This document discusses Nabokov's use of hypertextuality in his novels Lolita and Pale Fire. It argues that Nabokov employs techniques like multiple narrative strands, implicit connections between textual elements, and encouraging re-reading to allow readers to derive their own interpretations without being influenced by the author's intended morality. This hypertextual style disrupts linear narratives and gives readers freedom to find their own meanings and moral judgments in the text rather than following a single pathway.

1. Nabokov’s Do-It-
Yourself Didacticism:
Hypertextuality in Lolita
and Pale Fire
Nabokov and Morality
6th
May 2011
Simon.Rowberry@winchester.ac.uk

2. • My view of hypertext
• The theme of hypertextuality in Nabokov’s
corpus
• How significant is hypertextuality to
Nabokov’s approach to the novel
• How does this influence the reader’s
approach to the novel?
• The effect on the morality and didacticism
of the text

3. • Explicit and implicit extension to the text (Nelson
1987:49)
• Possible due to new ways of thinking in both
mathematics and literature
• Importance of Nelson
Key Principles:
• Multiple dimensions through temporal linearity
• Flow NOT fragments
• The process of reading and writing
• The (personal) readerly vs. the (general) writerly
• Layers of narrative within the text
• Transclusion  Technical Intertextuality
• The Web as Page + Link (schraefel 2007:123)

5. • The index holds the network together (Hazel Bell)
• Over half the links propel the reader towards
Kinbote’s narrative strands
• Successful spatial and temporal hypertext
• Pale Fire teaches a hypertextual reading approach
 Text with marginalia/paratext + searching
(implicit hypertext)
• Discarded fragment - ‘Student explains that when
reading a novel he likes to skip passages 'so as to
get his own idea about the book and not be
influenced by the author’ (Quoted in Wood
1994:15)

6. John Ray Jr’s Foreword
Humbert’s
prison narrative
Humbert’sediting
Nabokov’s(lackof)intervention
The ‘truth’/The real Dolores Haze
Humbert’s Point of View
The myth of Lolita
Humbert’s history pre-Lolita
Humbert’s Diary

7. • ‘Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one
can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader,
an active and creative reader is a rereader’
(Nabokov 1983:3)
• The Nabokovian macro-text (Nyegaard 2010:10)
• Circularity in his fiction
• Nabokov’s use of Parentheses in his fiction – Lolita
(450 – 1.7/page) and Ada (>2000 – 3.4/page)
• Index cards for composition
• ‘The stupidest person in the world is an all-round
genius compared to the cleverest computer’
(Nabokov 1990:142)

8. • Conclusions cannot be made without
rereading, if at all with any certainty
• Makes the reader find the patterns in the text
• Good (and bad) reading is hypertextual
• Are these patterns inherent or receptional?
• Disrupts spacetime/cause and effect
• ‘I've drawn my scalpel through spacetime,
space being the tumor’ (Nabokov 1990:116)

9. • No single moral pathway or orientation
• Hypertext allows the reader to choose their own
morality
• Nabokov distances himself from these decisions
through hypertext
• This is not generally true in hypertext which often
propels you towards morality
• Open-ended texts rather than ‘choose your own
adventure’
• This allows Nabokov to tackle these more complex
issues

10. Nabokov’s Do-It-
Yourself Didacticism:
Hypertextuality in Lolita
and Pale Fire
Nabokov and Morality
6th
May 2011
Simon.Rowberry@winchester.ac.uk