Subject: Re: ament catkin botkin
From: "D. Barton Johnson" <[email-masked]>
To: "Brian Boyd (FOA ENG)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 10:25:39 -0800

Dear Brian,
    No, I did not get your (earlier) response re the Lock review. Do you
mean  the message headed "ament catkin, botkin." If so, it should be
labelled or subtitled "BB's response to Lock" or else readers may not
realize that it refers to L's review. There is, of course, no problem
with running it.
    Just checking.

S Novym godom! Don

P.S. I just noticed my spell-checker corrects "ament" to "amanita".

"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 habitu?s 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:
>
> <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns =
> "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
>
> . . . 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.