who says
that the gardener could not have held a spade or a wheelbarrow or nothing at all
at different times? ...Really now.
[...] the omission of the last line by Shade (and the
"last" line is probably the first) is part of the poem's clearly symmetrical
structure. Leaving off this line this would make line 500 the central line
of 999 (only in a poem with an odd number of lines can there be a central
line). This line the marks Hazel's death, and Hazel's death is clearly the
"center" of the poem.
Anthony Stadlen: This is a
non-sequitur. It answers the questions "Why would there have been a line 1000?"
and "Why would line 1000 have been the last line?" It does not answer my
question: Why, why, why "presumably a repetition of the first line at the
end"? ,,,the poem is not obviously circular or cyclical like Finnegans
Wake. As I said: We have only Kinbote's word for it.
RSGwynn: I didn't phrase that very well, did
I? I think that JS fully intended to end at 999. It's for the reader
to complete the couplet, if he or she is so inclined; it would have been easy
enough for JS to write the line if he'd wanted to. Kinbote's supposition
is as good as anyone's, as the choice of rhyme does send us back to the
beginning... Thus, let the poem end without conclusion or say, essentially,
"back to square one."
JM: Shade seems to have enough imagination to fill his
description with recently or long past events, I agree. Therefore, there
is equally no proof that he is going insane when there is an apparent
slippage in his metaphors (docking ship, Zembla's cheek-field being
harvested...) In Nabokov's own paper-box with rejected cards he annotated in one
the information that Marat collected butterflies (and, I remind you, Marat is
also linked to assassination, razor-sharp guillotine and, most of all, a
"scientific" theory about the ethereal phlogiston).
But I disagree about his "...immense personal unhappiness
leading to a transcendent joy..." I cannot feel any real grief in him
after mentally-unbalanced, disagreable Hazel committed suicide: he
employs the bathos to play with it contrapuctually, to exercise his poetic
skills or something in that line. His failings as a caring father, though, as I
see it, have no relation with the hypothesis of his morphing into
mysoginous Kinbote, nor the doom-butterfly representing her equally loving
filial attempts to warn him off his assassination. PF's characters are
rather selfish and narrow-minded.
Some people see a butterfly-shape in the arrangement of the cantos, and
expect symmetry. The shape is of a pair of wings, there's no hairy and
sensitive body in between them. I agree with Gwynn that we have
only Kinbote's words( including the poem's division into cantos and
its verses and rejected variants) and that the poem ends without
conclusion, which is up to the readers to interpret in one way or
another.