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In the seventeen-year period between Videodrome (1982) and eXistenZ (1999), both based on his own scripts, Canadian director David Cronenberg has been repeatedly drawn to literary works as sources for his films. Two notable examples are William Burroughs' Naked Lunch and J.G. Ballard's Crash, the bases for films of the same titles released in 1991 and 1996, respectively. In opting to keep the titles of his source material and by choosing respected authors like Burroughs and Ballard, Cronenberg indicates that a sense of literary status is important to him. Indeed, Gaile McGregor, examining Cronenberg in the context of Canadian culture, notes that "literary parallels provide a key" to appreciating his work as a filmmaker.1 This essay examines the usefulness of that key to an understanding of eXistenZ, a film that is not based on a specific literary text.

In an interview, Cronenberg refers to Jorge Luis Borges' notion "that a phenomenon like Kafka actually creates his own precursors, linking together strings of writers not seen to be connected before."2 By examining his oft-cited, but as yet largely unexplored, relationship with the work of Vladimir Nabokov, this paper will consider to what extent Cronenberg created his own precursors. Whilst eXistenZ, with its nested and ludic narrative structure, is not typical of Cronenberg's work, a comparison with Nabokov here provides some useful tools with which to "open up" Cronenberg's literary aesthetic, particularly in relation to the playful relationship between the creator and his work (auteur debate aside) and use of narrative structures.

Linda Kauffman describes Cronenberg as "by far the most literate of contemporary filmmakers,"3 and according to Peter Morris, "his understanding of literature and literary criticism is prodigious."4 It is French critics of the Cahiers group, such as Serge Grunberg, who Cronenberg feels are most in tune with his work, partly because "the spectrum of their analysis is also very broad," but more particularly because "they also employ literary references as well as cinematic ones."5 The choice of Cronenberg to interview Salman Rushdie in hiding in 1995 (for Shift Magazine) reflects the director's literary sensibility, and Cronenberg admits that meeting the novelist provided "the spark" for eXistenZ, to the extent of having Kiri use the term "fatwa" to describe the pursuit of Allegra.6 Morris claims that at the start of Cronenberg's cinematic career, "film would liberate him from his literary possession by Nabokov and Burroughs. He could find his own voice,"7 but it is debatable to what extent he can be said to have broken away completely from these influences. Cronenberg describes himself as "a card-carrying existentialist,"8 and in drawing upon literary parallels as a means of illuminating his work, it makes sense to consider literature that enjoys playing with its own limits and with protagonists who shape their own reality, a notable feature of the typical Nabokovian narrative.

FOREGROUNDING THE AUTHOR

During his initial lectures at Cornell, Nabokov would remind students that, "Literature does not tell the truth but makes it up."9 It is this very artificiality of art, not its ability to mimic the world around it, towards which Cronenberg seems drawn in eXistenZ. Most special effects-driven films, ostensibly dealing with virtual reality, e.g. The Lawnmower Man (UK/US, 1992, Brett Leonard) and particularly The Matrix, (US, 1999, the Wachowski Brothers), leave the viewer in little doubt as to where they are at any point in the film. In creating alternative worlds that appear to fold back on themselves, Nabokov problematises the notion of narrativity altogether. eXistenZ can be seen as an exploration of this process of conscious artifice by which we allow ourselves to be deceived, a process Sartre terms "bad faith."

Nabokov rarely tries to draw his reader into a blind identification with his fictional figures but instead draws our attention to their very fictionality. As Barbara Heldt Monter said of his short story "Spring in Fialta," "Nabokov weaves a tougher web of illusion, an illusion of unreality."10 Alfred Appel, noting no less than twenty-seven examples of direct address in Lolita, observes that "to the Elizabethan playgoer or the reader of Cervantes, the work-within-a-work was a convention; to an audience accustomed to nineteenth-century realism, it is fantastic, perplexing, and strangely affecting."11 Much of the critical reaction to eXistenZ has focussed on the confusion about whether we are in a game-world or not. However, this misses the point. There is no sudden "reality shift" in the final phase of the film. The fictional and multi-layered nature of Cronenberg's narrative becomes clearer if we pay close attention to the range of clues presented to us throughout the film. Chris Rodley claims that "although the 'reality bleeds' continually signalled throughout the movie are not an original device, they presage a massive narrative haemorrhage at the end."12 However, to extend the metaphor, the "bleeding" is so profuse and internal that, by the close, a haemorrhage is barely possible.

