NPPF: Preliminary: The Epigraph

[Don Corathers]

akaJasper:

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?
>

Sure. And the question becomes more interesting because Shade's text is
mediated through Kinbote. (If you accept that Shade wrote the poem and
Kinbote edited it. I'm sure we'll be talking about other readings later, but
for now let's just assume for the sake of discussion that Kinbote exists.)

Kinbote, who almost certainly would not have had any involvement in
preparing the poem for publication under different circumstances,
essentially steals the manuscript, imposes a contract of dubious equity on
the bereaved widow, and holes up in a backwoods hideout to edit it. He is
not just an unreliable narrator, he is deranged, and he may be an unreliable
or even malicious editor. He does, after all, confess to fabricating two
lines from what he claims is Shade's draft, assuring us "it is the _only_
time in the course of the writing of these difficult comments, that I have
tarried, in my distress and disappointment, on the brink of falsification."
(p 228) Well, maybe.

So yeah, the internal authorship questions are crucial. And fascinating.

Don Corathers