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Walnuts: an ingenious literary conceit?
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Jansy's hazelnuts led recently to the interesting comment from Victor Fet
that "walnuts do not have a single kernel."
Walnuts make at least three interesting appearances in Pale Fire:
In the preface the skyscraper's "walnut and glass cell" that Kinbote
mentions seems not unrealistic. But later the walnut re-appears in one of
Eystein's "eye fools." And finally Kinbote entices Shade toward his demise
with the promise of "a knackle of walnuts."
As Victor Fet pointed out, walnuts do not have a single kernel. In a
portrait of a past Zemblan Keeper of the Treasury ("decrepit Count Kernel")
Eystein has painted "twin-lobed, brainlike, halved kernel of a walnut,"
which the strangely perceptive Soviet spies suspect have something to do
with the hiding place of the Zemblan Crown Jewels.
We don't have to guess here - - the nut is "brainlike." It is "twin-lobed"
and doubled. If the reader has begun to suspect (as it seems Jansy has) that
possibly Kinbote and Shade are the same person, could this be a clue to that
interpretation? Look back at the first appearance of the walnut - - that
"walnut and glass cell" on the 50th floor of a skyscraper, could it not also
be the brain and its glass/window/eyes?
The third appearance of walnuts actually confirms this interpretation. What
is a "knackle of walnuts"? There is no such word as knackle, but knack has
two pertinent obsolete meanings: a) a dainty article of food and b) an
ingenious literary form or device; a conceit. (Webster's 3rd)
The walnut, cell and kernel, is an ingenious conceit. When Maud suffers a
stroke, though she still speaks, "from adjacent cells imposters took the
place of words," as she "sought in vain to reason with the monsters in her
brain" (lines 205-208).
Zembla itself (in the comment to line 149) is described as a brain
experiencing a series of strokes. The Bera range divides Zembla into two
parts that are "cut off basally by an impassable canal" until "the vigilant
stutterer had finally exploded in spasmodic speech." The fugitive king then
encounters "a roadblock that at least had the merit of canceling both routes
at one stroke."
Kinbote finds the toy associated with Shade's juvenile fits "by a stroke of
luck" (comment to line 143) and Canto IV finds Shade in his bath counting
"five, six, seven, eight, nine strokes."
An ingenious conceit indeed.
Carolyn
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