Comment by vessenes
1 day ago
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.
I actually saw a little excerpt of a video interview that I failed to find to give you the link where he was asked about his current project. He showed a stack of cards that became Ada and talked about the main theme being passage of time
Ah, interesting!
Ryan Holiday shows his index card system in a few videos, including this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU7efgGEOgk
I also often think of the passage from Pirsig's Lila where his box of index cards gets upended upon return from the bar.
Shuffling zk (Zettelkasten) cards is just fine. [1] The meaning of a note is largely determined by its connections, and so approaching a note through a different set of connections gives it a different meaning. Finding new paths uncovers new meanings, which is at least one of the zk points. Shuffling cards is one way you might find new paths.
[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.
Yep. I'm a purist and prefer paper. Well, mostly. I do have a digital system that tries to bridge the gap, but it uses a standard-ish paper numbering system (1a2b11..) for a variety of reasons. And, yes, the keeping in order is much of the point of the numbering system on paper in my opinion.
i had a second reading, and i am convinced it is the greatest work of Art. a lot of people, myself included, bit the ruse that Kinbote was some parody of a mad man and ignored everything but the poem. but the notes have the most beautiful verses in the history of literature, even more beautiful, far more beautiful than the poem.
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.
> but the notes have the most beautiful verses in the history of literature, even more beautiful, far more beautiful than the poem.
An example, perhaps?
I've always found the poem full of beautiful things (makes you wish Nabokov wrote more poetry), and the commentary by Kinbote full of mad, hilarious nonsense. But each to his own, I suppose.
a pleasure! like i said, my first reading echoes yours and most others. my second reading echoes Nabokov's derisive snort towards the first. all the same, both deal with the dual-ity of objective/subjective, both within the poem (real/reflection) and without (canonical/interpretation). here abridged, Nabokov reveals the temporal dysphoria embodied by King Kinbote and his wife Queen Disa, as well as the self-hatred of gender dysphoria culminating into self-realization and the most delicate expression of self-compassion:
There was something else, something I was to realize only when I read Pale Fire, or rather reread it after the first bitter hot mist of disappointment had cleared before my eyes.
I am thinking of lines in which Shade describes his wife. Sixty-year-old Shade is lending here a well-conserved coeval the ethereal and eternal aspect she retains, or should retain, in his kind noble heart. Disa at thirty bore a singular resemblance not, of course, to Mrs. Shade, but to the idealized and stylized picture painted by the poet. Actually it was idealized and stylized only in regard to the older woman; in regard to Queen Disa, as she was that afternoon on that blue terrace, it represented a plain unretouched likeness. I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all.
The heart of his dreaming self, both before and after the rupture, made extraordinary amends. Worries assumed her image in the subliminal world as a battle or a reform becomes a bird of wonder in a tale for children. Her image, as she entered and re-entered his sleep, took into account changes of fashion; but the Disa wearing the dress he had seen on her the summer of the Glass Works explosion, or last Sunday, or in any other antechamber of time, forever remained exactly as she looked on the day he had first told her he did not love her.
The dream was a constant refutation of his not loving her.
this is the greatest verse in the history of literature. the greatest of sensibilities expressed in any form. it presents Kinbote as self-evident reality (simulacrum), not Professor V. Botkin's nor Nabokov's delusion, that allows Shade to paint Disa from Sybil. the same Kinbotes serenading Disas by a hospice bedside, by a photograph, by a mirror, by a grave. i switched the order for effect, as the last bit about self-compassion is a genius dual negative sleight of hand. the bit about writing poems echoes an interview with Robert Frost (whose symbolist poetry Shade reflects and Kinbote subverts): "If poetry isn’t understanding all, the whole world, then it isn’t worth anything." here is some mad, hilarious nonsense from Kimbote lampooning Eystein's trompe l'oeil replacing a painting with what was painted:
Eystein had resorted to a weird form of trickery: he would insert one which was really made of the material elsewhere imitated by paint. This device had something ignoble about it and disclosed not only an essential flaw in Eystein's talent, but the basic fact that "reality" is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye.
the notes are far more beautiful than the poem for the fact that replacing Disa with Sybil is replacing a painting with what was painted, where Disa is the "plain unretouched likeness" of Shades' painting, and without Kinbote's mad, hilarious nonsense the poem is a mere "idealized and stylized picture." without Kinbote, Shade merely licks the symbols of Frost on the windowpane. because Kinbote is the Shadow of the symbol slain, uniting the viewer and the view.
imagine subverting the greatest symbolist poet with the invention of postmodern simulacrum before it was cool.
Bonus: The shock had fatally starred the mirror, and thenceforth in his dreams her image was infected with the memory of that confession as with some disease or the secret aftereffects of a surgical operation too intimate to be mentioned.
Pale Fire is one of my favorite books of all time. BTW the crown jewels can be found in the book, if you know where to look :)
Thanks for this. Sounds like some good required summer reading coming up :)
Interesting to make the connection to Sonny Boy. That’s one to think on.