth-century literature, especially by Pope.
Shade then affirms that Sybil is somehow with him in everything he
writes:
And all the time, and all the time, my love,
950You too are there, beneath the word, above
The syllable, to underscore and stress
The vital rhythm.
As he begins to draw this verse autobiography to a close, he casts his
eye back over his past volumes of poetry, beginning with Dim Gulf, a
title lifted from Poe, in
a manner of naming titles he no longer cares for:
now I term
960Everything ⌠Poems,■ and no longer squirm.
(But this transparent thingum does require
Some moondrop title. Help me, Will! Pale Fire.)
He then draws still nearer to the end of the poem as he describes the
scene about him:
Gently the day has passed in a sustained
Low hum of harmony. The brain is drained
And a brown ament, and the noun I meant
To use but did not, dry on the cement.
Maybe my sensual love for the consonne
D▓appui, Echo▓s fey child, is based upon
A feeling of fantastically planned,
970Richly rhymed life.
As Charles Lock has recently reminded us, ⌠ament and the noun I
meant / To use but did not■ of course requires us to identify ⌠the noun
I meant to use■ as
⌠catkin.■ Why does Shade evoke a word he does not use?
Given the context, that he has been writing about the
inspiration for his verse, that he has shown his imagination roaming,
with the help of Pope and others,
to Zembla, that he has invoked his wife▓s role in his rhythms, and
that he has called on Shakespeare to supply the title for the poem he is
now writing, might he not
very discreetly be contrasting these sources of inspiration with the
Botkin who has been insistently but hopelessly trying to inspire him?
Shade is too discreet to
bring into his poem the neighbor he knows is insane, and too
compassionate to declare his rejection of the inspiration ⌠Kinbote■
seeks to supply. Without naming
Botkin directly, he evokes him obliquely, through the ⌠catkin■ he
summons but rejects, a catkin lying ⌠dry on the cement■≈seeds, in other
words, that have fallen
on stony ground≈and even hints at his neighbor▓s madness, through the
other sense of ⌠ament■ (imbecile, from the Latin for ⌠mad,■ non-mental),
which cannot
help being also implied when the botanical ⌠ament■ immediately follows
the phrase ⌠The brain is drained.■
Shade has all but finished his poem, and although he
acknowledges other inspirations, he firmly but painlessly declares he
has had to resist Botkin▓s insane
implorations to write an epic about Charles II of Zembla. He draws
attention, after the consonne d▓appui in ⌠meant/cement,■ to this
prosodic device, but he has
given the rhyme syllables still another appui, another support, in the
internal rhyme, also with consonne d▓appui, of ⌠ament,■ as if to stress
through the ⌠brown
ament, and the noun I meant / To use but did not, dry on the cement,■
the insistent ⌠me . . . me . . . me■ running through Botkin▓s story.