NPPF: Preliminary: The Epigraph

[Jasper Fidget]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
> Behalf Of Don Corathers
> Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2003 10:30 PM
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: NPPF: Preliminary: The Epigraph
> 
> 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
> 

Another way to stage it is in terms of order of creation.  Are both Shade
and Kinbote on the same level of creation -- ie are they both VN's fictions
-- or did one create the other? 

If so, then who created whom?  We've mentioned the argument that wants to
say Botkin/Kinbote created Shade (VN -> B -> K -> S) mainly because
Kinbote's prose is more vigorous and eloquent than Shade's poetry.  The
other primary order is VN -> S -> B -> K -> C because rational people can
create irrational people, but not the other way around.  Also, there's no
obvious reason for K to create S, while there is a reason for S -> K.  From
Shade's direction, he's trying to come to terms with Hazel's death, and
creates the Commentary and Kinbote as a key to a pattern that points toward
immortality (in one variation anyway).

If the characters are assumed to be on the same level -- as Rob says --
there are two different characters created by VN: VN -> S && VN -> K.  But
it gets tricky with the addition of Botkin, because the pattern of an order
of creation is developed: VN -> B -> K -> Charles the Beloved.  This
indicates defensible levels of reality in PF, multiple levels of creation,
and begs to be extended to Shade.  Of course that might be the very reason
so many have done so.

akaJasper