NPPF: Preliminary: The Epigraph

[Don Corathers]

jbor:

I don't understand why the obvious
> possibility, that Nabokov created both Shade and Kinbote as separate and
> independent characters, and consciously endowed them with the particular
> artistic, critical, intellectual, emotional etc talents and foibles they
> present with, and that (Nabokov's) Shade wrote the poem and (Nabokov's)
> Kinbote the Foreword and Commentary, has been discarded.

Certainly that's my starting position, one and a half reads through.


How could Shade, or Kinbote, or Kinbote channeling
> Shade's ghost, or Botkin, manage to get the text, as it stands, past the
> publisher? They couldn't. Only Nabokov could.
>

Did we just cross the membrane between the novel and the book here? As you
observed earlier, these internal authorship questions are really plot
issues--an especially sophisticated kind of plot issue, but basically a
matter of storytelling. I don't think anybody's suggesting Nabokov's not
responsible for everything in the book. But in order to read and enjoy the
fiction that the author has presented us with, I'm willing to accept at face
value, for now, Kinbote's account of his negotiations with the publisher,
his review of the proofs, his hiring of a professional proofreader, his
signing an agreement to take sole responsibility for everything in the
commentary. I will leave myself open to other theories that Kinbote is
Botkin, or that Shade wrote the whole thing and invented the deposed king,
or that Shade is Kinbote's, uh, ghostwriter.

But I think the threshhold proposition is that one of the characters in this
novel is responsible for its contents, and got it published. If you don't
suspend disbelief to that point, the whole thing is an empty technical
exercise.

Don Corathers