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[...] Maybe every author needs to keep faith with Nabokov, and every reader with Barthes. For how can you write, believing in Barthes? Still, I'm glad I'm not the reader I was in college anymore, and I'll tell you why: it made me feel lonely. Back then I wanted to tear down the icon of the author a…

find in those texts miniature versions of Pnin's Russian doll structure, mise-en-abymes placed by Nabokov into his novel

[...] No matter how I try to slot them together, Nabokov goes a certain way along with Barthes but no further. Reading is creative! insists Barthes. Yes, but writing creates, replies Nabokov, smoothly, and turns back to his note cards.

what amounts to a reader's mimeograph of the Author's creative act

For he felt his own work to be multiplex but not truly multivalent--the buck stopped at Nabokov, the man who had placed the details there in the first place.