James Twiggs [to JM's question ""Would Nabokov have intended to allude to Barthes,
Derrida and others by killing his two authors?" ] The answer is
surely not. The death of Shade and the (alleged) death of Kinbote are specific
to the novel in which they are characters and not illustrative of any such
general idea as Barthes' "death of the author." We all know what VN thought
about general ideas. Furthermore, even if he was aware of Barthes, Derrida, et
al., their politics, if not their theorizing, would have driven him up the
wall.
JM: Thanks for no
hem-and-hawing in your answer ("surely not..."), it's rather
refreshing! Yes, I agree that Bathes and Derrida et
alii would have "driven Nabokov up the wall."
If Nabokov had intended to
re-create in fiction a synthesis for Shade's and Kinbote's existence [" but
a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness" (darkness=a book
unread)], and offer, at the same time, a mockery of Barthes' "death of an
author" by killing off his two author-creatures, his novel would not
have come out as the "Pale Fire" we hold in our hands (or in a PC screen).
However, I gather
that Flaubert and T.S.Eliot (authors who are conflictingly present in
Nabokov's heart),sometime ahead of Barthes's formulation,were already
cultivating the perspective of an "absent third-person narrator,"
a project which Nabokov doesn't seem to have embraced ever, although he
takes some pains to refer to both GF and TSE (GF is present in ADA, I
cannot remember him in
PF).