In a message dated 22/12/2005 23:00:52
GMT Standard Time, chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu writes:
"Bright
wings beat out a final faint refrain."
-- Susan Elizabeth Sweeney
The Christmas break seems to have interrupted the flow of inspiration.
I thought the above entry was far and away the most fitting. But, as I
said at the time, should there not be a consonne d'appui? Also, might
there not be some elliptical reference to the resonance between the
gardener-and-wheelbarrow and the clockwork toy, even though Shade
apparently has no idea of his imminent death?
DN kindly told us that his father drew his attention to the
"round-the-corner" line 1000, but did not answer my question whether
his father said that line 1000 = line 1. In the absence of any further
"extra-textual" information, are we not justified in thinking the
following?
(a) Kinbote's certainty that line 1000 = line 1 is a characteristic
failure of a certain sort of imagination on his part (although he has
plenty of imagination of a different kind), and there is no a priori
reason to accept his assertion.
(b) Admittedly, if line 1000 = line 1, then there is a consonne
d'appui; but the line "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain" is odd by
itself, and it would also be odd if the poem just started again
cyclically, like "Finnegans Wake". Why should it? Whatever strange
theory of time is suggested by "Pale Fire", surely it is not merely a
cyclical one? I suppose one could argue that line 1000 = line 1 plus
the whole poem again, in the sense that the meaning of the end is not
just "In my beginning" as in Eliot, but in the whole poem, the whole of
Shade's meditation up to line 999, which he re-meditates as he comes to
its ending.
(c) If Shade has finished his poem except for "a few trifles to
settle", as Kinbote tells us he told him (and why should we disbelieve
him?), surely the crucial last line can not be one of these mere
"trifles"? Shade emphasizes his two methods of composing, A and B.
Surely his cramp and his satisfaction as he sits in the porch (where he
needs Kinbote to help him up) are the result of his meditating,
successfully composing his last line, by his method A, "the kind /
Which goes on solely in the poet's mind." ("Well," I said, "Has the
muse been kind to you?" "Very kind...Exceptionally kind and gentle.")
And surely such a last line ought to satisfy Shade's "sensual love for
the consonne / D'appui"?
So, once again, being no poet myself, I implore the sensitive members
of this List to continue trying to provide possible poetical solutions
to line 1000. We may not be able to discover the precise transcendental
Line composed by Shade, and perhaps even VN did not know what it was;
but are we not entitled to try? As he wrote in "Lectures on Russian
Literature" (1981: p. 12): "Readers are born free, and ought to remain
free..."