NABOKV-L post 0003036, Thu, 16 Apr 1998 08:10:00 -0700

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>From Brian Boyd, University of Auckland

Since Maurice Couturier’s article " ‘Which is to be master’ in _Pale
Fire_" was announced here, may I just point out that I find
Maurice’s reports of my previous theory of Shadean authorship of Pale
Fire unrecognizable ("According to Boyd’s theory, Kinbote’s
extraordinary saga is Shade’s bloated metaphor of his daughter’s
pathetic misery and hopeless attempts to gain access to an intangible
reality"), and his criticism of my use of manuscript evidence
misleading and condescending ("Boyd states somewhat naively that
‘Nabokov decided not to divulge _Pale Fire_’s secret.’ But is that
really what Nabokov was doing? Was he not rather playing another of
his little mask games, as he did in peppering his books with
anagrammatic doubles? . . . David Lodge pointed out that this was a
clear case of intentional fallacy": is it not _more_ naïve to suppose
that, since Nabokov is _often_ ironic, irony should become the
default mode of reading him than to determine the presence of irony
according to context? and does invoking the intentional fallacy--
which really amounts to nothing more than not putting excessive
weight on authorial statements of intent outside a work (as if one
should ever put excessive weight on any evidence--not ignore the
considerable body of argument in favor of intentionalism in
discussions of interpretation in philosophy of language and esthetics
over the last dozen years?). Others mentioned in the article may well
feel the same way as I do about the manner in which they are
reported.

There are indeed telling arguments against the Shadean hypothesis, but
it needs a little more attention to the text and a little less
reliance on a convenient but rather rusty critical cannon to take
decisive aim against Shade-as-author.

Maurice concludes by talking of the "near-paranoia, widespread among
Nabokovians" in their desire to understand a "tightly-constructed
text." We all attempt to understand each other all the time, and that
means using whatever we can, the language, the form, the context,
including our knowledge of the speaker or writer. The attempt can be
difficult and contentious, especially when we think the meaning
matters, but there is no more "paranoia" in trying to get at Nabokov’s
meaning than in trying to get at anyone else’s. Nabokov’s very habit
of preparing a succession of discoveries for his readers has the
consequence that different readers will make somewhat more, somewhat
fewer, somewhat different discoveries in a somewhat different sequence
from others, rather like people encountering the world. What is
tyrannical or paranoia-inducing about that?

After talking about some of the metaphysical implications I found in
the Shadean interpretation (which arise out of Shade’s and Nabokov’s
metaphysics, not mine), Maurice claims that "the Shadeans
unconsciously allow their own metaphysical preconceptions . . . to
dictate their interpretations of the novel. . . . the exegetes . . .
do not, properly, interpret the text; they analyse it more or less
scrupulously according to their own metaphysical or aesthetic
preconceptions." I know what Shade’s and Nabokov’s metaphysical
"preconceptions" are, but does Maurice have the least notion of what
mine are? On the other hand, I do know a little of Maurice’s
aesthetic preconceptions, and wish he would not express his belated
discovery of the inadequacies of Barthes’s characteristic exaggeration
in "The Death of the Author" by way of a sensationalism of his own, in
this talk of tyranny and paranoia.

From: Brian Boyd
English Department
University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019 Auckland New Zealand
Fax (64 9) 373 7429 Tel (64 9) 373 7599 ext 7480
Home fax: (64 9) 620 6520 Home tel: (64 9) 620 6597
e-mail: b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz