national lecturing at New Wye; and that Charles Kinbote (alias the deposed King of Zembla, and yet another near-anagram), the apparently deranged annotator of Shade’s cantos, ended up committing suicide, outside the novel itself, as it were. So, finally, compared with FLT, there are several Andrew Wileses (he who finally proved the 300-year-old conjecture), each of whom is convinced he knows what the novel is all about.

There’s more money to be made solving the P = NP conjecture (or its converse, the Clifford $1 million is unclaimed as I go to press my trousers), but a Pale Fire breakthrough could bring you lasting fame and headlines in the TLS or NYRB. It’s not without its computational aspects—namely, carefully constructing hypertext “allusional” graphs not unlike the ones devised by El Don Knuth to illustrate who was sharing carriages and information with whom on Agatha Christie’s Orient Express. Even minor Pale Fire discoveries have titillated the Nabokovian world, proving how easy it is to be dis-allu-sioned. A reference to Edsel Ford was for years taken to be Henry’s son or the eponymous, infamous, ill-fated motor car. Matt Roth, a Pale Fire expert, uncovered the shocking coincidence that there was indeed a rather obscure poet born and christened Edsel Ford (1928-70), although, of course, not at all obscure to those who know of him. Indeed, among those who knew him was that omnivore Vladimir Nabokov, who quotes two lines from Ford’s sonnet “The Image of Desire” in the novel Pale Fire.

My own Pale Fire solutions include the far-fetched idea that Pale should be pronounced Pally as in Palearctic, the very eco-zone in which every single butterfly nabbed [sic] and classified by Nabokov is to be found. This pale- prefix is a common contraction of paleo- meaning ancient or Old World. When we go a-llusioning, all things are possible. We now have not only pally or friendly fire (or amicide to increase your word-power—why buy Reader’s Digest?) in our chain, but productive hints of Promethean fire and unbounded links to Aeschylus, Shelley, and that crowd.

And here we return to mathematics, computer science, and veer toward John Playfair’s notion of a porism: “A proposition affirming the possibility of finding such conditions as will render a certain problem indeterminate or capable of innumerable solutions.”

Loosely (the word has been through many mangles since Euclid was a lad), we can think of a poristic equation as having either NO solutions or an INFINITE set of solutions. In England, we have the weaker Omnibus Existence Theorem: either NO bus comes to your bus stop or suddenly THREE arrive together. This is Brit Whine 2, after the Weather Whinge but ahead of the Cricket

Test Match Results Shock. The poristic situation seems bizarre: you’ll know that many existence proofs rely on reaching a contradiction after assuming that no solution exists. This familiar reductio ad absurdum (or law of the excluded muddle!) is known as a nonconstructivist approach, in that you may have proved the existence of a solution (at least one) without actually producing any actual solution(s). The limited choice between NO solution and a whole bleeding INFINITY of the buggers is not fair play, my dear Playfair.

I’ve no evidence that Nabokov ever used the word porism, but it’s the sort of arcane word that would delight him. He does use many mathematical terms such as surd and lemniscate (both as the butterfly shape and as infinity on its side). He is acquainted with the higher dimensions of Einstein’s space-time (which he attacks without showing a deep understanding of relativity) and speaks of bringing his “expanding universe back to a Newtonian norm.” In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (another cryptic masterpiece devoted to confused identities), he does a bit of Peano by having a character in the novel, closely identified with Nabokov himself, declare that “ONE is the only real number, and everything else comes from addition.” Mathematicians would avoid the ambiguity between “real” (actual) and “real” (as in the real number system of which the integers derivable from 1 and + are but a tiny drop in the numerical bucket).

In addition to being an aficionado of butterflies, Nabokov was a skilled chess-problemist, adding to the notion that his literary puzzles might inherit the same challenge of “finding the unique winning solution,” as in, “White to play and force mate in three moves.” Extending that to the Pale Fire problem is, of course, much more complex. Hence my guess that we are in poristic territory: there may be no solution, but if we do find one, an indefinite number of rivals will have to be accepted.

In his memoir Speak, Memory (ranked in the top 10 of the world’s nonfiction!), we can see what a great mathematician Nabokov might have become:

 

“As a little boy, I showed an abnormal aptitude for mathematics, which I completely lost in my singularly talentless youth. This gift played a horrible part in tussles with quinsy or scarlet fever, when I felt enormous spheres and huge numbers swell relentlessly in my aching brain. A foolish tutor [Nabokov enjoyed a wealthy, multilingual upbringing in Tsarist St. Petersburg] had explained logarithms to me much too early and I had read (in ...