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

• 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

• 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)

• 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)

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

• ‘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)

• 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)

• 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

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