NPPF Preliminary - Involution

[Jasper Fidget]

"The self-referential devices in Nabokov, mirrors inserted into the books at
oblique angles, are clearly of the author's making, since no point of view
within the fiction could possibly account for the dizzying inversions they
create."  (Alfred Appel Jr., Introduction to the 1970 Random House edition
of _Lolita_, page xxix).

Appel lists "seven basic ways" in which involution is achieved:

Parody: "Because its referents are either other works of art or itself,
parody denies the possibility of a naturalistic fiction.  Only an authorial
sensibility can be responsible for the texture of parody and self-parody."
(ibid xxvii)

Coincidence: "Some law of logic should fix the number of coincidences, in a
given domain, after which they cease to be coincidences, and form, instead,
the living organism of a new truth." (Nabokov, _Ada_, page 361).

Patterning: "Like the games implemented by parody, the puns, anagrams, and
spoonerisms reveal the controlling hand of the logomachist." (Appel,
xxviii).

Allusions: point to the author especially when the character that utters
them is unaware.

The Work-Within-The-Work: self-reference.

The Staging of the Novel: "[Nabokov's] novels proliferate with 'theatrical'
effects that serve his play-spirit exceedingly well.  Problems of identity
can be investigated poetically by trying on and discarding a series of
masks.  And, too, what better way to demonstrate that everything in a book
is being manipulated than by seeming to *stage* it?" (Appel, xxx).

Authorial Voice: "All the involuted effects spiral into the authorial voice
-- 'an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me,' Nabokov calls it -- which
intrudes continually in all of his novels after _Despair_, most strikingly
at the end, when it completely takes over the book." (Appel, xxxi).