Tag Archives: and the Art of Misdirection

In the preface to Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, the character Charles Kinbote urges the reader to refer to his annotations to a poem and to “study the poem with their help, rereading them of course.”[1] Critics who followed this advice soon published labyrinthine notes with annotations of the annotations of the poem, “Pale Fire.”[2] In his review of such criticism, Charles Ross writes of academics: “We are a busy people. Not many can wile away the hours in graduate school trying to construct a grammar of Zemblan. Give the public the solution it wants; then let us reread…a great short essay might have been a better choice than a spiraling critical study.”[3]