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. 

What books have you read over and over again?

Cover for the Standard Ebooks edition of Moby Dick. 

Tyler Cowen recently estimated that he has read Moby Dick five times. Cowen  named it The Great American Novel back in 2006. 

I have been thinking of re-reading Moby Dick (I think I've read it only once.) Robert Anton Wilson told Eric Wagner to read James Joyce's Ulysses more than 40 times.

All of this made me think about what books I've read over and over again.

Illuminatus! would be a good example for me. I read it for the first time in the 1970s, probably not too terribly long after it came out, and I have read it many times since then. In fact, I've read all of Wilson's novels more than once (except for The Sex Magicians, which I will finally read when Hilaritas releases it soon), and I've read other RAW books more than once, too; I am re-reading Cosmic Trigger 2 now. 

Other works of fiction I have read more than once: The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe; Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen; The Lord of the Rings, J.RR.. Tolkien; All Things Are Lights, Robert Shea; Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov; I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Harlan Ellison (short story collection), The Gold Bug Variations, Richard Powers, Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson. 

Oz Fritz on Pale Fire and 'books that blow your head off'

Oz Fritz has an entry on his blog about "Pale Fire: Books That Blow Your Head Off." 

The phrase about exploding books is taken from a passage written by Robert Anton Wilson. Oz writes, "I have always granted certain books great power.  I would carry them around with me wherever I went believing that I could continue absorbing their contents by osmosis through the proximity of their physical corpus.  I fully resonate with the quote I heard somewhere that 'great books are monasteries.'I like to live in these monasteries for periods of time, absorbing their program then moving on.

"For  about two to three months a year from the ages of 15 - 17 The Lord of the Rings was my constant companion.  This book had the effect of greatly broadening my vision beyond human society's consensual reality, norms and assumptions feeling new neural pathways opening up."

Illuminatus! would be the most obvious example of such a book for me. Lord of the Rings was an important book for me, too, when I was a teenager. (I still like it now, too).

Oz then goes on to discuss Pale Fire in connection with his theory, also discussed by his comments to the recent book discussion group here, that "Pale Fire functioned as a multi-level didactic experiment of an esoteric/transformational nature; magick and bardo training as the Department of Redundancy Department might put it."

Oz also talks about synchronicities. As it happens, he talks about them in connection with a conversation he had with a woman from Sandusky, Ohio. I read his post as I was sitting in Sandusky, Ohio, at work. (Although since I was at work, I didn't get to read his post carefully until I was off duty.)

Oz promises to do a follow up post.

Pale Fire online reading group, Week 14

I recently finished Brian Boyd's Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. Boyd, an English professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, arguably has no peer as a living Nabokov scholar and gives a close reading of the book. He convincing demonstrates that the book has clear references to works such as Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake, Robert Browning's Pippa Passes, T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets and "The Waste Land," and other works. If you don't think reading an entire book of literary criticism can be entertaining, Boyd's book might change your mind.

In the bulk of the book, Boyd discusses the theory that I also have endorsed, that the actual author is V. Botkin, an offstage minor character, who invents both Charles Kinbote and the exiled Zemblan king and who commits suicide after writing his deranged commentary.

In the last part of the book, Boyd offers a further theory that the ghosts of John Shade and his daughter, Hazel -- shades of the Shades -- helped inspire the composition of the book. For those who think that it's an unlikely theory, Boyd discusses "The Vane Sisters", a short story which features an acrostic that has a message from two sisters who have died. (Nabokov had to point out the acrostic after The New Yorker magazine rejected the story.)

Incidentally, Brian Boyd knows who Robert Anton Wilson is, or at least has heard the name.

I wrote to him recently, noting that I could find only very expensive copies of his book about Nabokov's Ada and asking for an ebook edition. I mentioned my blog and the online reading group for Pale Fire and explained that I usually write about Robert Anton Wilson.

Professor Boyd pointed to me to where I could find an ebook of his Nabokov's Ada: The Place of Consciousness, and pointed out his free Ada website, which has very detailed annotations on the novel. He ended, "Enjoy, and keep blogging. I have very little time to read for pleasure but I'll keep my antenna alert for more on RAW."

Looking ahead to the next reading group: California author, English teacher, Jeopardy game show champ and RAW scholar Eric Wagner has volunteered to lead an online discussion group at this blog focusing on Joseph Kerman's classic study, The Beethoven Quartets. Expect discussion that will included Beethoven and the book, but also Robert Anton Wilson's deep interest in Beethoven.

"I plan to write weekly pieces on the Kerman Beethoven book starting August 6, with the official group beginning August 13 and running eighteen weeks until December 10," Eric says.


About the Kerman book, Eric says, "I gave copies of this book to both Robert Anton Wilson and Rafi Zabor. I took a copy of it with me when I appeared on Jeopardy."

