Writing on the Wall Read Online Free PDF

the loss of his daughter, echoes Goethe’s “The Erl-King.”
Who rides so late in the night and the wind?
It is the writer’s grief. It is the wild
March wind. It is the father with his child.
    Now the German scholar Herder, in translating the elf-king story from the Danish, mistook the word for elf (elle) for the word for alder. So it is not really the alderking but the elf- or goblin-king, but the word “alder” touched by the enchanted word “elf” becomes enchanted itself and dangerous. Goethe’s erl-king, notes Kinbote, fell in love with the traveler’s little boy. Therefore alderking means an eerie, dangerous invert found in northern forest-countries. Similar sorcerers’ tricks are played with the word “stone.” The king in his red cap escaping through the Zemblan mountains is compared to a Steinmann, which, as Kinbote explains, is a pile of stones erected by alpinists to commemorate an ascent; these stone men, apparently, like snowmen, were finished off with a red cap and scarf. The Steinmann, then, becomes a synonym for one of the king’s disguised followers in red cap and sweater (e.g., Julius Steinmann, Zemblan patriot). But the Steinmann has another meaning, not divulged by Kinbote; it is the homme de Pierre or homme de St. Pierre of Pushkin’s poem about Don Giovanni, in short the stone statue, the Commendatore of the opera. Anyone who sups with the stone man, St. Peter’s deputy, will be carried off to hell. The mountain that the Steinmann -king has to cross is wooded by Man-devil Forest; toward the end of his journey he meets a disguised figure, Baron Mandevil, man of fashion, catamite, and Zemblan patriot. Read man-devil, but read also Sir John Mandeville, medieval impostor and author of a book of voyages who posed as an English knight (perhaps a chess move is indicated?). Finally the stone (glancing by glass houses) is simply the stone thrown into a pool or lake and starting the tremulous magic of widening ripples that distort the clear mirroring of the image—as the word “stone” itself, cast into the pool of this paragraph has sent out wavelets in a widening circle.
    Lakes—the original mirrors of primeval man—play an important part in the story. There are three lakes near the campus, Omega, Ozero, and Zero (Indian names, notes Botkin, garbled by early settlers); the king sees his consort, Disa, Duchess of Payn (sadism; theirs was a “white” marriage) mirrored in an Italian lake. The poet’s daughter has drowned herself in Lake Omega; her name (“...in lone Glenartney’s hazel shade”) is taken from The Lady of the Lake. But a hazel wand is also a divining-rod, used to find water; in her girlhood, the poor child, witch Hazel, was a poltergeist.
    Trees, lakes, butterflies, stones, peacocks—there is also the waxwing, the poet’s alter ego, which appears in the first line of the poem (duplicated in the last, unwritten line). If you look up the waxwing in the OED, you will find that it is “a passerine bird of the genus Ampelis, esp. A. garrulus, the Bohemian waxwing. Detached from the chatterers by Monsieur Vieillot.” The poet, a Bohemian, is detached from the chatterers with whom he is easily confused. The waxwing (belonging to the king’s party) has red-tipped quills like sealing wax. Another kind of waxwing is the Cedar Waxwing. Botkin has fled to Cedarn. The anagram of “Cedarn” is nacred.
    More suggestively (in the popular sense), the anal canal or “back door” or “porte étroite” is linked with a secret passage leading by green-carpeted stairs to a green door (which in turn leads to the greenroom of the Onhava National Theatre), discovered by the king and a boyhood bedfellow. It is through this secret passage (made for Iris Acht, a leading actress) that the king makes his escape from the castle. Elsewhere a “throne,” in the child’s sense of “the toilet,” is identified naughtily with the king. When gluttonous Gradus arrives in Appalachia, he is