The disjointed thoughts, which begin right from the start of the canto, the
looseness of metaphor throughout, the obsession with the act of shaving, and the
litany of hates, some of which seem odd, all point to the notion that Shade
is truly loosing his grip on reality; and perhaps his sense of
identity!
JM: An advert about Verdi's opera
"Nabucco" (lamentation about exile, lost love, lost liberty) bears
an illustrative "Assyrian beard". Nebukhanezar's name in Italian
is suggestive of Nabokov's surname - but this must be a dead end.
We often forget (when we imagine Mason or Irons
playing Humbert Humbert, for example) that Humbert describes his
either unshaven or grown beard ("to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and
my putrefaction..."), plus the bearded woman,
Beardsley, the difficult passage about a Kasbeam barber
("Lolita"), indicate a still not fully explored
reference to shaving. We find "gilette," razors associated
to bristling aesthetic thrills, poets (Shelley, Housman). Kinbote's
"beaver" was shaven off in Zembla and there is a white "whitmaneske" beard
in Bend Sinister (beards come in all shades of hair-color), aso.
PS: The author of the note about a bald-headed Pnin and a
not as bald Nabokov, was R.S.Gwynn ( "V. Botkin"
yields n b o k v (with i & t left over). I'm sure someone has
pointed this out before. Sounds like a conscious red herring to me. The
description of the man in the library jibes with every other description of Pnin
(whose presence is earlier noted in the novel). Photographs of VN from the
late 50s/early 60s show him with thinning, receding hair but not as bald. Plus,
would VN have ever appeared in public (or even in a cameo) wearing a Hawaiian
shirt? I doubt
it.)