Eric is the author of An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson.

I expect to be able to check my copy of the Kerman book out of the excellent local library system I use, renewing it as necessary -- that's what I did with the Brian Boyd book -- but I'm putting the reminder up here to give the rest of you time to make necessary arrangements.

And what should we do beyond? The answer, I think, comes from Hilaritas Press, which has new editions coming out soon of the three "Historical Iluminatus" books and then will do the two Cosmic Trigger sequels. They would certainly be a good focus for online discussions.

Pale Fire online reading group, week 12

Cover for first U.S. edition of Pale Fire

This week: Please finish reading the book, if you have time. But there will still be another couple of weeks of discussion.

So, what happened?

I lean toward the theory that the narrator is actually V. Botkin, the "American scholar of Russian descent" in the index, whose name, as the index records, can be turned around to make "kingbot," the maggot. In this reading, Botkin is crazy and imagines himself as both the exiled king of Zembla, and as a professor under the pseudonym Charles Kinbote. He writes the book and commits suicide afterward.

At the end, the narrator imagines writing a play that includes "a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire ... "

At the end of the book the narrator grudgingly refers to what really happened: Jack Grey escapes and attempts to kill the judge who put him away, Judge Goldsworth, in whose house the narrator is living; by mistake he takes Shade for Goldsworth.

This theory also fits his admiration for suicide expressed at the end of the book ("God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work.") One of those characters would be Hazel Shade, who in the index "deserves great respect, having preferred the beauty of death to the ugliness of life." (The other person who kills himself is the assassin, Jack Grey).

Nabokov said in an interview, that Pale Fire "is full of plums that I keep hoping somebody will find. For instance, the nasty commentator is not an ex-King of Zembla nor is he professor Kinbote. He is professor Botkin, or Botkine, a Russian and a madman."

For a rundown of various interpretations, see the Wikipedia article. 

Pale Fire online reading group, Week 11

Mont Blanc (public domain photo).

This week, a bit shorter read: Commentary for Line 741 to Commentary for Line 949, pages 170-183 in my old paperback.

Line 768: I'm assuming this is one of the letters to his queen that gave away Kinbote's location in the U.S.

Line 782: Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a famous poem about Mont Blanc, but it doesn't have the lines that Kinbote remembers; is there another poem that Kinbote could have in mind?

Line 803: Does this anecdote about a Russian translation offer an anecdote about who Kinbote really is?

Franklin Knight Lane (public domain photo). 

Line 810: Letters of Franklin Lane. A real book! And if you want to act on Kinbote's recommendation, you can get an ebook from Project Gutenberg. 

Franklin Knight Lane (1864-1921) was a prominent Democratic politician. He wrote the lines quoted in Pale Fire when he knew he was going to die soon.  

Commentary to Line 894: The origin of Kinbote's alias, and an admission that the author of Pale Fire is the V. Botkin mentioned in the index?

"He was a so-called Pink": This sounds like Nabokov's own sarcastic opinions. He didn't think much, for example, of Dr. Zhivago.

Line 929: Nabokov thought Freudianism was ridiculous.

Next week: The end is in sight! Please finish the commentary and look at the index.

Pale Fire online reading group, Week 10

Oz Fritz in the recording studio. Like Nabokov, Oz wants you to pay attention. (Photo by John Tabor).

This week: Commentary to Line 579 to commentary for Lines 734-735 (pages 153-170 in my old paperback, but your mileage may vary).

Commentary to Line 596: "As many people of little culture, Gradus was a voracious reader of newspapers, pamphlets, chance leaflets and the multilingual literature that comes with nose drops and digestive tablets..." Perhaps the modern Gradus would be those who consume social network posts to the exclusion of reading books.

Here is one of my favorite passages: "How much happier the wide-awake indolents, the monarchs among men, the rich monstrous brains deriving intense enjoyment and rapturous pangs from the balustrade of a terrace at nightfall, from the lights and the lake below, from the distant mountain shapes melting into the dark apricot of the afterglow, from the black conifers outlined against the pale ink of the zenith, and from the garnet and green flounces of the water along the silent, sad, forbidden shoreline."

Compare Nabokov talking about the virtue of being "wide-awake" with Robert Anton Wilson's remarks in his essay "How to Read/How to Think" in Coincidance. See also Oz Fritz's remarks about paying attention in his classic "The Art of Listening" blog post, which was part of a series.

