JM: When I compared Nabokov's writings in "Pale Fire" and
what he proffered in "The Art of Literature and Commonsense,"* I failed to
realize that Nabokov might also be implying that, in
fact, Kinbote's "non-utilitarian" footnotes and
commentaries create a man's life (Kinbote's own, as King Charles of
Zembla) and provide patterns that embellish the novel and John
Shade's poem for an outsider's artistic eye.
The author
as God, in this fictional work, is Kinbote and not John Shade,
although we'd better consider CK a demiurge whereas Nabokov,
of course, comes in as the Platonic "One,." as
inaccessible as his abstract conception of a novel before he sets it
down...
Alfred Appel Jr.mentions in "The Annotated Lolita" the tactics of
involution ( "An involuted work turns in upon itself, is
self-referential, conscious of its status as a fiction , and allégorique de
lui-même - allegorial of itself, to use Mallarmé's description iof one of his
own poems..") and how it is achieved in seven basic ways (parody,
coincidence,patterning, allusion, the work-within-the-work, the staging of the
novel, authorial voice.). He exhibits some concern about his
own annotations when he adds: "This edition - now, as in
1970 - is analogous to what Pale Fire might have been like if poor John Shade
had been given the opportunity to comment on Charles Kinbote's Commentary...But
the annotator exists; he is a veteran and a granfather..., and has not been
invented by Vladimir Nabokov." (Preface, xiii).However, his preoccupation
is beside the point I'm trying to make here, since I cannot see AAJ in
lieu of a Nabokovian demiurge.
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* - from the referred posting: "Charles Kinbote comments, on lines 939-40
from Shade's poem Pale Fire [ "Man's life as commentary
to abstruse/Unfinished poem. Note for further use.]: "If I correctly understand
the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life
is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece."
Years before, Vladimir Nabokov opined that “these
footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness”
(Lectures on Literature, 374). My hunch is that Nabokov is making an observation
about those patterns in human life which people, by themselves, cannot
easily discern: they are non-utilitarian embellishments empowered to please
an artistic Eye..."