Give thanks for the new episode of The Invisible College: almost three hours for paid subscribers—first 15 minutes free—on Nabokov’s Pale Fire. From the transcript behind the paywall:

And I think that with Nabokov, it's always hard to tell where the trick he's playing on you ends. It's always hard to tell exactly when or why he's checkmated you. Which is why one of my scandalous interpretations of Lolita that I've written about…is that Lolita is only really interesting if there is a live possibility that this is a French immoralist novel in the vein of Sade or Bataille, and the very final twist of the interpretive screw is that it is a defense of absolute transgression, and that the penultimate joke on you is if you start moralizing about Lolita in the vein of a Richard Rorty or Reading Lolita in Tehran. And it's only kind of an interestingly dangerous book if that possibility is in the air, if Nabokov was a true disciple of a Flaubert who didn't think that anything should be morally out of bounds. So I similarly think my version of that for Pale Fire is that Pale Fire is only interesting if interpretive nihilism remains an actual possibility, if there is no solution to the textual problem, if the whole thing is under the sign of unreality, even though as you read it, you're struggling to find a stable, real ground. So if a kind of moral or ethical nihilism is to me permanently in play when i read Lolita, then an epistemological or a hermeneutic nihilism for me is permanently in play when I read Pale Fire.