NPPF: Preliminary: The Epigraph

[jbor]

on 12/7/03 11:22 AM, Don Corathers wrote:

> All part of Kinbote's delusion. I don't think he should be held responsible
> for inconsistency.

Indeed. Kinbote clings with absurd persistence to absolutely any pretext,
however slender, from Shade's poem to launch into a further recount of the
life and times of Charles the Beloved (which, it is implied, is pretty much
what he did in his walks and talks with Shade as well), to tie in the
assassin's approach with the timetable of the poem's composition, and to
confirm his preconceived certainty that Shade would write the poem as a
tribute to the deposed Charles and Zembla. Shade's mention of a hypothetical
future "biographer" (line 887) is one such pretext which affords Kinbote an
opportunity to try and convince the reader (and reassure himself?) of his
importance in Shade's life as the poet was composing his epic. However, in
the greater scheme of things, the content of the Commentary isn't his
biography of Shade à la Boswell and Johnson at all, and nor does it really
support the idea that Kinbote perceived himself as standing in that
relationship to the poet. The note reads more like Kinbote clutching at yet
another straw.

All that said, this section of Shade's poem, juxtaposing his ablutions with
his poetic pretensions and methods, is a prime example of the poet's
self-indulgent banality, and thus of Nabokov's satiric intent, imo. (I think
it's a stretch to nominate Shade as a "major poet", both on the strength of
the poetry itself and in terms of the details of his career and work's
reception which are sprinkled throughout the text, even though that might be
Kinbote's evaluation of him. In fact, *because* that's Kinbote's opinion is
cause enough for doubt.)

And I must admit I have real difficulty with the suggestion that the
Epigraph is Shade's doing, which, I guess, defers to the oft-mentioned
"Shadean reading" of the novel. I can't see that Shade is anything but dead
(i.e. a "shade") at the time when the surrounding portions of the text were
composed.

best


> If he's crazy enough to believe that a major poet is
> going to write The Zemblaiad, why is it a stretch to accept that he believes
> he's serving Shade's legacy? One of the weird sympathies I have for Kinbote
> is that he seems so desperately sincere, even (or especially) when he's at
> his most delusional.
> 
> Don Corathers
> 
> 
> jbor wrote:
> 
>> 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.