Nice to see more literature on HN recently -- Infinite Jest came up yesterday to my delight.

Pale Fire is not my favorite Nabokov novel, largely because it's so successful at getting you in the head of someone who just fully and completely gives you the ick, top to bottom, in nearly every sentence.

This paper is awesome, though. I particularly like that Mr. Rowberry went ahead and graphed a bunch of connections, very cool.

That said, I don't think he mentions and definitely does not dive deeply into a very hypertext-y thing Nabokov did which was to write his novels using 4x6 cards. He reportedly would shuffle them and deal them out during production/finishing of his novels.

It reminds me of Zettelkasten a little, although the shuffling would be verboten to Zettelkasten practitioners. Either way, managing a novel through 4x6 cards makes me think most of his novels would be amenable to some sort of graph analysis / linking.

It's easy to imagine Pale Fire written this way, but I have a hard time imagining say Ada or Ardor written this way, I think largely because it's so long, but also because the scenes themselves are longer than I imagine can be written on notecards. But, maybe he used them for key points, images, scene goals.. lots of possibilities.

The mechanism of non-free but alternative ordering is already present in Julio Cortazar's Rayuela.

(Read it as printed or read it jumping from numbered chunk to numbered chunk in the alternative order.)

I love this book. Before anything else it's a pleasure to read: it's funny, touching, and the constant referring to the poem at its core forces literary engagement - even if it's only to notice where Kinbote is bending the truth. It also scratches a metafictional itch that has now become a huge trend in modern media...

Spoilers below

...but I find it suffers in criticism for a different trend: that everything has a 'gotcha'. While I accept that there is no sensible reading where the narrator is entirely reliable, I reject that there is an evocative reading using the Shadean theory referenced in footnote 2.

Sometimes this is given as 'Shade wrote the whole book'. I have no time for that. You don't need a character who writes Pale Fire on index cards: that's just Nabokov. And what would it mean if this Shade writes a heartfelt canto about his own loss, then the interpretation that cruelly misses the topic?

Sometimes it's given that Kinbote is a dissociative identity of Shade. I see this as an interpretation that minimised the impact of the text to maximise the self-satisfaction of the reader. Read through the book with it in mind and you find yourself asking what's the point of it all. In line 62's explanation, Kinbote reads 'hal.....s' as 'hallucinations'. If Kinbote is a real character within the story, that's a joke between Nabokov and the reader. With this theory it's nothing. Kinbote's writings make up the bulk of what you read. It's much more interesting to do so if you choose believe there's a point to them.

Spoilers done

I had a similar experience reading interpretations of Lolita, with the added problem of takes that over-correct and signal against the subject and wider public perception.

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain¹

¹ Pale Fire is one of the greatest books I’ve ever read. It took me two tries because I didn’t understand what I was getting into the first time.

Metafiction thought of as a precursor for hypertext fiction is not anything new I believe?

Awesome paper either way, just thinking that the title is quite hyperbolic.

I mean, you can buy a copy in any reasonable bookshop, so I'm not sure how "lost" it is.