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Bookishness, "metastory," and the timeline of PF
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I want to address a question posed by Sergei Soloviev last week,
about "keys" pertaining to the process of the composition and
publication of Kinbote's commentary. Sergei has raised some very
important and valid points throughout the recent PF threads--a
couple of times I've found my fingers poised to respond to a
post, only to see that Sergei has already anticipated my
arguments (for example, in his post "on arbitrariness in Shadean
theory," October 12). I should add, though, that I haven't had
time this month to follow the PF discussion in its entirety, so
I apologize if some of these observations have already been made
by other list members. A few of them I've made myself in various
posts over the years, which I quote from here. I also draw on
the published works of several Nabokovians, and to them I
apologize for the lack of documentation--as time permits I'll go
back and fill in the missing names. But for the moment I think
it's important to recognize that the embedded "metastory" of the
writing and publishing of Kinbote's commentary is both
internally and externally consistent--that is, the scattered
references throughout the novel tell a coherent story, and it
matches exactly the typical production schedule of a scholarly
book at the time PF was written--a schedule Nabokov became very
familiar with (or rather, became very accustomed to reducing to
a shambles) in the course of the writing and publication of his
Eugene Onegin commentary. This in turn presents a small but
obtrusive stumbling block to the Shadean split-personality
theory. For the purposes of my discussion I assume a fairly
straightforward, "traditional" reading of PF, positing an insane
Kinbote who may or may not be V. Botkin, whose Zemblan life is a
figment of his imagination, but whose reportage of _events_ in
New Wye is reliable (he did receive a note that said "You have
h.......s real bad") even though his _interpretation_ of these
events is wildly and transparently inaccurate (the note referred
to halitosis, not hallucinations). This reading may also be
extended to cover the Shade-as-author theory, if we assume that
Shade went to extraordinary lengths to create verisimilitude in
the account of the writing and publishing of "Kinbote's" commentary.
With the exception of the dedication and possibly the epigraph,
PF "works" as both a novel and a found object--that is, it
exactly mimics the form of a scholarly text-and-commentary,
albeit a very idiosyncratic one. There is a long tradition in
the novel of the "book as found object": Don Quixote and Pamela
come immediately to mind as examples of novels that purport to
be manuscripts or letters discovered and subsequently published
by an editor or commentator. Nabokov makes increasingly baroque
play with this convention throughout his later oeuvre, and it's
often useful to ask how the events of the novel relate
chronologically to the internal story of its composition
(usually by the narrator, but in the case of Ada by several
people), and also what events must have intervened between the
"writing" of the manuscript and its actual publication. In
Lolita, of course, it's evident at the outset of the first
re-reading, at the very latest, that both Lolita and Humbert
must be dead if the reader is holding the book in his hands.
It's precisely the mimetic form Nabokov chose for that work--a
first-person confessional text "found" and brought to
publication by a second person who adds prefatory information--
that enables him to reveal these events without ever explicitly
narrating them.
In PF, the first clue we have to this process is the phrase
Sergei brings up, "Insert before a professional." There are two
possible explanations here: Kinbote is lying when he says the
commentary was professionally proofread, because a professional
publisher's proofreader would have made sure that this
instruction, which Kinbote wrote in the margin of his copy of
the proofs, did not appear in the final printed text. The second
explanation is the more likely one: the text was proofed by both
Kinbote and a proofreader, the proofreader first--and thus the
sentence "A professional proofreader has carefully rechecked..."
is already there, probably added by the publisher. The
publisher, who presumably heard from the proofreader that the
commentary was a bit of mess, has asked Kinbote (as he tells us)
to insert the disclaimer "that I alone am responsible for any
mistakes in my commentary." Kinbote has done this, but he has
failed to heed what publishers' proofing directions always
stress: the importance of distinguishing instructions to the
typesetter from the actual text to be inserted (usually done by
simply drawing a circle around the instructions, as an
indication that they are not to be typeset. A similar mistake
may have happened in the note to line 167, "My slip--change to
sixty-first," and other places.) These points may seem obvious,
and they are, but they also show that we are given very precise
information about where we are in the book-production process as
Kinbote writes that sentence: the book has been written, it has
been set in galleys, the galleys have been professionally
proofread, and now Kinbote holds in his hands the page proofs,
on which he will make his final revisions to both foreword and
commentary (including perhaps the cross-references between
notes), and to which he will add an index, always the very last
step before a book is printed and bound between covers.
