Nabokov’s Do-It-Yourself Didacticism:

Hypertextuality in Lolita and Pale Fire

Nabokov and Morality

6th May 2011

Simon.Rowberry@winchester.ac.uk

• My view of hypertext• The theme of hypertextuality in Nabokov’s

corpus• How significant is hypertextuality to Nabokov’s

approach to the novel• How does this influence the reader’s approach

to the novel? • The effect on the morality and didacticism of

the text

• Explicit and implicit extension to the text (Nelson 1987:49)

• Possible due to new ways of thinking in both mathematics and literature

• Importance of NelsonKey Principles:• Multiple dimensions through temporal linearity• Flow NOT fragments• The process of reading and writing• The (personal) readerly vs. the (general) writerly• Layers of narrative within the text• Transclusion Technical Intertextuality• The Web as Page + Link (schraefel 2007:123)

• The index holds the network together (Hazel Bell)• Over half the links propel the reader towards

Kinbote’s narrative strands• Successful spatial and temporal hypertext• Pale Fire teaches a hypertextual reading approach

Text with marginalia/paratext + searching (implicit hypertext)

• Discarded fragment - ‘Student explains that when reading a novel he likes to skip passages 'so as to get his own idea about the book and not be influenced by the author’ (Quoted in Wood 1994:15)

John Ray Jr’s Foreword

Humbert’s prison narrative

Hum

bert’s editing

Nabokov’s (lack of) intervention

The ‘truth’/The real Dolores Haze

Humbert’s Point of View

The myth of Lolita

Humbert’s history pre-Lolita

Humbert’s Diary

• ‘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’ (Nabokov 1983:3)

• The Nabokovian macro-text (Nyegaard 2010:10)• Circularity in his fiction• Nabokov’s use of Parentheses in his fiction – Lolita

(450 – 1.7/page) and Ada (>2000 – 3.4/page)• Index cards for composition• ‘The stupidest person in the world is an all-round

genius compared to the cleverest computer’ (Nabokov 1990:142)

• Conclusions cannot be made without rereading, if at all with any certainty

• Makes the reader find the patterns in the text• Good (and bad) reading is hypertextual • Are these patterns inherent or receptional?• Disrupts spacetime/cause and effect• ‘I've drawn my scalpel through spacetime,

space being the tumor’ (Nabokov 1990:116)

• No single moral pathway or orientation• Hypertext allows the reader to choose their own

morality• Nabokov distances himself from these decisions

through hypertext• This is not generally true in hypertext which often

propels you towards morality• Open-ended texts rather than ‘choose your own

adventure’• This allows Nabokov to tackle these more complex

issues

Nabokov’s Do-It-Yourself Didacticism:

Hypertextuality in Lolita and Pale Fire

Nabokov and Morality

6th May 2011

Simon.Rowberry@winchester.ac.uk