Nabokov's pale fire: the lost 'father of all hypertext demos'? (2011)

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1995966.1996008

by aragonite • 2 months ago

133 33 2 months ago

dl.acm.org

vessenes4• 2 months ago

Nice to see more literature on HN recently -- Infinite Jest came up yesterday to my delight.

Pale Fire is not my favorite Nabokov novel, largely because it's so successful at getting you in the head of someone who just fully and completely gives you the ick, top to bottom, in nearly every sentence.

This paper is awesome, though. I particularly like that Mr. Rowberry went ahead and graphed a bunch of connections, very cool.

That said, I don't think he mentions and definitely does not dive deeply into a very hypertext-y thing Nabokov did which was to write his novels using 4x6 cards. He reportedly would shuffle them and deal them out during production/finishing of his novels.

It reminds me of Zettelkasten a little, although the shuffling would be verboten to Zettelkasten practitioners. Either way, managing a novel through 4x6 cards makes me think most of his novels would be amenable to some sort of graph analysis / linking.

It's easy to imagine Pale Fire written this way, but I have a hard time imagining say Ada or Ardor written this way, I think largely because it's so long, but also because the scenes themselves are longer than I imagine can be written on notecards. But, maybe he used them for key points, images, scene goals.. lots of possibilities.

browningstreet• 2 months ago

Ryan Holiday shows his index card system in a few videos, including this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU7efgGEOgk

I also often think of the passage from Pirsig's Lila where his box of index cards gets upended upon return from the bar.

mcbrit• 2 months ago

Shuffling zk (Zettelkasten) cards is just fine. [1] The meaning of a note is largely determined by its connections, and so approaching a note through a different set of connections gives it a different meaning. Finding new paths uncovers new meanings, which is at least one of the zk points. Shuffling cards is one way you might find new paths.

[1] If you have physical cards you are destroying the default hierarchical path if you shuffle them and that could be a pain in arse to reconstruct, and your ability to find a note with physical cards also depends on the hierarchy. Digital cards have different problems.

vessenes4• 2 months ago

Yep. I'm a purist and prefer paper. Well, mostly. I do have a digital system that tries to bridge the gap, but it uses a standard-ish paper numbering system (1a2b11..) for a variety of reasons. And, yes, the keeping in order is much of the point of the numbering system on paper in my opinion.

mm263• 2 months ago

I actually saw a little excerpt of a video interview that I failed to find to give you the link where he was asked about his current project. He showed a stack of cards that became Ada and talked about the main theme being passage of time

vessenes4• 2 months ago

Ah, interesting!

mrsvanwinkle4• 2 months ago

i had a second reading, and i am convinced it is the greatest work of Art. a lot of people, myself included, bit the ruse that Kinbote was some parody of a mad man and ignored everything but the poem. but the notes have the most beautiful verses in the history of literature, even more beautiful, far more beautiful than the poem.

spoiler: it is just one mind (solipsism). it deals with all kinds of dysphoria, especially gender and temporal (age). Nabokov misdirects away from psychoanalysis with the Freudian hate, but the Jung anima/animus and shadow are obvious. for historiographical background, Nabokov's brother died in the Holocaust where he was taken for being homosexual, and dealt at the time with both the Red and Lavender Scare of McCarthyism. there is a full stanza in the poem about Shade shaving his/her leg. and the, depending on context, hilarious or melancholic references to the loss of "crown jewels". references to "complications of an operation" as well. it is plausible that all of this is a product of Aunt Maud's dementia, where we see Maud's "handsome" lover (older woman) and patron welcomed by Shade in his birthday.

the "dual" in dual blue is in the context of chess puzzles where there are two solutions when one is ideal. indeed the novel was set up to show a most brilliant set up of stealing the "Pale Fire" of the poem into the "Pale Fire" of the novel with notes, and this still holds regardless whether it is all Professor Botkin and Kinbote his mind's reflection in the "mirrorland" of Zembla (which is the pre-Soviet Russia in Nabokov's head that no longer exist).

to me, of all Pale Fire derivatives such as Infinite Jest (a nod to lifting a title from Shakespeare) by Wallace, Gravity's Rainbow by Nabokov's student at Cornell who in a previous work "borrowed" Nabokov's Sebastian Knight, and Danielewski's House of Leaves, Danielewski succeeds in emulating Nabokov's most delicate romanticism above a semiotician's sensibilities, especially in exploring the archetypal in the architectural through Bachelard and Derrida.

but after my second reading, none of its echoes could compare to the original arrant thief.

if you are open to other forms, as someone who is a disciple of Godard and Kubrick, who organized viewing and discussion of 2001 with students and faculty, i can say that the animated work Sonny Boy is a direct adaptation of Pale Fire (i.e. a solipsist dysphoria) and surpasses the masters of cinema and animation (Shingo Natsume's mentor is the peerless genius Masaaki Yuasa) with his cinematic "grammar". i am on my phone and will update this with references from the book once i get my laptop (i only use hn with my phone).

i wish i could quote Kinbote's diss on those who read the poem and stopped at that. after my second read i felt completely bamboozled and could hear Nabokov's prerecorded snorts echoing through time just to ridicule my myopic mind.

uxp100• 2 months ago

Interesting to make the connection to Sonny Boy. That’s one to think on.

vessenes4• 2 months ago

Thanks for this. Sounds like some good required summer reading coming up :)

defen• 2 months ago

Pale Fire is one of my favorite books of all time. BTW the crown jewels can be found in the book, if you know where to look :)

zabzonk3• 2 months ago

but the notes have the most beautiful verses in the history of literature, even more beautiful, far more beautiful than the poem.

