NPPF: Preliminary: The Epigraph

[charles albert]

> 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.


Hi, sport.....

>From Alvin Kernan's - Reading Zemblan: The Audience Disappears in Pale Fire:

" Nabokov has, of course, purposely placed his readers in a most difficult
position, forcing them to face the fact than any reading of his work may be
simply a reflection of the readers own subjective needs from within a prison
house of self as confined as Shade's or Kinbote's......By setting up the
Kinbote misreading of the Shade poem, Nabokov involves us as readers in an
awareness of the full extent of human subjectivity and it's causes, and at
the same time warns us against detective story types of interpretations
which arrive at some absolute truth to the exclusion of all other
possibilities."

Surely no-one would suggest that COL49 offers a "resolution" in any orthodox
sense........Have you found any COL49 criticism which cites PF as a possible
model - I have heard references to Borges' Aleph and a novel often referred
to here - the name of which I have forgotten, but not PF....


love,
cfa