What Does Charles Kinbote Look Like?

Yesterday I was watching Mad Men, and because there are damn buses driving past my window all night, and because Mad Men is an Important Drama with Frequent Nearly Inaudible Speeches, I could not figure out what was going on on the show, and my mind wandered. And what it wandered to was that I don't know what Charles Kinbote looks like. I thought about it some more: I don't know what Tyrone Slothrop looks like, I don't know what Don Gately looks like, I don't know what Kilgore Trout looks like. And these are people whom I've spent a not insignificant amount of time thinking about, imagining in actual situations and doing actual things. I have thought long and hard about Kinbote puttering up to Shade's house and being told that he's not there by Mrs. Shade; I just kind of imagine the abstract idea of hopefulness, in one old body, puttering up to an abstract idea of disdain. I am having trouble even talking about what it is I can't do, because if you asked me, well, you understand, do you not, that a man is driving over to another man's house and encountering his wife, I would of course say yes. But I keep imagining different Kinbotes -- different old people reconstructing into the deposed old king -- and none of them stick. This is even true of people whom I met first in books whom I later saw in movies; Gilbert Osmond will never ever have quite the same features as John Malkovich, especially not in the way that Osborne Cox will always have exactly the same features as a particular John Malkovich.

When, straining to hear what icy thing Betty Draper was mumbling, I first thought about the fact that I didn't know what Gately or Slothrop looked like -- and moreover, that I had never really thought about the fact that I didn't know what they looked like -- I felt sort of scandalized. It was like realizing that I had never even thought about what Club Member Brian Matthew Blood's middle name is. But now, after thinking about it, I feel less scandalized, and more --not happy, really, but maybe appreciative: I like that I don't know what these people exactly look like, and probably because I can know them better. This is a constant theme among lonely readers, but one of the delights of books, and in particular a delight of books that isn't offered by films or television, is a deep feeling that You Know These People: and who would be easier to feel like you know than a hazy, blurred at the edges version of Charles Kinbote?