NPPF: Who's watching Gradus?

[Don Corathers]

Tim and Jasper were talking about narrative voice and authority this
morning, and it set me thinking about an aspect of Kinbote's narrative point
of view that I don't think we've touched on yet, that has some bearing on
the question of who is responsible for the commentary. From the beginning of
the foreword to the last page of the commentary, Kinbote speaks to us pretty
consistently in the same first-person voice. Whacked, but consistent.

*Except* when he's describing Gradus's progress from Zembla across Europe to
New York and on to New Wye. Those sections are written in a jarringly
omniscient third person, profoundly different from the rest of Kinbote's
text. In them we are given a great deal of detail that could only have come
from somebody who was present. We're told what people were wearing and given
extended quotes of conversations and direct observations about what the
weather was like, what the air smelled like, the "blinding blue of the sea"
at Nice, all this in spite of the fact that Gradus is "exceptionally
unobservant." More than that, we are inside Gradus's consciousness. We know
what he had to eat and how it affected his digestive processes, how he was
feeling, what he was thinking, why he was infuriated by the instruction to
amuse himself in the South of France.

Now, Kinbote tells us he had an interview (or was it two?) with Gradus when
the killer was in custody after the murder, and the implication is that he
captured all of this narrative detail in that meeting. I don't believe it.

But I'm not sure where that leads. Seems to me there are three
possibilities:

1. The writer of the commentary was present. That is, Kinbote was describing
first-person experiences, but shifted the narrative to the third person.
Kinbote = Gradus. Problematical, yes (but what about this puzzle isn't?)
because if we accept Kinbote's calendar, he was with Shade in New Wye when
Gradus was traveling from Zembla.

2. Kinbote (or somebody posing as Kinbote) made the whole thing up. This
seems to be the default explanation for everything that cannot otherwise be
sorted out in this novel. Not as much fun as some of the other
possibilities.

3. The wild card, Gerald Emerald, is somehow in play. He is present in at
least three of Gradus's traveling episodes.

I expect we'll be returning to this question in the coming weeks.

Don Corathers




>  Perhaps
> we are conditioned to suspect the 1st person voice, reduce it immediately
to
> opinion and limited perspective, while the 3rd person voice has that
> compelling pretension to omniscience.  Does this trust in a 3rd person
voice
> imply our susceptibility to control by others?  If so, with a missed
> communication, I think in a 3rd person narrative we are less suspicious of
> the *origin* of the message.  When told by the god-narrator that it
exists,
> then we assume that yes, it must exist.  If Pynchon is concerned with
> methods of control, then why assume in his narrative voice one such
method?
> Or does he work consciously to undermine that voice?
>