On Jun 9, 2010, at 2:32 PM, G S Lipon wrote:
This reminds me of the ludicrous account he gave Mr. Langton, of the despicable state of a young gentleman of good family. "Sir, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats." And then in a sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favorite cat, and said "But Hodge shan't be shot: no no, Hodge shall not be shot."
JAMES BOSWELL, The Life of Samuel Johnson
The epigram, coming from another literary biography, might seem to have some significance to the relationship between Shade and Kinbote. Instead its relevance is to VN and Shade. The basis of the analogy is that of control of another creature's fate. Mr. Langton holds the fate of the city's cats under his finger, the way VN holds the fate of his characters, in this case Shade. Presumably VN was amused or bothered by criticism of how he treated his fictitious creatures. Johnson's reassurance of the fate of his own cat, Hodge, is then to be applied to Shade, i.e., Shade will not be shot. This should be taken as a clue against a naive reading of the novel in which Shade is indeed shot. Instead Shade loses his daughter; and then his sense of self when he metamorphoses into Kinbote; and then as Kinbote, presumably, does indeed take his own life by gunshot, after the novel is over.
ps. there is no intent to disparage anyone's particular reading in using the term naive. I simply mean a reading that takes Shade, Kinbote, New Wye, Zembla et al. as all, more or less, equally real within the confines of the novel.
Gently the day has passed in a sustained
Low hum of harmony. The brain is drained
And a brown ament, and the noun I meant
To use but did not, dry on the cement.
The underscored, seventeen word, phrase
might well be parsed in the following ways:
a) a brown cylindrical spikelike inflorescence dries on the cement, or
b) a brown mentally deficient person dries on the cement, as well as
c) a noun that Shade meant to use; or,
d) the noun has been written down in ink which is now drying on its paper;
(plausibly paper=cement because it fixes the word and its meaning in a more permanent medium).
It would be interesting to know which plants, trees, or bushes, have catkins or aments that are expiring around mid, or late July.
(Do magnolias have catkins? Mine has just about finished throwing down its shower of execrable, elongated cones, whatever they may be called.) This brown ament reminds me of Frost's sonnet, a kind of lament,
The Oven Bird, where decay or decline are found even during the profligate heat of summer. Shade, viewing the summer crepuscule from behind his window, is withdrawn or withdrawing from the summery world he's spent the day observing.
There may be other, better, reasons why
John Shade is eclipsed on that day, July,
the twenty-first, but what most readily
I see right now is how summer twilight
so boldly limns the ebbing of John Shade,
poor old man, against the busy foil
of sights and sounds and rhythms of broad life:
And thus the brown ament is seen as a robust (dare I use the word) symbol of its setting and of Shade's impending fate.
The adjective brown then becomes imbued with the notion of aging and temporal reversion, and it is this sense, and not strictly its sense as color, that mainly qualifies in the meaning of a brown ament as a brown, mentally deficient person; which would seem to be more of a description of Kinbote or Gradus than of Shade, but at this point the brown ament may well be thought of as alluding to the whole trinity of personalities.
As has been pointed out by others (who was first, I'd like to know, in order to give credit where credit is due), the unspecified noun could well be catkin, a synonym for a cylindrical spikelike inflorescence. Catkin might then be parsed as a cat's kin; and this plausibly suggests Shade, if you accept the previous argument. I.e., Shade is a cat's kin by virtue of his being paired analogically with Hodge.
It's likely that VN wanted the reader to see the wreathe of unlikely yet relevant associations that swirls around the synonymic pair, ament & catkin; madness and Hodge, and this is why he spent two, otherwise not too interesting lines, pointing out these coincidences.
So perhaps what the reader is most importantly to see in the brown catkin is a symbol of decline; and, less potently, a symbol for Shade and his personae, his particular and weird serial inflorescence, one driven by daemonic, chthonic powers.
Shade's wordy seeds are about to be cast
upon the never-resting winds of time,
forever blowing across that twilight scene
of mid-summer in divine New Wye.
–GSL