Writing on the Wall Read Online Free PDF Page B

suffering from a severe case of diarrhea, induced by a conflict of “French” fries, consumed in a Broadway restaurant, with a genuine French ham sandwich, which he had saved from his Nice-Paris railway trip. The discharge of his bowels is horribly paralleled with the discharge of the automatic pistol he is carrying; he is the modern automatic man. In discharging the chamber of his pistol he is exercising what to him is a “natural” function; earlier the slight sensory pleasure he will derive from the act of murder is compared to the pleasure a man gets from squeezing a blackhead.
    This is no giggling, high-pitched, literary camp. The repetitions, reflections, misprints, and quirks of Nature are the stamp or watermark of a god or supreme intelligence. There is a web of sense in creation, old John Shade decides—not text but texture, the warp and woof of coincidence. He hopes to find “some kind Of correlated pattern in the game, Plexed artistry, and something of the same Pleasure in it as they who played it found.” The world is a sportive work of art, a mosaic, an iridescent tissue. Appearance and “reality” are interchangeable; all appearance, however deceptive, is real. Indeed it is just this faculty of deceptiveness (natural mimicry, trompe l’oeil, imposture), this power of imitation, that provides the key to Nature’s cipher. Nature has “the artistic temperament”; the galaxies, if scanned, will be an iambic line.
    Kinbote and Shade (and the author) agree in a detestation of symbols, except those of typography and, no doubt, natural science (“H 2 0 is a symbol for water”). They are believers in signs, pointers, blazes, notches, all of which point into a forest of associations, a forest in which other woodmen have left half-obliterated traces. All genuine works contain precognitions of other works or reminiscences of them (and in curved time the two are the same), just as the flying lizard already possessed a parachute, a fold of skin enabling it to glide through the air.
    Shade, as an American, is an agnostic, and Kinbote, a European, is a vague sort of Christian who speaks of accepting “God’s presence—a faint phosphorescence at first, a pale light in the dimness of bodily life, and a dazzling radiance after it.” Or, more concessive, “Somehow Mind is involved as a main factor in the making of the universe.” This Mind of Kinbote’s seems to express itself most lucidly in dualities, pairs, twins, puns, couplets, like the plots of Shakespeare’s early comedies. But this is only to be expected if one recalls that to make a cutout heart or lacy design for Valentine’s Day all a child needs is a scissors and a folded piece of paper—the fold makes the pattern, which, unfolded, appears as a miracle. It is the quaint principle of the butterfly. Similarly, Renaissance artificers used to make wondrous “natural” patterns by bisecting a veined stone, an agate or a carnelian, as you would bisect an orange. Another kind of magic is the child’s trick of putting a piece of paper on the cover of a schoolbook and shading it with a pencil; wonderfully, the stamped title, Caesar’s Gallic Wars, emerges, as though embossed, in white letters. This, upside down, is the principle of the pheasant’s hieroglyph in the snow or the ripple marks on the sand, to which we cry “How beautiful!” There is no doubt that duplication, stamping, printing (children’s transfers), is one of the chief forms of magic, a magic we also see in Jack Frost’s writing on the window, in jet trails in the sky—an intelligent spirit seems to have signed them. But it is not only in symmetry and reproduction that the magic signature of Mind is discerned, but in the very imperfections of Nature’s work, which appear as guarantees of authentic, hand-knit manufacture. That is, in those blemishes and freckles and streakings and moles already mentioned that are the sports of creation, and what is a vice but a mole?
    Nabokov’s