Penny McC. wrote: "Anthony Stadlen’s warning against the ‘symmetry lure’ is useful. I think the wonderfully misleading summary for lazy critics of ‘The Luzhin Defence’ is an instance, at least against ‘pattern’. And the novel itself a compassionate study of a victim of the patterning impulse."

 

Would a bad reader be one of the "victims of the patterning impulse"? 
In my non-heraclietean opinion  there are  patterns that a good author creates and a good reader discovers and these are entirely different from the patterns which we observe "outside" in recurring events that establish what we understand to be either coincidences or (as in scientific thought) "general laws".  Nabokov's novels probably employed patterns both to deceive and to reveal what he, as their author, saw. They are part of what John Shade discovered as "plexed artistry".

 

Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream/ But topsy-turvical coincidence,/ Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense,
Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find/ Some kind of link-and-boblink, some kind/ Of correlated pattern in the game,/Plexed artistry, and something of the same/ Pleasure in it as they who played it found (803-815).

 

Also in Zembla, we find Brian Boyd on "Shade and Shape in Pale Fire", departing from a  NABOKV-L discussion (8 Jan 1998) in which
'Ellen Pifer cited her 1980 citation of Robert Alter's "eminently sensible" 1975 comment: "This novel is not a Jamesian experiment in reliability of narrative point-of-view, and there is no reason to doubt the existence of the basic fictional data--the Poem and its author, on the one hand, and the mad Commentary and its perpetrator, on the other, inverted left hand" (Pifer 187n. 15; Alter 186) (...) The closer we attend to Pale Fire, the more it provokes us into explaining the strange resonances between two minds and worlds that seem as remote from one another as Shade's and Kinbote's. The novel is indeed no Jamesian experiment in narrative reliability, but it is an eminently Nabokovian exercise in readerly discovery, and in the surprises that can leak out from another realm(...) Those who have argued against Shade as sole author have rarely paid sufficient heed to the astonishing pressure of significance that wells up as echoes between part and part accumulate, to the way, in Alvin Kernan's words, that "everything in the `plexed artistry' of the novel seems to lead on to everything else and to tease us with the possibility of a completely articulated structure which if understood will allow us to fly through the barrier of the text into a meaning beyond." (...) Those who have argued for Shade, on the other hand, myself included, have been so struck by the need to respond to the tantalizing mystery of the novel's covert coherence and its promise of radical revelation that they have overlooked the objections to the Shadean position that...'

 

The debates between the pro-Shadeans and the anti-Shadeans ( in Boyd's acception) are, perhaps, similar to these on "pattern and symmetry". Then they will probably fall into another kind of infinite patterning which we, poor pawns in this otherwordly order, are unable to perceive [  "Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns / To ivory unicorns and ebon  fauns" (ln 819-820).]

...Unless we dream of aurochs and angels and let our "frac tails" fly.
Jansy Mello