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Re: PF NArrator?: Bellino contra Boyd (fwd)
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As a p.s. to my last posting on PF, I'd like to note that I read Mary
Bellino's reply to Boyd after I'd written my own and that she says
more eloquently (and diplomatically?) what I was trying to say in
my posting (and what I'd said more fully 15 years ago): that Nabokov
is the Ur-Creator of PF and of the fictional world of PF. I would
add that I imagine VN as chuckling in his grave over all the
"did Shade create Kinbote/Botkin or vice versa" debates. And
as someone who has written about theories of authorship, I'd like
to say that now, post-"Death of the Author" (Barthes), some critics
do talk about authorial intention again (which Wimsatt and Beardsley
almost but not quite succeeded in eliminating from critical discussion
even before Roland Barthes' famous essay). Nabokov's recurrent
themes, phrases, images, topoi, betes noires--not only in his
Forewords and interviews but in some of his characters' "mouths"
(fictional mouths, created by VN), some of which Mary cites, also
suggest that the problematizing of authorship was one of many things
VN was up to in much of his fiction, and perhaps nowhere more than
in PF.
Marilyn Edelstein
medelstein@scuacc.scu.edu
Bellino's reply to Boyd after I'd written my own and that she says
more eloquently (and diplomatically?) what I was trying to say in
my posting (and what I'd said more fully 15 years ago): that Nabokov
is the Ur-Creator of PF and of the fictional world of PF. I would
add that I imagine VN as chuckling in his grave over all the
"did Shade create Kinbote/Botkin or vice versa" debates. And
as someone who has written about theories of authorship, I'd like
to say that now, post-"Death of the Author" (Barthes), some critics
do talk about authorial intention again (which Wimsatt and Beardsley
almost but not quite succeeded in eliminating from critical discussion
even before Roland Barthes' famous essay). Nabokov's recurrent
themes, phrases, images, topoi, betes noires--not only in his
Forewords and interviews but in some of his characters' "mouths"
(fictional mouths, created by VN), some of which Mary cites, also
suggest that the problematizing of authorship was one of many things
VN was up to in much of his fiction, and perhaps nowhere more than
in PF.
Marilyn Edelstein
medelstein@scuacc.scu.edu