I liked Oz Fritz's comment in the last installment: "Deleuze says that writers of what he terms "minority literature" write for a "people to come." Their audience doesn't exist when they write, their literature has to find readers who will grasp it. This seems similar to Nietzsche's philosophy. Joyce wrote for readers of the future. You have to become smarter and broaden your awareness to comprehend his later works. Nabokov teaches how to be such a reader. He creates a bridge for the current reader to become one of those "people to come" who will understand and appreciate Joyce and perhaps realize Nietzsche's or Crowley's philosophy. Twice already, through Kinbote, Nabokov explicitly expresses an intention to teach, putting the word "teach" in a sentence by itself or with one other word to emphasize this intention."

Compare with the famous anecdote about Beethoven: "Legend has it that when the Italian violinist Felix Radicati complained that Beethoven’s Opus 59 Quartets were 'not music', the composer responded: 'Oh, they are not for you, but for a later age'.” (Source).

And I do think that whether he was in the classroom or in the pages of a novel, Nabokov was teaching us to read carefully, and to re-read.

Pale Fire online reading group, Week Eight

Photo of Robert Frost published in 1941

This week: From Commentary on Line 347 to Commentary on Line 431 (pages 123 to 136 in my old paperback).

Commentary to Line 376: The poem Shade is attacking is "Four Quartets" by T.S. Eliot, as I found when I Googled the words that Hazel Shade asks about: "chthonic semipiternal grimpen." 

Commentary to Lines 385-386: If our unreliable narrator can be trusted, the most dramatic event in the poem Pale Fire turns on a misunderstanding. Compare with "white fountain" versus "mountain," lines 750-802 in the poem.

Commentary to Line 426

Was it really true once, or is it true now, that every American knows Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," as Kinbote asserts? I don't have that much faith in American schools. (But Eric Wagner, who is an English teacher, says many students know the poem -- see his comment below. So maybe I just don't know.)  I encountered the poem when my father pulled out one of his old college textbooks and showed it to me. And I agree with Kinbote that it is "one of the greatest short poems in the English language." For your convenience, here it is:

Whose woods these are I think I know. 
His house is in the village though; 
He will not see me stopping here 
To watch his woods fill up with snow. 

My little horse must think it queer 
To stop without a farmhouse near 
Between the woods and frozen lake 
The darkest evening of the year. 

He gives his harness bells a shake 
To ask if there is some mistake. 
The only other sound’s the sweep 
Of easy wind and downy flake. 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, 
But I have promises to keep, 
And miles to go before I sleep, 
And miles to go before I sleep.

Andrew Pitzer, in her The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov,  writes that Nabokov did readings with Frost, "once being in the unenviable position of opening for him in Boston." She says Edmund Wilson despised Frost.

Pale Fire online reading group, Week Seven

Mary McCarthy. Public domain photo  by Dick DeMarsico, World Telegram staff photographer - Library of Congress. Via Wikipedia bio of McCarthy. 

This week: Commentary for Lines 181-182 to commentary for Line 334. Pages 108 to 123 in my old paperback, but your mileage may vary.

Line 230 commentary: " ... his picture of Hazel is quite clear and complete; maybe a little too complete ... " Talk about an unreliable narrator, here is an unreliable commentator, actually complaining about the poem being about the poet's dead daughter, rather than the commentator!

Line 238 commentary: If you wondered what a cicada looks like:

Annual cicada: Creative Commons photo by Bruce Marlin. 

Line 247 commentary: "a king sized botfly." Could refer to Prof. Botkin, possibly Kinbote's real identity. Bot flies, also known as gadflies, have larvae that are internal parasites of mammals.

One of Poussin's Arcadian Shepherds paintings, e.g. "Et in Arcadio ego" paintings. 

Line 286 commentary, first paragraph: "Even in Arcady, am I, says Death." A translation of "Et in Arcadio ego."  Which is the title of a well-known painting.  Which connects to the work of Robert Anton Wilson. As the Wikipedia article I just linked to puts it: "The authors of the pseudohistory The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982), under the false impression that 'et in arcadia ego' was not a proper Latin sentence, proposed that it is an anagram for I! Tego arcana dei, which translates to 'Begone! I keep God's secrets', suggesting that the tomb contains the remains of Jesus or another important Biblical figure." The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail theory is referenced in RAW's work. See for example RAW's reference to the painting in "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary" in Email to the Universe.

Readers of this blog also will enjoy a private amusement that this paragraph of Nabokov's has the number 23. It's also amusing that this famous modernist novel can be connected, however fleetingly, to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.

I recently discovered that Mary McCarthy's famous review of Pale Fire is online. Read it here.  For a time, McCarthy was married to Edmund Wilson, once an important friend of Vladimir Nabokov.

"This centaur-work of Nabokov's, half poem, half prose, this merman of the deep, is a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality, and moral truth. Pretending to be a curio, it cannot disguise the fact that it is one of the very great works of art of this century, the modern novel that everyone thought dead and that was only playing possum." -- Mary McCarthy

Pale Fire online reading group: Week Four

Want to learn about Vladimir Nabokov by taking classes from Professor Brian Boyd, the world's most important Nabokov scholar? All you have to do is move to New Zealand and enroll at the University of Auckland (pictured). 

