''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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225
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sounds quite promising with a typical formulation containing
a typical piece of information, and the reader
is for a moment tempted to believe that the foreword
is going to give him the necessary introductory knowledge
about the poet and his poem. At the end of it,
however, he knows little about the poet, less about
his poem, nothing about Shade's other works, and a
lot about Kinbote. The references to Shade do not contain
anything beyond the most superficial facts: the
dates of his birth and death (13) and a description
of his working habits (13-14); the reader learns about
his unattractive appearance. This description Kinbote
spices with some "profound" remarks which, however,
remain rather obscure (25-26). Nor is the commentary
very helpful on this point. True, after studying it
carefully, the reader has a somewhat better idea of
Shade, but what information there is about him is
buried under a lot of irrelevant material in various
unexpected places and has to be dug up, freed from
all the superfluous stuff clinging to it, and pieced
carefully
together.
There is no word either in the foreword that even
vaguely hints at the contents of the poem and the
philosophical questions that Shade discusses in it.
Instead, Kinbote gives a fussy description of the
manuscript(13f. ) and later supplements this description
by mention of the rubber band which held together
the index cards on which Shade wrote his first
draft (15). Again, this inclination to introduce the
most pedantic detail from which the reader does not