Further bits of information scattered throughout the text
confirm this chronological placement, and they enable us to see
what is going through Kinbote's mind as he reads over, at the
"present" moment, what he had written probably several months
earlier. He is in Cedarn, if we believe that he is in fact in
Cedarn and not huddling and groaning in a madhouse; he is in
some ways less sane than he was at the time he wrote the
manuscript, and in some ways perhaps more sane. Thus his remark
"As I mentioned, I think, in my last note to the poem..."
suggests that either he was too cognitively impaired to
completely finish reading the proofs, or, more likely, that he
first read through the text and commentary and then, at a later
point, when some details had slipped his mind, turned to
revising his foreword. It is in the course of his reading of the
proofs that he backs off from his claims for some of the
"variant" lines, suggesting that he has now at least glimpsed
the fact that his own obsessions have led him to distort
Shade's text. Perhaps Nabokov meant to suggest that this
realization has made it impossible for Kinbote to live with
himself; we have Nabokov's statement--extratextual, but
emphatic-- that Kinbote "certainly" committed suicide "after
putting the last touches to his edition of the poem" (SO 74)--a
remark that refers explicitly to the time I'm describing, when
Kinbote reads over and corrects the proofs of what he's written.
A number of Kinbote's remarks also enable us to reconstruct the
story of his obtaining the poem, finding and negotiating with a
publisher for his commentary, running afoul of Sybil's
determination to see her late husband's last poem published
properly, and so forth. I won't detail these here, as they're
perfectly clear, but they do consistently follow the normal
routine for the writing and publishing of a scholarly book,
adding further to the impression of verisimilitude in Kinbote's
account of that process. Returning again to the final
proofreading stage, then, Kinbote's final task would be to
compose the index. It's impossible to determine from the text
whether he in fact did this last (if there are mentions of index
entries in the commentary--and I can't remember whether there
are or not--they might have been added in anticipation of what
he knew the index would contain), or whether he continued to
work on the Foreword as he compiled the index. We are left to
wonder then whether the last words he actually wrote were the
last words of the foreword, "it is the commentator who has the
last word," or the last words of the index, "Zembla, a distant
northern land." Either line of course would be exquisitely
appropriate, and either would fit with Nabokov's view that
Kinbote killed himself immediately after writing it: either this
is, literally, the commentator's "last word"; or a sudden jolt
of clarity has made him see that Zembla is a land "distant" in
more than the geographical sense, and that he has butchered his
friend's poem in his pursuit of it.
None of these observations definitively rules out the Shadean
multiple-personality theory, and that's not my intention
here--rather, my concern is merely to draw attention to the very
meticulously constructed chronological framework on which
Nabokov placed the narrative events of the novel's "metastory,"
and the pains he took to place the reader at a very precise
point in that chronological sequence. What his purpose might
have been I leave for another day. But thanks, Sergei, for
bringing up this interesting and, I think, useful question.
Mary Bellino
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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
about "keys" pertaining to the process of the composition and
publication of Kinbote's commentary. Sergei has raised some very
important and valid points throughout the recent PF threads--a
couple of times I've found my fingers poised to respond to a
post, only to see that Sergei has already anticipated my
arguments (for example, in his post "on arbitrariness in Shadean
theory," October 12). I should add, though, that I haven't had
time this month to follow the PF discussion in its entirety, so
I apologize if some of these observations have already been made
by other list members. A few of them I've made myself in various
posts over the years, which I quote from here. I also draw on
the published works of several Nabokovians, and to them I
apologize for the lack of documentation--as time permits I'll go
back and fill in the missing names. But for the moment I think
it's important to recognize that the embedded "metastory" of the
writing and publishing of Kinbote's commentary is both
internally and externally consistent--that is, the scattered
references throughout the novel tell a coherent story, and it
matches exactly the typical production schedule of a scholarly
book at the time PF was written--a schedule Nabokov became very
familiar with (or rather, became very accustomed to reducing to
a shambles) in the course of the writing and publication of his
Eugene Onegin commentary. This in turn presents a small but
obtrusive stumbling block to the Shadean split-personality
theory. For the purposes of my discussion I assume a fairly
straightforward, "traditional" reading of PF, positing an insane
Kinbote who may or may not be V. Botkin, whose Zemblan life is a
figment of his imagination, but whose reportage of _events_ in
New Wye is reliable (he did receive a note that said "You have
h.......s real bad") even though his _interpretation_ of these
events is wildly and transparently inaccurate (the note referred
to halitosis, not hallucinations). This reading may also be
extended to cover the Shade-as-author theory, if we assume that
Shade went to extraordinary lengths to create verisimilitude in
the account of the writing and publishing of "Kinbote's" commentary.
With the exception of the dedication and possibly the epigraph,
PF "works" as both a novel and a found object--that is, it
exactly mimics the form of a scholarly text-and-commentary,
albeit a very idiosyncratic one. There is a long tradition in
the novel of the "book as found object": Don Quixote and Pamela
come immediately to mind as examples of novels that purport to
be manuscripts or letters discovered and subsequently published
by an editor or commentator. Nabokov makes increasingly baroque
play with this convention throughout his later oeuvre, and it's
often useful to ask how the events of the novel relate
chronologically to the internal story of its composition
(usually by the narrator, but in the case of Ada by several
people), and also what events must have intervened between the
"writing" of the manuscript and its actual publication. In
Lolita, of course, it's evident at the outset of the first
re-reading, at the very latest, that both Lolita and Humbert
must be dead if the reader is holding the book in his hands.
