Nonlinear Traditions in Literature (II)

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(…) 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. Vladimir Nabokov

If we need any literary theory at all, it is a theory of playful discontinuity. (…) It is a movement beyond control over the work of art toward openness, even toward gratuitousness – gratuitousness is free – of existence. Ihab Hassan

The Game Board

Published in 1962, the fifth American novel by Vladimir Nabokov is composed of four autonomous and clearly distinct parts. The first is a foreword written by Charles Kinbote, a European professor who claims to be a close friend of the American poet John Shade and, at the same time, the editor of his poem Pale Fire.

The second part consists of Shade’s poem itself. It is divided into four cantos and comprises 999 lines. The final line suggests the absence of a proper ending. Yet it finds its completion in the opening line, turning the poem into a closed circle — a structure without a clearly marked beginning or end.

The third part of the novel is Kinbote’s commentary. It is only loosely connected to the poem and is meant to guide the reader toward a fuller understanding of Shade’s work. Kinbote even claims that without his notes the poem is, at best, incomplete:

Let me state that without my notes Shade’s text simply does not contain any human reality whatsoever (…); a reality that only my notes can supply.

The commentary contains a dense network of internal cross-references. These lead to other sections of the commentary and, at the same time, point to specific lines of Shade’s poem.

The fourth and final part of Pale Fire is an index compiled by Kinbote. In practical terms, it is of little use when read independently. It provides additional information about the people and places mentioned in the commentary and includes references to particular lines of the poem. In short, the index without the commentary loses its function.

Instructions for Misreading

From the outset, then, the reader of Pale Fire must choose both a direction and a way of reading. One may read the foreword and the poem in a straightforward, linear fashion. One may also attempt to move through the commentary without paying attention to the fact that its sections function as informational nodes tied to specific lines of the poem — even when, at the level of content, the connection between poem and commentary appears tenuous or altogether absent. A linear reading of the index, for obvious reasons, proves awkward.

The most coherent approach seems to involve reading the poem alongside the commentary — and the commentary alongside the index — moving back and forth between the novel’s parts as cross-references activate one another. Reading becomes a matter of navigation.

Significantly, Charles Kinbote himself — despite his fictional status and undisguised perfidy — recommends precisely such a way of reading his edition of Shade’s poem:

Although these notes follow the poem, according to custom, I would advise the reader to consult them first and then study the poem with their help, naturally rereading them as he proceeds through the text, and perhaps even consulting them a third time after finishing the poem in order to complete the picture. In such cases it seems sensible, in order to avoid the inconvenience of turning pages back and forth, either to cut and fasten these pages alongside the appropriate text or, still simpler, to buy two copies of the book and place them side by side on a comfortable table…

Sounds marketing, isn’t?

What matters here is the point of entry. Kinbote advises beginning with the commentary — he does not mention the index at all — and only afterward proceeding to a parallel reading of poem and notes.

The poem contains no references directing the reader toward the commentary. It is the commentary that refers to the poem, not the other way around. Egocentric as ever, Kinbote ignores the most obvious possibility: first reading the poem independently, and only then returning to it alongside the commentary, supplemented when necessary by the index.

Kinbote’s proposed reading anticipates what we would now call a **hyper textual experience of Pale Fire. A simple experiment — scanning the novel and linking sections of Shade’s poem to Kinbote’s commentary and index using HTML syntax — makes this structure visible. It realises the reading strategy described above without the cumbersome procedure of physically cutting the book or purchasing a second copy. More importantly, it demonstrates how naturally the novel lends itself to non-linear navigation**.

In this sense, Pale Fire strongly resembles a classic hypertext, complete with all its defining features.

Ghost Authors

A separate internal difficulty of Pale Fire lies in its intricate narrative construction. This issue is closely tied to the question of authorship of the texts that make up the novel — a question addressed by Leszek Engelking in his monograph devoted to Nabokov:

Did they come from the pen of one author or two? The poem and the commentary together with its appendices (index and foreword) complement one another, forming a single artistic structure — this argues in favor of the hypothesis of a single author. But who would that author be? (…) Should we then accept the thesis of two represented authors? Not necessarily. It is possible that the represented author is only Kinbote (or rather Botkin) or only Shade. It is possible that we are dealing with the mad genius Botkin, who created not only the literary vision of himself (Kinbote, that is Charles the Beloved) but also the American poet Shade. It is also conceivable that Shade did not die (or did die — theoretically speaking, the represented author could even be a deceased man) and wrote both the poem and the accompanying commentary, foreword, and index (or rather: both the commentary, foreword, and index, and the poem that completes them), parodying scholarly editions of literary works. In that case, Shade would also prove to be the creator of their author, Kinbote, who is perhaps a portrait of a real person, Professor Botkin.

These questions cannot be resolved here in full. What matters is that they have been posed. They reveal how intricate the narrative structure constructed by the empirical author — Nabokov himself — truly is, and how difficult it is to determine with certainty who is who in Pale Fire.

For our purposes, however, the final word belongs to the reader. Each reader, in effect, recreates Pale Fire, producing a personal version of the text according to a chosen path of reading. Perspective depends entirely on where one begins and how one proceeds.

The author of all parts of Pale Fire may be Kinbote, alias Charles the Beloved. It may be Shade, who might simultaneously function as Kinbote’s alter ego. Or it may be the exceedingly modest Professor V. Botkin — alias Kinbote, of course.

In this respect, Pale Fire is a unique work. Though written by a single author, it can appear as the work of many — or of no one at all.

False Bottoms

The reality of Pale Fire can only be described as fictional. There was no Shade, no Kinbote, no Botkin. Charles II the Beloved, King of Zembla, never existed, nor did Zembla itself. Nabokov himself, in a 1962 interview for BBC-2, characterised reality as follows:

• In your new novel, Pale Fire, one of the characters says that reality is neither the subject nor the object of real art, which creates its own reality. What is that reality?

• Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialisation. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless. So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects — that machine, there, for instance. It’s a complete ghost to me — I don’t understand a thing about it and, well, it’s a mystery to me, as much of a mystery as it would be to Lord Byron.

Kinbote is the master of the space of Pale Fire. Everything in the novel ultimately revolves around him, regardless of who he “really” is. Even Shade’s poem — perhaps merely a lyrical digression Pushkin style — functions through the prism of Kinbote’s commentary and occupies a subordinate position in relation to it.

The poem matters to him primarily as an opportunity for self-expression. In this sense, the space of Pale Fire — at least at the level of Shade’s poem — becomes purely pragmatic.

Elevator Logic (From Trace to Principle)

This is further reinforced by the instability of temporal structure in the commentary and, naturally, in the index. The commentary does not follow any overarching chronology. Its sections are internally fragmented, marked by frequent flashbacks and flash-forwards. While the poem itself maintains a degree of temporal continuity in the speaker’s voice, no such organising principle governs Kinbote’s discourse.

He moves along the axis of time as if riding in an elevator, pressing different buttons at will and stopping at whichever floor suits him.

When narrative space becomes navigable in this way, when chronology dissolves into selectable segments and perspective depends on the reader’s chosen point of entry, the novel begins to resemble not a story to be followed but a structure to be explored. In such works, sequence is no longer imposed; it is assembled.

The act of reading ceases to be progression and becomes configuration. What in Pale Fire appears as a structural possibility will, in other texts, emerge as an explicit principle.

Further Reading and Conceptual References

• Barthes, R.

1984. The Death of the Author.

• Engelking, L.

1989. Vladimir Nabokov.

• Foucault, M.

1969. What Is an Author?

• Hassan, I. 1971. Paracriticism.
• Markiewicz, H. 1995. Theories of the Novel Abroad: From the Beginnings to Naturalism.
• Nabokov, V.

1962. Pale Fire. 1983. Pale Fire. (Russian translation by V. Nabokov)
1963. Pale Fire. (Russian translation by I. Ilyin)

Hypertextual Sketches is a micro-series of essays on hypertext, the post-modern condition of culture, semiotics, and non-linear ways of describing how meaning circulates when continuity breaks down. Original research essays were written between 1997 and 2000, in Prague, Krakow, and Leipzig, when the internet was still experimental, but its logic was already reshaping how we read, write, and think. Larger portions of this work were actually published on paper between 1999 and 2003. Read today, these essays function less as historical artifacts and more as early signals of a reality we now take for granted.