NPPF Preliminary: The Epigraph

[Jasper Fidget]

On Behalf Of jbor:
> Further, I don't think the picture you present below quite
> matches with what we come to know about Kinbote or his state of mind as he
> takes flight, Shade's poem in hand, and composes his Foreword and
> Commentary
> to it. And the specific quote he chooses, if indeed we assume Kinbote did
> choose it, isn't particularly flattering to either Johnson or Boswell (nor
> thus to himself or Shade), nor does it correlate much to the whole debacle
> as he perceives or imagines it. For one thing, Kinbote believes himself to
> be of equal or greater stature than Shade in the general scheme of things,
> and would cast Shade as his own Boswell (or panegyrist), if but he could,
> rather than vice versa. In fact, he overtly eschews the role of Shade's
> biographer (eg. see "Commentary: Line 71").
> 
> All that said, it's a possibility of course, and worth considering. I just
> think that it allows Kinbote greater self-awareness and a healthier sense
> of
> humour than the rest of the novel would actually warrant.
> 
> NB also Kinbote's remarks about Judge Goldsworth's cat (see "Commentary:
> Lines 47-48"). These don't relate to the Epigraph, nor do they betray a
> consciousness of it, at all. The shooting of Shade, like Judge
> Goldsworth's
> cat, resonates only very superficially with the novel's Epigraph imo.
> 
> best


Casting Shade as Kinbote's Boswell (or panegyrist): this is an interesting
dimension to Kinbote, the mirror of the commentator dutifully gathering and
reporting information on his subject; Kinbote wants to gather and report his
own information as well, and hang it in Shade's mirror.  He sees his role as
collaborative rather than merely responsive.  This all goes to the idea of
synthesis: of poem and commentary into an atomic text.  But it also serves a
larger process in PF, the act of creating connections and meaning from the
discovered world.  As Shade creates meaning through the writing of the poem
-- a process that structures the entire commentary (to the extent that
Kinbote allows it) -- by taking parts of his world and his memory and
putting them into verse, so too Kinbote creates meaning for himself by
supplying Shade and the hypothetical reader with his own world and memories.
Zembla too is created as the novel moves along, again for both Shade and
reader.  John Shade is for Kinbote one more discovered aspect of the world
that can be used in order to create meaning.

We see Kinbote attempt to perform this magic trick many times.  Taking parts
of the poem and creating his own memories.  Taking Shade as a neighbor and
creating his own place in that other's life.  Taking the poem itself and
making himself its commentator.  It could be that everything in Kinbote's
possession becomes in some manner a part of the text, and that would include
the "footnote from Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson" (154).  If we want to
contend that Kinbote invents the events of the story, this epigraph might
supply not its reflection, but the germ of its origination: "the despicable
state of a young gentleman of good family" who runs about town shooting, a
member of that town who will specifically not be shot, the interrelationship
of subject and commentator, even the subtle but deliberate interweaving of
cat references throughout the text.

As sort of an aside -- and due only to the pressure to produce (or at least
forecast) a Pynchon correlation now as opposed to when it's the right time
-- a possible reason or explanation for Kinbote's frenetic creation of
meaning, patterns, and correlations, is paranoia; one might contend that the
creation of Zembla works in the *reverse* of how it might initially seem to
a reader: that Zembla is made by Kinbote in order to fill in the gaps
created by his own paranoia, a system of meaning applied to his world and
himself in order to account for and somehow understand the "reality" he
perceives himself immersed in, and in order to make arbitrary connections
between himself and both the world and its history.  We will see many
examples of both Kinbote's paranoia and of his (or the narrator's I should
say) creation of patterns that satisfy it.

akaJasperFidget