Abstract
This article considers different experiences available to the reader of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire by exploring the novel through concepts familiar from videogaming, such as the warp, the glitch, and the Let’s Play, developing particular parallels with the Nintendo game Super Mario Bros. All of these potential modes of experience are comprised in the playerly text, which serves as a conduit linking together a work’s past, present, and future readers.
Highlights
Vladimir Nabokov opines in one of his Lectures on Literature that “one cannot read a book; one can only reread it” (1989, 3)
Reading is plowing: an arduous preliminary that must be completed if the field is to bear fruit. This same Nabokov is often regarded as one of the fathers of interactive fiction thanks to his novel Pale Fire, which disrupts the steady linearity of prose by providing the option to hop between pages via a series of parenthetical cross-references
This is to make of the reader not a co-author, but a subsequent editor: each arranging his own Pale Fire, all so many distinct instances drawn from the same printed matter — a strategy appropriate for a novel in which the central battleground is editorial policy
Summary
Pale Fire takes the form of a critical edition of a poem by the same name, the last written in this life by eminent poet John Shade. Other parts of the Foreword, such as his comments on page proofs and galleys, are necessarily emendations; as these precede a later reference to the “carrousel” that he believes to be part of the amusement park, it is clear that the document is patchwork, with blocks of text inserted where necessary; any errors or contradictions are roughly altered or entirely ignored This writing practice reflects Kinbote’s perpetually evolving framework of paranoid delusion, at the core of which is his secret identity: Charles Xavier, exiled king of Zembla. Further investigation reveals the marks of other, earlier patches made to explain the ridicule Kinbote endures at the hands of faculty and students, with each tormentor an agent of his ongoing persecution (Boyd 2000, 99–102) In undertaking this process of patching, Kinbote foregrounds his own experience of reading Shade’s Pale Fire, while attempting to control the response of the readers and re-readers to follow. The effect on the reader is instead to crystallize the notion that Kinbote is a madman; those who follow the chain of cross-references find awaiting them upon their return to the Foreword a darker Kinbote, less jovial and more threatening—the patch that would have been provided nearly at the end of a linear experience of Pale Fire instead supplied almost at the beginning
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