Self-referentiality and the use of commentaries, notes, and fictional forewords in Nabokovian works like Lolita (1959) and particularly Pale Fire (1962), create a sense of life as a process of interwoven interpretation and subjective readings and counter-readings. Rodley even includes a parody of this technique with a fictional foreword from a Dr Martyn Steenbeck (alluding to the brand of editing equipment). Bend Sinister (1947) refers to fictional events taking place "by special arrangement with the mind behind the mirror."13 The protagonist, Krug, becomes aware of "a kind of stealthy, abstractly vindictive, groping, tampering movement that had been going on in a dream, or behind a dream, in a tangle of immemorial...machinations."14 In Invitation to a Beheading (1938), a ludicrously fake acorn falls after Cinncinatus, in prison for a crime he does not understand, has appealed for help; a spider in his cell turns out to be fake; and an elusive moth, which only Cinncinatus appears to see, are all signs of "the blurring of borderlines between the universe of the author and that of the character."15

A useful term here is mise-en-abime. First used by Andre Gide, it has been defined by Leona Toker as "a narrative enclave that reproduces the features of the whole work that contains it."16 The opening paragraphs of Laughter in the Dark (1932) demonstrate this device in terms of plot:

Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.

This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome.17

The opening scene of eXistenZ not only draws upon a basic notion of mise-en-abime but extends it to exploit other typical Nabokovian devices, e.g. "easily unnoticed precision," "premature key information," and "solution to a mystery hidden within its presentation."18 For example, the camera placement weakens divisions between the frame of apparent reality and the game worlds. The initial church hall setting, the motel and the Chinese restaurant all feature extremely low angle shots, even necessitating the inclusion of ceilings in the motel. The use of shot-reverse-shot sequences in alternating high and low angles creates a sense of stylised unease and a God-like detachment from what we are watching. In the opening scene this forms unusual axes of viewpoint, e.g. between Allegra by the door and Levi at the blackboard, connecting the pair stylistically before we see how they relate in the narrative.

There are fairly clear indications from the mise-en-scene that we are in a world suspiciously similar to that of the game eXistenZ. The dominant colour is blue-black, linking the blackboard, posters, the shirts of many audience members as well as those of Levi and Dichter, and even Ted's scanning device, as parts of one kind of aesthetic experience. It is not necessary to wait until the game starts to dissolve and Allegra becomes aware of new blue headgear and armbands to realize that the dominant colour of the transCendenZ game is part of its branding by Pilgrimage. Markers of fictionality are deliberately disguised or made so obvious that we distrust them. In the motel, the unmotivated sounds of jungle-style crickets and the repeated hooting owl sound effect are only there to create a sense of sexual tension and to denote the time of day. The very obvious use of back projection as Ted and Allegra make their escape and even Ted's pink "fone" cued to appear behind the van once Allegra has thrown it out of the window, appears consistent with that of a moving vehicle in a classically created Hollywood movie. However, its impact in a film with relatively complex effects elsewhere (like the trout farm mutant amphibians), is to signal the fictive nature of what is being shown, and to allude to another type of video game: simulated car-driving.

Kevin Jackson states that Allegra is "plainly not averse to rescripting herself from a barely articulate wallflower in real life into a devastatingly sexy action babe in eXistenZ life."19 However, the obvious point is that it is not she who has "rescripted" herself but Cronenberg. The change from the ski chalet to the game world is signalled by the shift in Allegra's appearance from relatively flat shoes and shiny trousers, to blue high heels and a blue, short, tight skirt that rides up as she leans back on the crate in the backroom of the game emporium. In combination, this suggests a sensual heightening of game levels, rather than a sharp dichotomy of "reality" and "fiction." Jackson's praise reflects an expectation of fictional characters that are psychologically motivated, fully rounded individuals. However, Allegra is recast in the guise of a cartoonish, games character for a predominantly male adolescent market, in effect Cronenberg's tongue-in-cheek Lara Croft.

The appearance of the fantastical two-headed lizard at the gas station is indeed "a sign of the times," but more importantly, it is a sign of the director. Nabokov has expressed several times the notion that "in a first-rate work of fiction, the real conflict is not between the characters but between the author and the reader."20 When Allegra appears fascinated by the lizard's cuteness and guinea pig-like squealing, the film audience is also being encouraged to admire the ingenuity of its creator. Such creatures or the mutants in the trout farm pools function as directorial signatures like the creatures in George Lucas' bar-room scene in Star Wars (UK/US, 1977). The two-headed creature remains in the shot for some time and appears again shortly afterwards in daylight and to another character, Ted (thereby eliminating the possibility that it is Allegra's subjective hallucination). After the creature makes its appearance at the gas station (Cronenberg's first ever completely harmless special effect), it should be clear that this is a fantastic world, a game world.

In Invitation to a Beheading, Cincinnatus is aware of the insubstantiality of the world around him but resolves that now "I shall test for myself all the insubstantiality of this world of yours."21 Ted and Allegra engage in a similar tactile experiment on the fabric of Cronenberg's universe in eXistenZ. When Ted enters Kiri's ski chalet, a close-up shows his fingers digging into a chair, as if testing its "reality." On first entering the game, Ted touches his own face and smells his hand in disbelief. Later in the Chinese Restaurant section and almost lost on first viewing, Ted stands and declares "eXistenZ is paused!" and then sits back down and places his head on the table, which is no longer solid. Allowing Ted's head to sink into it, the table has taken on the colour and the texture of the bed in the motel. The "bleeds" between illusion and "reality" work both ways, into and out of game-worlds, foregrounding the creative presence behind the narrative, and implicitly illustrating Christine Ramsay's point that typical Cronenberg heroes are "mere possessions of the author."22

"I ONLY HAVE WORDS TO PLAY WITH."

Like Hitchcock, Nabokov likes to appear in his own fictions, via alter egos often signalled by anagrams, e.g. Vivian Darkbloom in Lolita, Vivian Bloodmark in Speak, Memory (1967) and Blavdak Vinomori in King, Queen, Knave (1928). Cronenberg's use of witty and ironic names has been noted before,23 but examples from eXistenZ and parallels with Nabokov, have not. Nabokov declares that "when naming incidental characters . . . I like to give them some mnemonic handle, a private tag."24 For Anthony Olcott, Nabokov's word-games make the reader "acutely aware of the author."25 In Lolita, for example, one of Lolita's classmates is named "Aubrey McFate." Jackson talks of Cronenberg's use of "preposterous names,"26 but his choices are far from random. In eXistenZ, Willem Dafoe's character appears at the petrol pumps and is addressed as Gas by Allegra at the same moment that his uniform displays the word "Gas." Like the Chinese waiter, he is a game character, who must be addressed by a term that describes his function. In the opening scene, we have the name of the latecomer, Noel Dichter, visible on screen as his I.D. is scanned but also verbalised by Ted, just in case we have missed the reference (Dichter being German for "poet"). The assassination attempt might then be seen as a rear-guard attempt by the forces of Literature to prevent hi-tech usurpation of modes of creativity, historically dominated by the written word.

The term "game" "commonly denotes frivolity and an escape from the exigencies of the world."27 The eponymous hero in Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) is described as "constantly playing some game of his own invention, without telling his partners its rules."28 This sense of insular aloofness is similar to Allegra's in eXistenZ, for although she does explain the rules of her game, she does so in a piecemeal fashion and only after Pikul has committed himself to the game. In The Defence (1930), the chess-dominated existence of the protagonist, Luzhin, prefigures Allegra's obsession with the game-world: "Instead of enriching Luzhin's life, chess impoverishes it by channelling his mental energies away from almost all other aspects of reality."29 In Invitation to a Beheading, Cincinnatus' mother talks of objects known as nonnons: "absolutely absurd objects, shapeless, mottled, pockmarked, knobbly things, like some kinds of fossils" which altered reality to make it seem as if "everything was restored, everything was fine."30 She could have been describing Allegra's game-pods, which like the nonnons, are popular with adults as well as children and involve a similar amelioration of existence through a distortion of "reality."