This week, we cover about 15 pages, in my paperback, pages 61 through 76. In any edition, we are going from the discussion of line 62 to the discussions of lines 120-121.

When Oz Fritz began reading Pale Fire, he suggested that "this novel will have a bardoesque aspect to it," and explained that bardo spaces are "spaces that convey the mood of death or the bardo." (See the comments in the post for the first week.) 

Oz has been developing his theory that Pale Fire is "a classic of esoteric communication" (see the comments for last week's entry), but this time I want to go back to his earlier remark about death haunting the novel. We have yet to even come to John Shade's death, but I certainly think Nabokov's novel includes a sense that death can strike at any time. The poem Pale Fire is dominated by the suicide of the poet's daughter, and the passage that we cover this week is largely concerned with two sudden deaths: The farcical yet tragic death of the king's father in an airplane crash, just as onlookers have seen him "raise one arm in triumph and reassurance" after pulling his plane out of an apparently uncontrollable dive, and the sudden death of the king's mother, who was ill but had been "much better on the day before."

And in the beginning of this week's passage, the narrator describes his night terrors, haunted by "how given to regicide Zemblans are."

The careful reader cannot help but notice that the literary commentator must be the exiled king; how else could he know so much about the king's life?

Brian Boyd 

But is that all to the story? In his introduction to Nabokov's Pale Fire, Brian Boyd quotes the observation by Martin Amis that Nabokov, whatever else he is doing, "spins a jolly good yarn, with believable characters, a strong story-line, and vivid, humorous prose ... He does all the usual things better than anybody else." Boyd them observes that in a first reading, the reader can make out important elements of the plot, including figuring out the link between Professor Kinbote and King Charles II. (An aside, Martin Amis is himself is pretty great when he's at his best. See, for example, Money: A Suicide Note.)

But for Boyd, and Nabokov, part of the pleasure of reading is teasing out more. Boyd quotes Nabokov as telling his students at Cornell that "Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader."

It seems too early to discuss any spoilers, but Boyd says there are four major  interpretations about what "is" "really" going on in the book, and that he himself changed his mind, coming to a new interpretation that "contradicts all the others."

Pale Fire online reading group begins Jan. 15

Vladimir Nabokov in 1973

When I was a high school senior, back in the 1970s, the teacher in my creative writing class assigned us to read Vladimir Nabokov's early novel, Despair.

My high school teachers back in Tulsa must have been a pretty funky bunch -- some of my other assigned reading in high school included Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.

In any event, I really liked Despair, and it got me interested in reading Nabokov. Over the next few years, I read more Nabokov novels, such as Lolita and Pale Fire, and more obscure ones such as King, Queen, Knave and Glory.

Nabokov has to overcome many dangers in order to become the mature novelist who wrote Lolita and Pale Fire. He was born into a wealthy family in Russia, but his family fled in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution. At first, he lived in Berlin. Eventually, he married a Jewish Russian woman and had a son. Germany became an unsafe place for a family with Jews, and even moving to France could not keep Nabokov's family safe.

As the Germans began to overrun France in 1940, Nabokov finally managed to secure an exit to America. Andrea Pitzer writes in The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov: "The Nabokovs' American visas were finally issued on April 23."

Once in the U.S., Nabokov led a financially precarious existence for years, cobbling together a modest income from part time teaching jobs and freelance writing. He finally obtained a full time job as a college professor at Cornell University. Lolita, published in 1955, was a best seller, and allowed Nabokov to become a full time writer.

Although Lolita is Nabokov's best known novel, Pale Fire, published in 1962, is my personal favorite, and also influenced Robert Anton Wilson's use of footnotes in The Widow's Son, according to Eric Wagner. We'll begin the exploration of the book on Jan. 15.

Nabokov never owned a home anywhere. On 1961, he and his wife moved into a hotel in Montreaux, Switzerland, and he lived there until his death in 1977.

Nabokov was born in Russia and wrote in both Russian and English. (The earlier novels such as Glory and Despair were written in Russian and later translated into English.) In his 1964 interview with Playboy magazine, Nabokov said, "I am an American writer, born in Russia and educated in England where I studied French literature, before spending 15 years in Germany. I came to America in 1940 and decided to become an American citizen, and make America my home. It so happened that I was immediately exposed to the very best in America, to its rich intellectual life and to its easygoing, good-natured atmosphere. I immersed myself in its great libraries and its Grand Canyon. I worked in the laboratories of its zoological museums. I acquired more friends than I ever had in Europe. My books — old books and new ones — found some admirable readers."

Let us hope that Nabokov would consider us "admirable readers."