Discovery: There are a ton of glass and mirror references in this
book---
“the name Zembla is a corruption
not of the Russian zemlya, but of Semblerland, a land of reflections, of
“resemblers. . .”(p265)
“The newspaper reader’s face had
been atrociously injured in the recently mentioned explosion (Glass Explosion),
and all the art of plastic surgery had only resulted in a hideous tessellated
texture with parts of pattern and parts of outline seeming to change, to fuse
or to separate, like fluctuating cheeks and chins in a distortive mirror.
. . a mosaic-faced man” (p 146).
“Glassman hospital” (p 253).
“Old Dr. Sutton’s last two
windowpanes” (ln 986).
“The music stopped as Gradus,
confused by the whimsical shape of the house, hesitated before a glassed-in
porch” (p 199).
Botkin. . .Kinbote
---which takes me back to discussions we had on Don Quixote
and Alice in Wonderland and Dorothy in Oz and actually. . .Hayao Miyazaki,
because I am researching his movies for another class. All of these characters or books or films
contain unreal landscapes, which have the potential to reveal more about the
“real” world than seen at first glance. In an article on Cervantes, Peter Dunn says
that while “we may be indifferent to the reality that surrounds us, we will
respond actively to that same reality if it is reflected in a mirror. . . The
experience of heightened awareness, I presume, is a consequence of two facts:
first the fact that the looking-glass image is reversed; and second, the fact
that this reversed image is concentrated within a frame” (Dunn 7). Two realities (or more) live parallel in Nabokov’s
book, all separated by glass. Glass and
shadows. I started to dog-ear each page
that had the words, “shad(e)ow” or “glass,” in them, and then stopped before
the whole book started to look like an origami explosion. I’m not exactly sure about the meaning of
all this, but I speculate that Shade and Kinbote are two people on either side
of the poem, “Pale Fire,” which is acting as a mirror, because as “tragic
poetry” it “presents to us the condition of man as though she were a brightly
shining mirror” (Dunn 6).
I think Kinbote, as an exile from an unreal world, chooses
to see it (Zembla) in the poem, because it contains more potential than the "real." But his land of “resemblers” feels kind of
shattered. There’s that glass explosion,
Gradus- failed glass guy, mosaic face (who was actually pretending to be a
mosaic face) etc. It’s all taken over by
“Shadows.” Shade, maybe.
Shade is the “shadow of the waxwing slain,/by the false
azure in the windowpane;” Also
glass.
I need to think more, but something really quick I found in
that Dunn article---- Mirrors “as a phenomenon, it falls within the science
of optics, and it can serve only as a problem in the phenomenology of
perception. . .Don Quixote believes that he is remaking our real world in the
image of a superior world of chivalric romance.
In the view of the “real world” characters, he is a looking-glass person
at large in their real world; whereas he believes that he is the only real
person in a looking-glass world” (12).
Dunn, Peter. “Don Quijote Through the Looking Glass.”
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