NPPF: Preliminary: The Epigraph

[Jasper Fidget]

On
> Behalf Of jbor
> 
> 
> The other thing which doesn't quite gel for me is the assumption that
> Nabokov was trying to conceal the fact of his own overall authorship of
> the
> novel, his ultimate "control" over the fiction. Plainly, he wasn't. The
> puzzles of the text, and their ultimate answerability, answerabilities or
> unanswerability, are intentional ones. I think that in this respect
> Nabokov
> himself, and _Pale Fire in particular, probably stand at one of those cusp
> points between Modernism and postmodernism (see eg. McHale 1987, 1992),
> and
> that Nabokov still perceived the author's position -- his own position --
> in
> respect to the text as one of preeminence, even though, admittedly, the
> themes and structural complexities within the text do challenge and
> problematise that whole relationship between "authorship" and "authority".
> I
> don't think Nabokov sees this paradox as an issue. Thus, the question of
> whether Shade or Kinbote or any other character could write "as well as"
> Nabokov seems to me to be irrelevant. It is Nabokov who can write as well
> as
> Nabokov: his characters are the *products* of his writing, not the
> producers. Certainly, however, I can imagine his bemusement at the
> critical
> controversies surrounding the "authorship" of _Pale Fire_, and I can
> imagine
> his tongue firmly planted in his cheek when in interviews and memoirs he
> subsequently referred to Kinbote or Shade as if they were real people.
> 
> best


Any framing of the novel is ultimately VN's, but it's a novel concerned with
characters in the process of not only living the story, but actively writing
it as well.  While the argument can be made, and I think it should be, that
ultimately the clues in the text do point beyond Shade and Kinbote to VN
himself, the novel at least ostensibly presents itself less as the artifact
of a novelist than as the combined artifact of its characters.  Surely then
these creative acts in the story, their resultant text, and the identity of
their creators, are a matter worthy of concern, no?

akaJasperFidget