NPPF: Preliminary: The Epigraph

[jbor]

>> <<Sure (except, to make this point, you, or Rorty,
>> *are* mulling over and worrying about it). The fact
>> that he's a bond trader doesn't automatically preclude
>> him from having a way with descriptive adjectives,
>> adverbs and imagery, of course.

on 15/7/03 10:39 PM, Malignd at malignd at yahoo.com wrote:
 
> Well, yes, it's possible, of course, that there are
> bond traders who write like Fitzgerald, but if a
> reader or if Fitzgerald brings that into the novel, it
> becomes the single most interesting thing about the
> novel.  Who's this bland chap nextdoor who writes so
> well?  Why's he mucking about trading bonds?  And yes,
> Rorty and I are mulling it, but so what?  The point is
> still the same:  Fitzgerald is not intending that
> Carraway be framed by the reader as someone who writes
> like a poet, who is wasting his life on Wall Street.

Sure, this isn't ever an element of the plot. But I also think there is a
distance between Nick and Fitzgerald, and that part of this is effected in
the way that Nick's idealism and a certain jejuneness spills over into his
prose style. I'd have to go back and reread it, but Nick's youth and
gaucheness does come across through his imaginative retelling of the events.

>> Is Kinbote totally "mad", or just occasionally
>> deluded? (Eg. How would he have kept his job at
>> Wordsmith if altogether insane?) This aside, many
>> great artists and writers were cot-cases. And, does he
>> really write exactly "like Nabokov"? There are quite a
>> few assumptions made in this and I'm still not sure
>> that I see it as a valid argument.
> 
> Whether or not he's "mad" is not crucial to my point;
> let's say he isn't.  There's still the fact that he
> writes very well and, yes, I'd say "like Nabokov" and
> that fact seems relevant and inescapable in
> considering the question of internal authorship, even
> if one's conclusion is to discard the idea that one
> wrote the other.

But there are errors and incongruities in Kinbote's writing, such as the
"your favorite" in the second paragraph of the Foreword, which is
grammatically and cohesively inconsistent with the rest of that paragraph.
Nabokov has had Kinbote write deliberately in this manner, and it's not the
way Nabokov would write a Foreword to a critical edition of, say _Eugene
Onegin_. Sure, there are flashes of inspired writing, but Kinbote is also
pathologically verbose and he is unable to control the tone of his writing,
and much of what he does write, and the way he it is written, is
inappropriate to the context in which he is writing, and these are stylistic
flaws which Nabokov has consciously endowed him with as an aspect of the
characterisation.

It's worth following the hypothesis through.

best