NPPF: status of the two author theory

[jbor]

on 19/7/03 7:17 AM, Jasper Fidget wrote:

> An interesting post to the N-List:
> 
> 
> http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0307&L=nabokv-l&P=R36690
> 
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: James Veitch <mailto:james at jveitch.fsbusiness.co.uk>
>> 
>> Dear Mr (soon to be Dr?) Olson,
>> 
>> What a great abstract! This is exactly what I am interested in. Nabokov
>> anticipates his critics (most clearly in 'Pale Fire') and forces terms
>> such as the extradiegetic-heterodiegetic  and the intradiegetic-
>> homodiegetic to become instantly redundant.  Rimmon comments (on Sebastian
>> Knight, where the interpenetration is impossible to unravel) that ‘as if
>> to complicate matters, the different levels are made analogous to each
>> other, sometimes so much that they seem identical and the borders between
>> them are often blurred by the penetration of one level into another. 1
>> 
>> What intrigues me, however, is the critical need (still) to 'unravel' the
>> novel into its parts. This is beautifully impossible in 'Sebastian
>> Knight,' though that does not stop critics trying. I've even noticed this
>> in the excerpts I've read of the 'Pale Fire' reading; a need to discover
>> an empirical solution...what 'actually happens.' But like Humbert Humbert
>> who manufactures dreams for his Freudian doctors, 'pure classics in style
>> (which make them the dream-extortionists, dream and wake up shrieking),'
>> Nabokov anticipates the critical response and makes it impossible.
>> 
>> Here's an example that I think, partly, sums up a form of 'Pale Fire'
>> criticism. In the index of Pale Fire, the notation under ‘Lass1 reads ‘see
>> Mass,1 the note for ‘Mass1 orders the reader to ‘see Male,1 then ‘Male1
>> says ‘see Word Golf1 (the reader starts to get the joke) and ‘Word Golf1
>> leads full circle giving the notation ‘see Lass.1 Thus, through literally
>> searching for an answer and elucidation, the reader is lead in a circle of
>> maddening ‘word golf,1 that parallels the vain critical search for a
>> definite reality in 'Pale Fire.'  It's easy to do though, and it's easy to
>> be found at the end of the novel, still spinning from 'Lass,' to 'mass' to
>> 'male' etc. Yet this form of 'paper chase' criticism is surely misguided;
>> a wonderful, cunning diversion. True engagement with the novel, I think,
>> occurs when one considers the effect of these multiple and overlapped
>> narrative layers; when the reader accepts the plurality of realities and
>> disallows one to take precedence over the other; allowing an examination
>> of the effect this multiplicity has upon the reader, how it possibly
>> comments upon art, artifice, identity and reality.
>> 

The circular references in the glossary are reminiscent of a really bad
dictionary, except they aren't really glossing the words but merely
demonstrating the Word Golf sequence Kinbote mentions in the note to Line
819. The other two examples play out like this I think:

hate  have  lave  love

live  line  lind  lend  lead  dead

The obvious answer to the apparent paradoxes of internal authorship is that
Nabokov meant it to be like this. In other words, it is deliberately
indeterminate, there is no "ultimate" solution. Why he did this is open to
speculation, but it's certainly a technical exercise, or game, on his part,
and confounding readers and critics is another possible motive. It is also
something -- perhaps the main thing -- which a postmodern writer like
Pynchon has taken from this novel.

Thinking of it from another perspective, if he did intend that Kinbote
created Shade, or Shade Kinbote, or Botkin the lot of them, then the
inconsistencies within the text which refute each of these readings are
evidence that he has been unsuccessful in his aim, that he was not in
control of his material -- in other words, that it is a flawed fiction.

But I think Nabokov was very much in control of what he wrote, and that all
the false leads and red herrings, and thus the ultimate unanswerability of
the internal authorship question, are precisely as he intended it to be. The
one level that does remain intact is that between the *real* author,
Nabokov, and his real authorship of the novel, and the various possible
*fictional* authorships which present themselves through his text. This, to
me, *is* the "Grand Unified Theory" of this novel, and not so perplexing and
unthinkable to a "good" reader in 2003 as it might have been back in 1962.

best