Hypertextual Readings of Pale Fire: How new is the Digital Text?
Modern Language Association, 2003
Nabokov after Lolita: Pnin and Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire explores the possibilities of hypertextual narrative in the print medium. The book's four-part structure comprising of a Forward signed by Charles Kinbote, the long poem "Pale Fire" by John Shade, Kinbote's line-by-line commentary to the poem, and his Index, forces the reader to adapt alternative reading strategies to cope with the non-linear narrative structure of the novel.
As early as the end of the Forward, Nabokov has already thrown the reader from one section to the other with Kinbote's dizzying page references so that the reader is not clear where his or her reading will lead to or even whether to follow the suggested path of the printed text or follow Nabokov's lead from one page to the other to make any kind of sense out of this textual maze.
Demanding the reading of a multitude of concurrent texts, the hypertext encourages a topographical writing and reading style that subverts any notion of spatial or temporal linearity and requires the reader to develop an interactive relationship with the text. In existence since the medieval codex, this type of textuality finds itself at home in the electronic medium. The electronic text undermines the hierarchical structuring of texts as characterized by the table of contents while defying the canonical rules and formats solidified with the advent of print.
Nabokov, in Pale Fire, exploits this hypertextual approach in fiction. He ingeniously arranges the constituents of this so-called edited work, i.e. the Forward, the poem, the commentary and the Index in such a way that any linear reading is undermined and that there is no hierarchical organization amongst the sections. John Shade's poem, the primary source regenerating the commentary, retreats to the background and leaves the spotlight to the commentary. It is up to the reader to take an active role in constructing the novel by simultaneously gathering information from the disparate yet integrally intertwined sections. Charles Kinbote, in this sense becomes the parodical representation of the hypertext reader. His reading, as exemplified in the Forward, the commentary, and the Index, violates and destroys the poem. He aggressively superimposes his own reading on Shade's poem to construct a totally different and even a hostile text. Seen from this perspective, Pale Fire is about the problem of its own reading.
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