Appel also describes how Nabokov "begins a narrative only to stop and retell the passage differently; halts a scene to 'rerun' it on the chapter's screen."31 For example, towards the close of Lolita, we have a false trail that is almost immediately retraced: "Then I pulled out my automatic-I mean, this is the kind of fool thing a reader might suppose I did. It never even occurred to me to do it."32 Similarly, narrative momentum is arrested in eXistenZ by Ted when he pauses the game or by Nader's trance-like state, caused by a dialogue loop that needs to be repeated like a spell before he can continue. For Nabokov, the exact demarcation between game and serious issue is not always completely clear. In "Terra Incognita" (1931) the narrator witnesses a fight to the death, mistakenly imagining that "this was all a harmless game, that in a moment they would get up and, when they had caught their breath, would peacefully carry me off."33 What appears to be a game turns out to be real, whereas in Invitation to a Beheading, what Cincinnatus takes to be real, eventually dissolves into nothing but an existential illusion. In eXistenZ, the distinction between these two mutually exclusive options remains unclear, and Ted's question to Allegra after she has shot Kiri-"What if we're not in the game any more?"-receives no answer from her, nor in the coda that follows.

THE SENSE OF AN ENDING AND CENTRIFUGAL NARRATIVES

Often at the end of Nabokov's novels, the reader is made aware of the protagonist's fictionality. In Glory (1972), the hero, Martin, just disappears from a room mysteriously, prompting his friend, Darwin, to search underneath furniture for him, and in Bend Sinister, Nabokov explains that Krug, the protagonist, suddenly realises "that he and his son and his wife and everybody else are merely my whims and megrims."34 The notion that characters (and by extension, readers too) are merely dreams of their creator, who upon awakening would destroy them, is evoked in Borges' comment, "If the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious."35 In one of Nabokov's early choices of a literary work to translate, Lewis Carroll's Alice Through the Looking Glass (1896), Tweedledum warns Alice not to wake the Red King because "If that there king was to wake...you'd go out-bang!-just like a candle!"36

Appel comments on how Nabokov "reveals that the characters have 'cotton-padded bodies' and are the author's puppets, that all is a fiction; and how they widen the 'gaps' and 'holes' in the narrative until it breaks apart at 'the end' when the vectors are removed, the cast of characters is dismissed, and even the fiction fades away."37 The coda of eXistenZ returns us to the church hall as the characters discover themselves to be part of their own narratives. Going beyond a parody of script writing conferences or an attempt by Cronenberg to pre-empt adverse criticism, the protagonists talk of their own feelings about the roles they played in a revelation of the mechanisms of storytelling, although as I have suggested, the fictional nature of the main body of the film is signalled throughout.

The underlying form of a Nabokovian narrative is less circular than spiral-like, ending close to, but not exactly where it began. Pale Fire, described by Cronenberg as "still one of my favourite novels,"38 ends on an uncompleted couplet as though interrupted, and as L.L. Lee asserts, "We can only suppose, as Kinbote supposes, that the final line would repeat the first line, starting a new spiral."39 In Pnin, "the novel has gone, not full circle, but full spiral.... Pnin's lecture, is to be repeated but not in the same form."40 At the close of The Gift (1938), the hero, Fyodor, reveals to Zina that he is planning to write a book: the novel that we have been reading, "the gift" of the title; in other words, the narrative "is built in its own spiral, the beginning is contained in the end but has become different; it is the author's own personal wrestling with time, a victory and a defeat."41 In Ada (1970), the text presented to Van on his ninety-seventh birthday is the text that we have been reading. In Lolita, Humbert's narrative will only be read after his execution and in Pale Fire, Kinbote expects to find himself in Shade's poem.

Rodley asserts that, "As soon as eXistenZ is over you feel the need to "play" the film again to understand its rules more fully, certain you must have missed something."42 This is undoubtedly true. eXistenZ seems designed specifically for "consumption" on video (particularly given the film's central game-playing conceit). The allusive and deceptive nature of the film not only repays repeated viewings but actually requires it. For critics like Joseph Frank, modernist fiction tends to replace causal relationships with word-groups, which relate to one another internally. The meaning of such groups is not clear "until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity," with the result that "modernist fiction...cannot be read, but only re-read," because "a knowledge of the whole is essential to an understanding of any part."43 In Pale Fire, Shade suggests that "human fate may be, like the design of a complicated game, apparent only in retrospect."44 Understanding is only possible via a process of artistic involution.