It's precisely the mimetic form Nabokov chose for that work--a
first-person confessional text "found" and brought to
publication by a second person who adds prefatory information--
that enables him to reveal these events without ever explicitly
narrating them.
In PF, the first clue we have to this process is the phrase
Sergei brings up, "Insert before a professional." There are two
possible explanations here: Kinbote is lying when he says the
commentary was professionally proofread, because a professional
publisher's proofreader would have made sure that this
instruction, which Kinbote wrote in the margin of his copy of
the proofs, did not appear in the final printed text. The second
explanation is the more likely one: the text was proofed by both
Kinbote and a proofreader, the proofreader first--and thus the
sentence "A professional proofreader has carefully rechecked..."
is already there, probably added by the publisher. The
publisher, who presumably heard from the proofreader that the
commentary was a bit of mess, has asked Kinbote (as he tells us)
to insert the disclaimer "that I alone am responsible for any
mistakes in my commentary." Kinbote has done this, but he has
failed to heed what publishers' proofing directions always
stress: the importance of distinguishing instructions to the
typesetter from the actual text to be inserted (usually done by
simply drawing a circle around the instructions, as an
indication that they are not to be typeset. A similar mistake
may have happened in the note to line 167, "My slip--change to
sixty-first," and other places.) These points may seem obvious,
and they are, but they also show that we are given very precise
information about where we are in the book-production process as
Kinbote writes that sentence: the book has been written, it has
been set in galleys, the galleys have been professionally
proofread, and now Kinbote holds in his hands the page proofs,
on which he will make his final revisions to both foreword and
commentary (including perhaps the cross-references between
notes), and to which he will add an index, always the very last
step before a book is printed and bound between covers.
Further bits of information scattered throughout the text
confirm this chronological placement, and they enable us to see
what is going through Kinbote's mind as he reads over, at the
"present" moment, what he had written probably several months
earlier. He is in Cedarn, if we believe that he is in fact in
Cedarn and not huddling and groaning in a madhouse; he is in
some ways less sane than he was at the time he wrote the
manuscript, and in some ways perhaps more sane. Thus his remark
"As I mentioned, I think, in my last note to the poem..."
suggests that either he was too cognitively impaired to
completely finish reading the proofs, or, more likely, that he
first read through the text and commentary and then, at a later
point, when some details had slipped his mind, turned to
revising his foreword. It is in the course of his reading of the
proofs that he backs off from his claims for some of the
"variant" lines, suggesting that he has now at least glimpsed
the fact that his own obsessions have led him to distort
Shade's text. Perhaps Nabokov meant to suggest that this
realization has made it impossible for Kinbote to live with
himself; we have Nabokov's statement--extratextual, but
emphatic-- that Kinbote "certainly" committed suicide "after
putting the last touches to his edition of the poem" (SO 74)--a
remark that refers explicitly to the time I'm describing, when
Kinbote reads over and corrects the proofs of what he's written.
A number of Kinbote's remarks also enable us to reconstruct the
story of his obtaining the poem, finding and negotiating with a
publisher for his commentary, running afoul of Sybil's
determination to see her late husband's last poem published
properly, and so forth. I won't detail these here, as they're
perfectly clear, but they do consistently follow the normal
routine for the writing and publishing of a scholarly book,
adding further to the impression of verisimilitude in Kinbote's
account of that process. Returning again to the final
proofreading stage, then, Kinbote's final task would be to
compose the index. It's impossible to determine from the text
whether he in fact did this last (if there are mentions of index
entries in the commentary--and I can't remember whether there
are or not--they might have been added in anticipation of what
he knew the index would contain), or whether he continued to
work on the Foreword as he compiled the index. We are left to
wonder then whether the last words he actually wrote were the
last words of the foreword, "it is the commentator who has the
last word," or the last words of the index, "Zembla, a distant
northern land." Either line of course would be exquisitely
appropriate, and either would fit with Nabokov's view that
Kinbote killed himself immediately after writing it: either this
is, literally, the commentator's "last word"; or a sudden jolt
of clarity has made him see that Zembla is a land "distant" in
more than the geographical sense, and that he has butchered his
friend's poem in his pursuit of it.
None of these observations definitively rules out the Shadean
multiple-personality theory, and that's not my intention
here--rather, my concern is merely to draw attention to the very
meticulously constructed chronological framework on which
Nabokov placed the narrative events of the novel's "metastory,"
and the pains he took to place the reader at a very precise
point in that chronological sequence. What his purpose might
have been I leave for another day. But thanks, Sergei, for
bringing up this interesting and, I think, useful question.
Mary Bellino
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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