An example, perhaps?

I've always found the poem full of beautiful things (makes you wish Nabokov wrote more poetry), and the commentary by Kinbote full of mad, hilarious nonsense. But each to his own, I suppose.

vortegne• 2 months ago

Metafiction thought of as a precursor for hypertext fiction is not anything new I believe?

Awesome paper either way, just thinking that the title is quite hyperbolic.

robwwilliams• 2 months ago

Diderot’s Jacque, The Fatalist is a great example. Perhaps even moreso of endless recursion to the end.

ubermonkey3• 2 months ago

I mean, you can buy a copy in any reasonable bookshop, so I'm not sure how "lost" it is.

cauch• 2 months ago

The article talks about Ted Nelson's demo about hypertext. The first version of the demo was using Nabokov's Pale Fire book. This first version of the demo has been lost. The article is not saying that Nabokov's book has been lost, but that the usage of Nabokov's book as a demo for hypertext has been lost.

zabzonk3• 2 months ago

the usage of Nabokov's book as a demo for hypertext

I get what you are saying, but should just point out that the Kindle version of the Penguin edition provides hypertext links from the poem to the deranged narrator's commentary. I remember reading a paper edition sometime back when, and being able to flip via hypertext is definitely superior to paper page flipping. And I'm someone that loves paper books.

This is a truly amazing and very, very funny book. If you haven't read it, you are really missing out.

ubermonkey3• 2 months ago

Ah, my mistake.

windward• 2 months ago

I love this book. Before anything else it's a pleasure to read: it's funny, touching, and the constant referring to the poem at its core forces literary engagement - even if it's only to notice where Kinbote is bending the truth. It also scratches a metafictional itch that has now become a huge trend in modern media...

Spoilers below

...but I find it suffers in criticism for a different trend: that everything has a 'gotcha'. While I accept that there is no sensible reading where the narrator is entirely reliable, I reject that there is an evocative reading using the Shadean theory referenced in footnote 2.

Sometimes this is given as 'Shade wrote the whole book'. I have no time for that. You don't need a character who writes Pale Fire on index cards: that's just Nabokov. And what would it mean if this Shade writes a heartfelt canto about his own loss, then the interpretation that cruelly misses the topic?

Sometimes it's given that Kinbote is a dissociative identity of Shade. I see this as an interpretation that minimised the impact of the text to maximise the self-satisfaction of the reader. Read through the book with it in mind and you find yourself asking what's the point of it all. In line 62's explanation, Kinbote reads 'hal.....s' as 'hallucinations'. If Kinbote is a real character within the story, that's a joke between Nabokov and the reader. With this theory it's nothing. Kinbote's writings make up the bulk of what you read. It's much more interesting to do so if you choose believe there's a point to them.

Spoilers done

I had a similar experience reading interpretations of Lolita, with the added problem of takes that over-correct and signal against the subject and wider public perception.

stevenwoo• 2 months ago

I went into it blind and the first thought ( which is probably very common ) is that this experience would greatly benefit from a hypertext implementation. There's a neutral interpretation here. https://www.tundrasquid.com/palefireindex.htm

wahnfrieden• 2 months ago

seems broken. the anchor tags do nothing.

zem• 2 months ago

I think jumping back and forth via hypertext would be a bad reading experience; what you ideally want is two panes scrolling in parallel. (I read it keeping two copies of the book open on my kindle and phone but if I reread it I'll probably use split windows on a laptop instead)

mdp2021• 2 months ago

The mechanism of non-free but alternative ordering is already present in Julio Cortazar's Rayuela.

(Read it as printed or read it jumping from numbered chunk to numbered chunk in the alternative order.)

m-hodges• 2 months ago

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain¹

¹ Pale Fire is one of the greatest books I’ve ever read. It took me two tries because I didn’t understand what I was getting into the first time.

Apocryphon• 2 months ago

Within cells interlinked.

gabrielsroka• 2 months ago

Pale Fire (name of the book), links to a PDF

Novel was referenced in Blade Runner 2049

gwern• 2 months ago

Striking that despite all the references to Ted Nelson, OP doesn't anything like Project Xanadu techniques. Even the presented network graph owes little to him.

xyzsparetimexyz• 2 months ago

And blood-black nothingness began to spin

A system of cells interlinked within Cells interlinked within cells interlinked

Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct

Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

Nabokov's pale fire: the lost 'father of all hypertext demos'? (2011)

Related Stories