Is 'Pale Fire' a 'lost father' of hypertext documents?

 

Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel, is an unusual work that consists largely of footnotes to a long poem. We did an online reading group for the book back in 2018, partially because of the influence the book had on Robert Anton Wilson's novel, The Widow's Son, which makes extensive use of footnotes. (Scroll down the right side of this page for the reading group.)

The Boing Boing website has a piece by Ellsworth Toohey reporting that a new paper says that Nabokov was ahead of his time:

"Rowberry maps 504 explicit links inside the novel — notes pointing to other notes, an index pointing only to notes — and finds Kinbote's vain cross-references uncannily modern. His self-serving self-indexing, Rowberry writes, resembles 'Search Engine Optimization and inserting unnecessary keywords into an index.' Nabokov built some of the web's worst habits decades before the web."

More here.