Self-Abuse and Epiphany

This time, unlike with Proust, I understood exactly what was going on. Here are a few lines from Pale Fire, a poem in heroic couplets, composed by the American poet John F. Shade, or is it the Zemblan literary critic Charles Kinbote? Or is it the ever elusive, American scholar of Russian descent, V. Botkin? Or perhaps it is just the Master himself playing games with his readers as usual. Well, the authorship question is still under serious critical investigation, but I will save that for later posts.

The following extract is from the first canto of the poem.

[...].One day,
When I'd just turned eleven, as I lay
Prone on the floor and watched a clockwork toy-
A tin wheelbarrow pushed by a tin boy-
Bypass chair legs and stray beneath the bed,
There was a sudden sunburst in my head.

And then black night. That blackness was sublime.
I felt distributed through space and time:
One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand
Under the pebbles of a panting strand,
One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,
In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.
There were dull throbs in my Triassic;green
Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene,
An icy shiver down my Age of Stone,
And all tomorrows in my funnybone.

During one winter every afternoon
I'd sink into that momentary swoon.
And then it ceased. Its memory grew dim.
My health improved. I even learned to swim.
But like some little lad forced by a wench
With his pure tongue her abject thirst to quench,
I was corrupted, terrified, allured,
And though old doctor Colt pronounced me cured
Of what, he said, were mainly growing pains,
The wonder lingers and the shame remains.

This extract is a great example of how even a parodist, and Nabokov was a parodist par excellence (just as Joyce was, and to think of it, he was a master of self-abuse-as-epiphany kind of writing too, but I don't have my copy of Ulysses with me right now), can reach epiphanic heights of beauty and transcendence. In fact Nabokov himself was quite interested in the subject of mimicry, both in nature and in art. Hmm, that's an interesting subject for another post.