I intended no disrespect to Jansy in my post about Barthes. If  my “surely not” came across that way, then of course I apologize. 

To look at the matter from a different angle, Barthes’ famous essay, with its even more famous title, didn’t appear in either French or English till several years after Pale Fire was published. It could not, therefore, have been an object of parody for VN. 

Stripped of the drama of the word “death” and of his broader philosophical and political aims, Barthes’ thesis has much in common with a key idea of American New Criticism. As Wimsatt and Beardsley put it in their paper on the intentional fallacy, published in 1946, a poem “is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it. The poem belongs to the public.” In other words, for all he can do about its fate, the author of a poem (or novel) might as well be dead the minute it falls into the hands of readers. 

Although I appreciate Simon Rowberry’s point, not even as vigilant and imposing a presence as VN could control the vast flow of conflicting readings that every work of any value is bound to provoke. The reception and history of Lolita--and of the very name “Lolita” and the word “nymphet”--provide obvious examples. For that matter, VN himself seemed to be well aware of what Barthes, and before him Wimsatt and Beardsley, had in mind. In a letter to Carl Proffer, mentioned by A. Bouazza and Stephen Blackwell back in August, VN wrote as follows:

"Page 72 A considerable part of what Mr. Nabokov thinks has been thought up by his critics and commentators, including Mr. Proffer, for whose thinking he is not responsible. Many of the delightful combinations and clues, though quite acceptable, never entered my head or are the result of an author's intuition and inspiration, not calculation and craft. Otherwise why bother at all--in your case as well as mine." Selected Letters 1940-1977, p. 391, letter dated September 26, 1966.

I agree with Stephen that this passage, written in response to Proffer’s book Keys to Lolita, is “very important and under-quoted.” 

The English translation of Barthes’ essay and also Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy” are readily available online.

Finally, Jansy may share my amusement that in 1992 Gilbert Adair published a novella called The Death of the Author, based apparently (I haven’t read it) on the rise and fall of the arch-deconstructionist Paul de Man. Although VN likely didn’t know any deconstructionists, he was bound to have met, at each of his American schools, a few new critics. Or perhaps in creating the character of Kinbote, he was pulling the legs of such old-critic friends as Wilson and Levin. And perhaps Pale Fire is not only a seeming parody of what later came to be called postmodernism but is itself, as some have said, an early entry in that movement. It hardly seems to matter. Wild interpretations are neither recent inventions nor the special failures of any particular school of thought. They have been around as long as there have been writers and readers, speakers and listeners--which is to say, since the dawn of communication. 

Jim Twiggs