(Read it as printed or read it jumping from numbered chunk to numbered chunk in the alternative order.)
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.
Awesome paper either way, just thinking that the title is quite hyperbolic.
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.
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 also often think of the passage from Pirsig's Lila where his box of index cards gets upended upon return from the bar.
[1] If you have physical cards you are destroying the default hierarchical path if you shuffle them and that could be a pain in arse to reconstruct, and your ability to find a note with physical cards also depends on the hierarchy. Digital cards have different problems.
spoiler: it is just one mind (solipsism). it deals with all kinds of dysphoria, especially gender and temporal (age). Nabokov misdirects away from psychoanalysis with the Freudian hate, but the Jung anima/animus and shadow are obvious. for historiographical background, Nabokov's brother died in the Holocaust where he was taken for being homosexual, and dealt at the time with both the Red and Lavender Scare of McCarthyism. there is a full stanza in the poem about Shade shaving his/her leg. and the, depending on context, hilarious or melancholic references to the loss of "crown jewels". references to "complications of an operation" as well. it is plausible that all of this is a product of Aunt Maud's dementia, where we see Maud's "handsome" lover (older woman) and patron welcomed by Shade in his birthday.
the "dual" in dual blue is in the context of chess puzzles where there are two solutions when one is ideal. indeed the novel was set up to show a most brilliant set up of stealing the "Pale Fire" of the poem into the "Pale Fire" of the novel with notes, and this still holds regardless whether it is all Professor Botkin and Kinbote his mind's reflection in the "mirrorland" of Zembla (which is the pre-Soviet Russia in Nabokov's head that no longer exist).
to me, of all Pale Fire derivatives such as Infinite Jest (a nod to lifting a title from Shakespeare) by Wallace, Gravity's Rainbow by Nabokov's student at Cornell who in a previous work "borrowed" Nabokov's Sebastian Knight, and Danielewski's House of Leaves, Danielewski succeeds in emulating Nabokov's most delicate romanticism above a semiotician's sensibilities, especially in exploring the archetypal in the architectural through Bachelard and Derrida.
but after my second reading, none of its echoes could compare to the original arrant thief.
if you are open to other forms, as someone who is a disciple of Godard and Kubrick, who organized viewing and discussion of 2001 with students and faculty, i can say that the animated work Sonny Boy is a direct adaptation of Pale Fire (i.e. a solipsist dysphoria) and surpasses the masters of cinema and animation (Shingo Natsume's mentor is the peerless genius Masaaki Yuasa) with his cinematic "grammar". i am on my phone and will update this with references from the book once i get my laptop (i only use hn with my phone).
i wish i could quote Kinbote's diss on those who read the poem and stopped at that. after my second read i felt completely bamboozled and could hear Nabokov's prerecorded snorts echoing through time just to ridicule my myopic mind.
I get what you are saying, but should just point out that the Kindle version of the Penguin edition provides hypertext links from the poem to the deranged narrator's commentary. I remember reading a paper edition sometime back when, and being able to flip via hypertext is definitely superior to paper page flipping. And I'm someone that loves paper books.
This is a truly amazing and very, very funny book. If you haven't read it, you are really missing out.