Proposal for an Edition of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
On every page, any occurrence of the letter “v” will be replaced by white space. Those purloined letters will reappear, however, in almost transparent sheets of vellum laid over the text. By necessarily turning both sheets in order to read each page, a reader might come to understand that Sebastian’s story is filtered through V.’s narration, that Sebastian and V. are both essential to the text, and that the reader ultimately determines the relationship between them. The novel’s first page will be printed in a very dark violet ink on white paper, with the missing v’s in a pale, virtually invisible shade of violet on the vellum. As the novel progresses, however, the relationship between those dark and pale violet hues gradually reverses, as Sebastian recedes into the background and V.’s perception of him grows stronger.