NPPF: Preliminary: The Epigraph

[jbor]

At many other moments, however, Kinbote details how he continually and
deliberately hinted to Shade to compose the poem about his own alterego,
Charles the Beloved, and in the final piece of commentary to the missing
Line 1000 he admits his expectation that the poem would be a "kind of
*romaunt* about the King of Zembla", about how disappointed he was to find
it at first merely an "autobiographical, eminently Appalachian, rather
old-fashioned narrative in a neo-Popian prosodic style", and then how, on
rereading the poem he did perceive the "dim distant music, those vestiges of
color in the air" which confirms his original solipsism and generates much
of the substance of his commentary.

I'd be inclined to follow the standard editions (the first edition, the
Vintage, the Penguin Classics) in respect to the placement of the epigraph
-- not that that proves anything, of course, but the variants might be down
to a particular house style. (Note to David Roach: there's a delay of a
couple of days or so in messages getting to the list when they're from email
accounts which aren't subscribed to the pynchon-list. To subscribe, go to
www.waste.org/pynchon-l/)

On the strength of interpretive consistency I'm inclined to stick with
Nabokov as Nabokov, rather than Nabokov as Kinbote, as the intended
originator of the Epigraph. However, trying (and failing!) to nail down even
this simple point reminds me of Oedipa Maas getting all caught up in
footnotes and variant editions in attempting to locate a definitive version
of the Trystero quote in 'The Courier's Tragedy' in _Lot 49_. It might be as
Malignd said, "that VN intended this sort of unknowing", that
indeterminacies such as this have been deliberately inscribed by Nabokov
into his text (cf. Pynchon again), or, indeed, that he was happy enough to
let rather more unintentional ambiguities persist once they had arisen.

best

on 12/7/03 7:39 AM, gumbo at fuse.net wrote:

> Interesting note from David Roach on the epigraph.
> 
> Thanks also to jbor, malign and others who illuminated this topic earlier
> today. One other morsel I happened across at lunch that relates to Kinbote’s
> perception of himself as Shade’s biographer: p 264 in the Commentary, a note
> on a section of Canto IV in which Shade describes his method of shaving in the
> tub:
> 
> Lines 887-888: Since my biographer may be too staid or know too little
> 
> [Of which Kinbote writes] Too staid? Know too little? Had my poor friend
> precognized _who_ that would be, he would have been spared those conjectures.
> As a matter of fact I had the pleasure and honor of witnessing (one March
> morning) the performance he describes in the next lines. [
]
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
> David Roach wrote:
> 
> But > here's the rub: in the first edition of PF [Putnam's, 1962, and in the >
> current "standard," the Vintage International paperback, published in 1989, >
> which was apparently reset from the first edition], the epigraph (the >
> quotation from Boswell) appears *before* the table of contents, whereas in >
> later editions [such as the Berkley Medallion paperback, published in 1963, >
> and the Wideview/Perigee paperback, published in 1980], it appears *after* >
> the table of contents. The raises the question, who chose the epigraph? Is >
> it 
> VN acting as the author of the novel PF, or is it someone within the > story
> world (i.e., Kinbote or Shade)?
> 
> [more]
> 
> 
> Don Corathers
> 
> 
>