MR: VN and his
characters show up where you least expect. The math text
_Finite Structures
with Few Types_, by Gregory Churlin and Ehud Hrushovski
(Princeton, 2003)...
the authors have a little fun in the index (pg. 192) where we find the
following familiar fellow: Kinbote, Charles: not in the
text
JM: I placed this information
under "thoughts" because I think that it represents more things than those we
usually encounter in "a sighting". It indicates not merely VN's
ubiquitous sense of humor and acumen, but it also demonstrates
his importance in other fields of human endeavour besides literature,
translation...entomology. Kinbote's inclusion in the index of Churlin and
Hrushovski's book is a "real presence" in the guise of an
absence ( ... "not in the text") .
On the discussion concerning literature and
novels cum footnotes, we should remember again T.S.Eliot's oeuvre, for
example, "Four Quartes". In a totally different spirit we also have
Virgínia Woolf's "Flush" where footnotes are not only part of the
structure of the "memoirs" but it also highlights V.W"s critical views
about nobility and social problems presented not
didactically but in the same literary spirit as the corps of the
novel.