Subject
Unreliable editors versus narrators
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Jansy Mello: While perusing the Brazilian translation of Julian Barnes's "Sense of an Ending" ("O Sentido de um Fim"), I dwelt for a few minutes on the book's cover, with its seedling dandelions and its lonely wistful quote: "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." These lines inside the novel are attributed to a French author, Patrick Lagrange, whereas their insertion in the cover of the Rocco edition (I don't know if the same happens in the novel's original), functions as a giveaway, for it seems to be that book-covers conventionally suggest that loose quotes belong to sentences written by the novel's author). From almost the very start, readers are forced to conjecture and expect unreliable narrators at some (other) point in the novel.*
There are clear limitations that await the decisions which are made by a fictional editor, one whose life also depends of the physical structure of the novel, and the real life editor's decisions about cover design and settings in general. "Pale Fire's" Kinbotean edition remains faithful to his whims, even including some of his uncorrected remarks to the printer (although in translation the alphabetical order of his Index must suffer according to the receiver's language).The omission of John Ray Jr's preamble to "Lolita" in Collins Collector's Choice edition (the Introduction was written by Peter Quennell) was, certainly, a real editor's slip.
My query to the VN-L is not exactly about the different roles and contexts of Nabokov's unreliable narrators, but about Nabokov's unreliable editors, such as Kinbote, Ada's Darkbloom (?) or TT's R. Are there any significant discrepancies between Kinbote's or Darkbloom's editorial decisions, and what actually came out in print in the novel (nb: I don't mean John Shade's isolated poem as another instance of unrealiable editorship). After I puzzled about Julian Barnes's lines in the cover of the book, and the reality of that other Patrick inside the fiction (namely the nabokovian transposition of the surname Lagrange from Barn), I perceived that, until today, I had confused "unreliable authors" and "unreliable editors," facts and fictions. Does anyone offer to clarify?
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Geoff Dyer, in "Julian Barnes and the Diminishing of the English Novel," (Dec. 2011) writes about JB's acclaimed novel, "Sense of an Ending":
"We must be fair. Quizzed by a master at school, Adrian comes up with a breathtaking aphorism: "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." It turns out Adrian is quoting a Frenchman, Patrick Lagrange. Proof that Barnes doesn't have any ideas of his own! Except that Lagrange has been invented by Adrian (on the spur of the moment), and self-evidently by Barnes, which means he does have ideas of his own! But this then throws up a rudimentary technical problem, namely, that we are expected to believe that Adrian could have come up with a formulation - and an alleged source - not only implausibly beyond the capacities of even the most precocious adolescent but distinctly sharper than anything else his creator manages in the course of the book," before he develops his idea about modern day "unreliable narrators." Julian Barnes and the Diminishing of the English Novel - NYTimes ... www.nytimes.com/.../julian-barnes-and-the-dimi...
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There are clear limitations that await the decisions which are made by a fictional editor, one whose life also depends of the physical structure of the novel, and the real life editor's decisions about cover design and settings in general. "Pale Fire's" Kinbotean edition remains faithful to his whims, even including some of his uncorrected remarks to the printer (although in translation the alphabetical order of his Index must suffer according to the receiver's language).The omission of John Ray Jr's preamble to "Lolita" in Collins Collector's Choice edition (the Introduction was written by Peter Quennell) was, certainly, a real editor's slip.
My query to the VN-L is not exactly about the different roles and contexts of Nabokov's unreliable narrators, but about Nabokov's unreliable editors, such as Kinbote, Ada's Darkbloom (?) or TT's R. Are there any significant discrepancies between Kinbote's or Darkbloom's editorial decisions, and what actually came out in print in the novel (nb: I don't mean John Shade's isolated poem as another instance of unrealiable editorship). After I puzzled about Julian Barnes's lines in the cover of the book, and the reality of that other Patrick inside the fiction (namely the nabokovian transposition of the surname Lagrange from Barn), I perceived that, until today, I had confused "unreliable authors" and "unreliable editors," facts and fictions. Does anyone offer to clarify?
................................................................................................................................................
Geoff Dyer, in "Julian Barnes and the Diminishing of the English Novel," (Dec. 2011) writes about JB's acclaimed novel, "Sense of an Ending":
"We must be fair. Quizzed by a master at school, Adrian comes up with a breathtaking aphorism: "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." It turns out Adrian is quoting a Frenchman, Patrick Lagrange. Proof that Barnes doesn't have any ideas of his own! Except that Lagrange has been invented by Adrian (on the spur of the moment), and self-evidently by Barnes, which means he does have ideas of his own! But this then throws up a rudimentary technical problem, namely, that we are expected to believe that Adrian could have come up with a formulation - and an alleged source - not only implausibly beyond the capacities of even the most precocious adolescent but distinctly sharper than anything else his creator manages in the course of the book," before he develops his idea about modern day "unreliable narrators." Julian Barnes and the Diminishing of the English Novel - NYTimes ... www.nytimes.com/.../julian-barnes-and-the-dimi...
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/