NABOKOV AND CRONENBERG

Nabokov's influence on Cronenberg is too pervasive to be comprehensively covered in a paper of this length, but it is possible to signal other Cronenberg texts that would repay close examination for Nabokovian elements. The ending of Crash reveals a narrative that might appear to be circular and repetitive, but is actually spiral-like and centrifugal. In Lolita, Humbert explains "And while I was waiting for them [the police and the ambulance people] to run up to me on the high slope, I evoked a last mirage of wonder and hopelessness,"45 articulating a typical tonal feature of Cronenberg: the melancholic epiphany. In the published screenplay of Crash, as Catherine lies on the embankment, expressing a mixture of pain at her injuries and frustration at not dying, she is described "as though she has been crying, and there is wetness at the corner of her eyes." Catherine "begins to move, stretching her arms behind her head, as though awakening from a deep sleep,"46 evoking a sensuous, romantic heroine, like Keats' La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Although a surface reading might suggest that Cronenberg's Crash has an episodic procession of apparently interchangeable sex scenes, the denouement, whilst echoing the opening three scenes and clearly signalling itself as a conscious framing device, can be read as a reaffirmation of love rather than empty repetition.

Endings that collapse upon themselves are evident in Videodrome and Naked Lunch. In the latter film, the coach station scene shows the hero, Lee, to be in New York and not Tangiers, thereby problematising the preceding narrative. Indeed, like Nabokov's Cinncinatus in Invitation to a Beheading, Serge Grunberg feels, on visiting the set of the bazaar scene that "suddenly this totally artificial Tangiers where the sky is dotted with powerful projectors and where doors only open onto a naked wooden framework, is revealed for what it is-precisely a set, a vast labyrinth, which when seen from a crane resembles a brain in cross section," (italics added), which he finds to be an example of "crude Brechtian distanciation."47 In Cronenberg's version of Burroughs' narrative, what is "naked" is not so much a laying bare of human nature as a revelation of the mechanisms of storytelling.

There is also a related point about novelisations that deserves further research. Jean-Paul Sartre speaks of readers who come to novels after having seen the film version, and who view the book as "a more or less faithful commentary" on the film.48 Ironically, a similar effect is produced by novelisations, works of literature, which had no existence before the film. Sartre is describing a subjective impression produced by ignorance of the literature, but novelisations can also add to one's understanding of a film. To create such a work, a writer must watch a film several times shot-by-shot, if not frame-by-frame, and then produce a prose "reading" or interpretation of the film. With front covers now routinely reprinted to feature shots from the film as a mutually-reinforcing marketing strategy, in a sense, a novelisation can be seen as the subtext of a film or the text upon which a film could have been based.

Christopher Priest's novelisation of eXistenZ (1999) might even be seen as creating a Nabokovian work of prose. In Pnin, the appearance of a "quiet, lacy-winged little green insect"49 just as Pnin finds he is to be fired, acts as a reminder of authorial presence and highlights his self-absorbed nature. As Pnin washes up, he cuts his hand on a splinter of glass, which "stung him" (italics added).50 Apparently unwittingly, Priest uses the same image pattern with insects appearing before assassination, death and a major change in the fortunes of the protagonists, (also reflecting the shared passion of Cronenberg and Nabokov for lepidoptery), e.g. "Something buzzed and fluttered against Ted Pikul's chest, feeling like a large winged insect,"51 which turns out to be his pink "fone." Ted's mind is "on other things" and "he swiped at it absently, flapping his fingers with an irritated motion."52 For both Nabokov and Cronenberg, the insect motif acts as a symbol of imminent change or loss,53 and more particularly as evidence of authorial presence, which is a key element in the opening sequence of eXistenZ.

Irving Howe proposes that for Nabokov, "the main question will no longer be the conditions of existence but existence itself."54 As a potent expression of the cinematic experience, eXistenZ articulates how we wilfully indulge in illusions, dramatising the Sartrean paradox of how we have more and less freedom than we may think. Cronenberg literally "plays" with a number of Nabokovian features, including ludic motifs, the use of mise-enabime, the significance of naming, self-consuming narrative structures, and markers of authorial intrusion. He places the figure of the artist at the core of the narrative in a strange hybrid of Romanticism and literary modernism, suggesting that an artist at the end of the twentieth century, is just as likely to be the creator of video games as the writer of fictional autobiography.

[Footnote]

NOTES

1. Gaile McCregor, "Grounding the Countertext: David Cronenberg and the Ethnospecificity of Horror," Canadian Journal of Film Studies 2.1 (1992): 56.

