I must say I hadn't thought of ADA in the terms Joseph Aisenberg mentions (in his previous post) about the stereotyped bad girl (with Gothic pallor) / good girl (with healthy glow) structure of romantic and melodramatic fiction. But it seems entirely plausible, given Nabokov's parody of the mode and history of the novel in ADA, and his parody of novelistic cliches elsewhere (in RLSK especially, perhaps) and his strong sense that great authors need to be great critics of the creative opportunities and cliched obstacles within the form they choose.

 

I might also add that I have asked my students in a Literature and Science course I teach to describe the process of their reading and rereading one of the works on the course (which includes Pale Fire) in terms of hypothesis formation and correction. It is fascinating to see how diverse readers’ expectations of plot developments are at different stages of the reading process, how their expectations seem to remain idiosyncratic to individual readers and don’t correspond at all to my recollections of a first reading, now dimmed by the palimpsest of subsequent responses.

 

Brian Boyd