It was wonderful to read the recent Nabokov Online Journal, Vol. IX (2015) and its enticing round table discussion “APPROACHES TO TEACHING NABOKOV’S PALE FIRE.” From my past experience of teaching a different subject (psychology, psychoanalysis) in a different country it was an extremely rich demonstration of the choices being made by a very special group of American teachers and scholars, their projects and attitudes towards their college and post-grad students (mostly envisaged as “virginal” in relation to V.Nabokov’s works): protective, laborious and directive at least while their initial considerations remained distant from the excess of information now widely available in the digital world.
But then, Yuri Leving inquired:
Y.Leving:“Considering some obvious challenges, presented in the previous scenario, what possibilities exist for teaching Pale Fire in the new computerized era of iPads and interactive apps?”
I selected a few considerations when they touched upon a theme that has been recently worrying me*:
Priscilla Meyer: “For one of their papers students can create a gaming blog, write a film scenario or record a rap performance, etc.”
Will Norman: The possibilities are endless in theory, but I have doubts about their efficacy. Nabokov’s whole śuvre is so invested in the book-as-object—its materiality, its annotated margins, its destructibility—that it would seem to me short-sighted to attempt circumvention of these qualities. The tension between the impulse towards transcendence on one hand and its inevitable frustration by the material world on the other is a subject to be interrogated in its own right rather than evaded.
Dale Peterson: There are ways, of course, that digital technology can assist and accelerate an individual’s familiarity with the densely woven text of Pale Fire. It would be a great boon to have a clickable concordance that would enable a reader instantly to locate recurrences of words and phrases—a digital rival to Kinbote’s index. The numerous allusions, borrowings, and imprecise citations that lay beneath the surface of the book’s prose and poetry could be retrieved by a search engine programmed to provide accurate references and quotations disguised by the cunning poet or by Zemblan translations. It goes without saying that collective brainstorming has been extended beyond classroom hours in blogs posted by students as they are reading assigned pages. Should we worry about cognitive overload or blatant misreadings going viral? Not really—as Kinbote’s commentary attests, misreading and verbal distortions can provide a productive kick to the imagination.
Yuri Leving: Pale Fire is the ultimate hypertext written in a time when the notion of a clickable hyperlink had yet to be introduced. Consider the pros and cons of a digital edition of Pale Fire from a pedagogue’s point of view.
Priscilla Meyer: In effect it already exists: there is a searchable digitized text online and there is Google. The only difference between reality and a “digital edition” is that this leaves it up to the reader to decide which forking paths to take. S/he may never come of the garden [ ] The project of annotating Pale Fire is by design infinite. Where does one stop, at which layer of referentiality, which ripple of the cast stone? A digital edition could short circuit exploration.
Will Norman: I am not sure I agree that Pale Fire is the ultimate hypertext. As I have suggested above, I understand it to be invested in the deep materiality of the book-as object. To be flippant for a moment—Kinbote distributes the pages of “Pale Fire” about his body, a kind of physical armour or extension of his body (“plated with poetry” as he puts it) which could not be achieved with a Kindle or iPad. The slippage between corpse and corpus is at the centre of Nabokov’s concerns from (at least) as early as The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. There is a danger that thinking of Pale Fire as a proto-hypertext not only displaces such concerns but also encourages a fantasy of Nabokov as himself history-less and virtual, which fails to take into account his dealings with mortality, materiality and the real spatial challenges of reading and writing fiction in the midtwentieth century.”
I was particularly struck by Priscilla Meyer’s differentiation between the published novel’s “reality and a ‘digital edition’,” and Will Norman’s arguments and emphasis on the “materiality of the book-as object.” (including the materiality of the author- as person…). The same “Nabokov Online Journal” is part of a “material” change (I have in mind now the discussion about VN’s “Lolita” and D.F.Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” in “Breaking Post-modernism: The Effects of Technology and Writing Programmes on Contemporary Literature” by Amanda M. Bigler [ http://rupkatha.com/tag/david-foster-wallace ], although I’m rather doubtful of the validity of her arguments comparing VN and DFWi**) and itself illustrates and proves how digital resources may positively provide another way of reading V.Nabokov and his "multiple points-of-view" into the present age.
Materiality and transcendence, reality and virtuality… And, at the end of the round table we read:
Will Norman: “It’s interesting to me that Priscilla offers us this reflection on happiness at the close of our discussion and that Rachel dwells on the comic and joyous. At the risk of opening Pandora’s box, I’d like to know more about how a happy referential mania might look different from an unhappy one.” Priscilla Meyer: “The unhappy version is the madness of the son in “Signs and Symbols,” caused by the solipsism of his reading of the universe: he sees the world as focused on him, which begets an unbearable paranoia. Nabokov’s works lay trails leading the reader from the known into the unknown, rewarding the quest with new knowledge and a vision of the miraculous interconnectedness of everything.”
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
*I’ve just finished Jonathan Franzen’s “Purity” with its concerns about the totalitarian dangers of the internet and its power to erase historic events and “real” human stories and destinies through their transformation into the virtual domain. His truncated epigraph, from Goethe’s Faust, is intriguing: what lies ahead, nothingness or a new affirmation of life? (“Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft”)
** "Works of, for example, Vladimir Nabokov versus the works of David Foster Wallace show some of the gaps between post-modern literature and contemporary literature. The influences of post-modern writers vary greatly from those of contemporary writers. Nabokov’s Lolita focuses on the inward struggle of the protagonist and the narcissistic nature of obsession; David Foster Wallace’s lengthy novel, Infinite Jest, includes numerous main characters (Hal Incandenza, Remy Marathe, John Wayne, Michael Pemulis, Don Gately, etc.), three separate locations and backgrounds of the characters, and an interweaving plot between the characters that allow the reader to experience multiple points-of-view by refusing to alienate the audience. Researchers and critics have commented on the narrow viewpoint that Lolita encompasses, and, as Kasia Boddy points out, “since Lolita was published in 1955, many have agonized over the fact that his eponymous heroine had neither much of a life nor, in Humbert Humbert’s hands, much of a literary memorial,” (Boddy 2008: 165). This single-minded need of Nabokov to indulge the reader in only Humbert’s thoughts and emotions, and by depicting Lolita as literally incompetent, is testament to the post-modern tendency to absorb the work in the self. This self, often loosely attached to the musings and struggles of the author, outshines the other characters and often renders the other players as one-dimensional. This is due to the emphasis on the protagonist’s opinions and conflicts, and deters the work from delving into other viewpoints that would divorce the work from an often egocentric frame of reference.// David Foster Wallace, on the other hand, has broken away from the post-modern notion of self-reflection in support of using multiple character points-of-view to create an all-encompassing narrative that veers from the ego of the protagonist into a patchwork of differing voices. He swiftly and abruptly moves from one character to another in often jarring segues. As Timothy Aubry notes, “when [Wallace] interrupts the progression of the narrative, rendering it all the more compelling, Wallace highlights the fact that plots are often propelled, or at least enhanced, by efforts to suspend them, and he exposes a similar pattern in addiction… Addiction and metafiction (sic), then, turn out to be peculiarly resonant,” (Aubry 2008: 209). This literary device of diverting the reader from one plot to another is prevalent in contemporary literature in response to the often linear progression of post-modern works." A.Bigler, op. cit.