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PF narrator? BOYD (fwd)
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To reiterate a point/question I raised in an earlier posting, but in
somewhat different terms, WHY must the operative question be "did
Kinbote create Shade or Shade create Kinbote"? Nabokov rejected
simplistic binary thinking, liked to set up puzzles to trap reading
into trying to "solve" them (often puzzles of worth precisely because
of their resistance to solution). More specifically, in terms of
the narrative tradition, a reader does not usually feel the need
, with a work having multiple narrators, to dissolve all narrators
into one single narrator. And the device of the real, flesh-and-blood
author creating one or more fictive authors within a novel is not
unique. So why must there be only one fictive author or one "real"
narrator/author within the fictive world of PF? We don't dissolve
the various narrators (who are, in complex ways, authors as well)
of, say, Durrell's THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET into one who is "more
real" (within the fictional "possible world" or, simply, the world
of the fiction) than the others. Clearly, NABOKOV is THE author
of PF--the one genius who created 3 main characters, two of whom
are authors (Shade and Kinbote) within the fictional world,
one of whom is also the "narrator"--dramatic speaker--of the
poem "Pale Fire", the other of whom is the first-person narrator
of the Foreword, the Commentary, and the Index. Citing much
of the same etymological evidence in my 1982 article on PF (written
a couple of years before publication, as usual) that has been
reiterated here, and examining some of the same and some additional
textual evidence of pattern, allusion, plot, I argued then and
would argue now that the debate that's been going on in NABOKV-L is just
the sort of thing that Kinbotian academics may not only be inclined
to engage in but that Nabokov may have--in part and in addition to
many other complex things--wanted to both encourage and mock in
PF.* Characters in novels don't usually invent the other characters,
and I don't think the most important discussions about PF are
about whether Shade created Kinbote or vice versa. I think they
are equally fictive within the world created by the real author
Nabokov. Now that I've alienated dozens of list members, I'll
close for the nonce.
Marilyn Edelstein, "_Pale Fire_: The Art of Consciousness," in
_Nabokov's Fifth Arc_, ed. Charles Nicol and J. E. Rivers. Austin: U of
Texas PPress, 1982. pp. 213-223.
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Marilyn Edelstein, Associate Professor of
English, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara CA 95053
medelstein@scuacc.scu.edu