NPPF: Epigraph (not the pissing contest)

[MalignD at aol.com]

In a message dated 7/11/03 5:41:09 PM, gumbo at fuse.net writes:


> Clearly suggesting that Kinbote did consider himself a Boswell to Shade’s 
> Johnson. It seems consistent with Kinbote’s delusion that he believed he was 
> serving his favorite poet even as he tried to hijack Shade's last poem, both 
> before and after his death.
> 
> Anyhow, I’m going to leave my nomination of Kinbote as the source of the 
> epigraph on the table for now. 
> 
It's possible, of course (even likely), that VN intended this sort of 
unknowing.   There was some discussion earlier about involution and one shouldn't 
dismiss VN's allowing the involutions to open out of the novel into uncertainty 
(or real life).   Part of the trap of Pale Fire is believing that all Nabokov's 
clues lead to a resolution.  Pale Fire reveals its secrets in time.   What 
seems at first straightforward, a parody of commentary run amok, opens into the 
strange correlations between the poem and the commentary and from there 
numerous floors drop out from beneath a reader.   The confounding thing about Pale 
Fire is that one's questions may not be resolved, but resolution seems always 
over the next hill.

It is possible that Pynchon understood and took confidence from this 
opening-out in PF in writing GR, wherein the set piece mystery that opens the novel -- 
Slothrop's odd attraction to the rockets -- is left unanswered.   Total 
conjecture becuase of TP's irritating muteness and GR's being a very very different 
novel, but PF is anyway, a chronological precedent.

 
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