NPPF: Preliminary: The Epigraph

[Malignd]

Rob Jackson (I think):

No, that's not what I've said at all. 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. 

I'm not certain it's been discarded or need be.  But
as one reads further into the poem and the glimmers of
Kinbote's madness begin to appear, a reader has no
choice but to consider what's going on.

<<To take any one of the four propositions offered in
the essay Jasper linked just one short (logical) step
further -- 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.>>

The point here is that the publication of the book
would be legally impossible?  Are we so certain of
that?  (Is there a lawyer out there?)  Kinbote writes
in the Foreword:

"Immediately after my dear friend's death I prevailed
on his distraught widow to forelay and defeat the
commercial passions and academic intrigues that were
bound to come swirling around her hujsband's
manuscript ... by signing an agreement to the effect
that he had turned over the manuscript to me; that I
would have it published without delay, with my
commentary, by a firm of my choice; that all profits,
except the publisher's percentage, wouldaccrue to her;
and that on publication day the manuscript would be
handed over to the Library of Congress for permanent
preservation."

Am I wrong in believing that, if there is nothing
illegal contained within, a contract is binding; is,
in a real sense, the law governing what it contains
and entails?  I'm not certain this is as strong a
disqualifier as seems to be believed.

<<I think, from what little supplementary stuff I've
read, that Nabokov would have been enormously amused
by the way some critics approached his text as though
Shade and/or Kinbote were as "real" as the author
himself, in respect of its composition.>>

Nabokov was reported (I think by Dimitri Nabokov) to
have said that the idea that Kinbote created Shade or
that Shade created Kinbote was just slightly less
preposterous than the idea that each had created the
other.  (I would not necessarily put faith in this
comment.)

Rob's making a good point in noting the membrane
between Nabokov's novel and the artififact that it
contains (and that happens, the artifact, to coincide
word for word with the entirety of Nabokov's novel). 
I'm not sure, however, I agree precisely upon which
side of that membrane the various arguments are
properly heard.

Questions about the quality of the writing are the
most tricky.  Rob's argument (comparing the internal
writers to VN) is strong if one accepts his judgement
on the quality of the poem, less so if one doesn't.

Also, separately, Rob's points about Carroway in
Gatsby are fair, but it is specifically the quality of
prose that Rorty's point addresses, Nick's prose
style, not the colorations and characterizations that
accrue to his point of view.


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