NPPF: Preliminary: The Epigraph

[MalignD at aol.com]

<<I don't know that this is a particularly convincing argument. I'm sure that 
Alexander Pope was proud of his 'The Rape of the Lock' as well, and that he 
read it aloud on occasion; and it's worth recalling the prominence of Pope 
throughout all facets of the text of _Pale Fire_. A satiric poem such as Pope's 
can be, and certainly is regarded as, a "great" one, and it's not at all 
inconsistent or implausible to imagine that Nabokov put much creative effort into the 
composition of the poem by his "invented" poet, and that he was pleased with 
the results, but that he still intended it to be a satire.>>

Pope has always seemed the touchstone here and Rape of the Lock is a good   
guess as to Nabokov's intended tone.

<<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'm not sure I'm with you.   this seems at odds with:

<<... 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: >>

Here I'm not so sure.   This point has been raised (not originally by me) in 
the context of suspended disbelief.   In brief, one reads first-person novels 
(the example given, The Great Gatsby) and readily suspends disbelief; i.e., 
the disbelief that Nick Carroway could write as well as Fitzgerald.   But in 
Pale Fire, the question of the quality of the poem and of the writers of the Poem 
and the Commentary (Kinbote and Shade), are pertinent to the novel itself.   
Boyd, for example, believes the poem first-rate and much of his analysis of 
the novel, indeed the entirety, I would say, of his first, now rejected, 
explanation of Shade as creator of Kinbote and author of the entirety of Pale Fire 
(poem and commentary) would have been impossible but for the idea that Shade 
could have created Kinbote, but the opposite would be quite impossible.   
However, Richard Rorty argued that the poem is second-rate and that Kinbote, despite 
his madness, writes like Nabokov and thus Kinbote could have created Shade and 
not the opposite.

We can go into this--the question of authorship within the novel; it's 
endlessy interesting--further, but the idea that Nabokov was indifferent to this and 
simply wrote as himself in the Commentary is not an argument I'm ready to 
accept.
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