Jansy Mello: While perusing the Brazilian translation of Julian
Barnes's "Sense of an Ending" ("O Sentido de um Fim"), I dwelt
for a few minutes on the book's cover, with its seedling dandelions
and its lonely wistful quote: "History is that certainty produced at
the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of
documentation." These lines inside the novel are
attributed to a French author, Patrick Lagrange, whereas their
insertion in the cover of the Rocco edition (I don't know if the same happens in
the novel's original), functions as a giveaway, for it seems to be that
book-covers conventionally suggest that loose quotes belong to
sentences written by the novel's author). From almost the very
start, readers are forced to conjecture and expect unreliable
narrators at some (other) point in the novel.*
There are clear limitations that
await the decisions which are made by a fictional editor,
one whose life also depends of the physical structure of the novel,
and the real life editor's decisions about cover design
and settings in general. "Pale Fire's" Kinbotean edition remains faithful to his
whims, even including some of his uncorrected remarks to the printer
(although in translation the alphabetical order of his Index must suffer
according to the receiver's language).The omission of John Ray
Jr's preamble to "Lolita" in Collins Collector's Choice edition (the
Introduction was written by Peter Quennell) was, certainly, a real editor's
slip.
My query to the VN-L is not exactly
about the different roles and contexts of Nabokov's unreliable
narrators, but about Nabokov's unreliable editors, such as
Kinbote, Ada's Darkbloom (?) or TT's R. Are
there any significant discrepancies between Kinbote's or
Darkbloom's editorial decisions, and what actually came out in print in the
novel (nb: I don't mean John Shade's isolated poem as another instance of
unrealiable editorship). After I puzzled about Julian Barnes's lines in the cover of the
book, and the reality of that other Patrick inside the
fiction (namely the nabokovian transposition of the
surname Lagrange from Barn), I perceived that,
until today, I had confused "unreliable authors" and "unreliable editors," facts
and fictions. Does anyone offer to
clarify?
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Geoff Dyer, in "Julian Barnes and the Diminishing of the English
Novel," (Dec. 2011) writes about JB's acclaimed novel, "Sense of an
Ending”:
"
We must be fair. Quizzed by a master at school, Adrian comes up with a
breathtaking aphorism: “History is that certainty produced at the point where
the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” It turns
out Adrian is quoting a Frenchman, Patrick Lagrange. Proof that Barnes doesn’t
have any ideas of his own! Except that Lagrange has been invented by Adrian (on
the spur of the moment), and self-evidently by Barnes, which means he does have
ideas of his own! But this then throws up a rudimentary technical problem,
namely, that we are expected to believe that Adrian could have come up with a
formulation — and an alleged source — not only implausibly beyond the capacities
of even the most precocious adolescent but distinctly sharper than anything else
his creator manages in the course of the book," before he develops
his idea about modern day "unreliable narrators."
Julian Barnes and the Diminishing of the English
Novel - NYTimes ... www.nytimes.com/.../julian-barnes-and-the-dimi...