2. David Cronenberg, "Appendix: Festival of Festivals' 1983 Science Fiction Retrospective," in David Cronenberg: Dossier 21, Wayne Drew, ed. (London:British Film Institute, 1984), 57. See Jorge Luis Borges, "Kafka and His Precursors," in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964), 201.

3. Linda Kauffman, "David Cronenberg's Surreal Abjection," in Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 188.

4. Peter Morris, David Cronenberg: A Delicate Balance (Toronto: ECW Press, 1994), 17.

5. David Cronenberg cited in Xavier Mendik, "Logic, Creativity and (Critical) Misinterpretation: An Interview with David Cronenberg," in The Modern Fantastic: The Films of David Cronenberg, Michael Grant, ed. (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 2000), 171.

6. David Cronenberg, cited in Chris Rodley, "Came Boy," Sight and Sound 9.4 (1999): 9. On the Rushdie interview see, "Interview with David Cronenberg," Shift Magazine 3.4 (1995): 13 (www.cronenberg.freeserve.co.uk/cr_rushd.html).

7. Morris, 33.

8. Rodley, 10.

9. Alfred Appel Jr., The Annotated Lolita (New York: McCraw-Hill, 1970), 347.

10 Barbara Heldt Monter, "Spring in Fialta: The Choice That Mimics Chance," in Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences, Translations and Tributes, Alfred Appel, Jr. and Charles Newman, eds. (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1971), 133.

11. Appel Jr., lxi.

12. Rodley, 9.

13. Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 203.

14. Ibid.

15. Leona Toker, Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 138.

16. Ibid., p. 78.

17. Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 5.

18. William W. Rowe, "The Honesty of Nabokovian Deception," in A Book of Things about Vladimir Nabokov, Carl R. Proffer, ed.(Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis Inc., 1974), 179.

19. Kevin Jackson, "eXistenZ," Sight & Sound 9.5 (1999): 46.

20. Dabney Stuart, Nabokov: The Dimensions of Parody (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 89.

21. Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 63.

22. Christine Ramsay, "Dead Queers: One Legacy of the Trope of 'Mind Over Matter' in the Films of David Cronenberg," Canadian Journal of Film Studies 8.1 (1999): 51.

23. Maurice Yacowar, "The Comedy of Cronenberg," in The Shape of Rage: The Films of David Cronenberg, Piers Handling, ed. (Toronto: Academy of Canadian Cinema, 1983; New York: New York Zoetrope Inc., 1983), 80-86.

24. Vladimir Nabokov, Ada (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 393.

25. Anthony Olcott, "The Author's Special Intention: A Study of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight," in Proffer, ed., 107.

26. Jackson, 46.

27. Appel Jr., xix.

28. Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 181.

29. Toker, 72.

30. Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, 123.

31. Appel Jr., xxxi.

32. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (London: Corgi Books, 1961), 295.

33. Vladimir Nabokov, "Terra Incognita," in A Russian Beauty and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 122.

34. Nabokov, "Introduction," Bend Sinister, xiv.

35. Borges, "Partial Magic in the Quixote," in Labyrinths, 196.

36. Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking Glass (London: Galley Press, 1988), 81.

37. Appel Jr., xxi.

38. Richard Porton, "The Film Director as Philosopher: An Interview with David Cronenberg," Cineaste 24.4 (1999): 9.

39. L.L. Lee, Vladimir Nabokov, Twayne's United States Authors Series, 226 (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1976), 140.

40. Ibid., 129.

41. Ibid., 83.

42. Rodley, 9.

43. Stephen Jan Parker, Understanding Vladimir Nabokov (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1987), 16.

44. Lucy Maddox, Nabokov's Novels in English (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 2.

45. Nabokov, Lolita, 323.

46. David Cronenberg, Crash (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), 64.

47. Serge Grunberg, "Sur les terres de Cronenberg," Cahiers du Cinema 446 (1991): 38.

48. Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? Bernard Frechtman, trans. (London: Methuen, 1950), 245.

49. Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), 144.

50. Ibid., 172.

51. Christopher Priest, eXistenZ (New York: Harper Entertainment, 1999), 1.

52. Ibid., 1.

53. See Michael Grant, "Cronenberg and the Poetics of Time," in The Modern Fantastic, 128-129.

54. Irving Howe quoted in Ellen Pifer, Nabokov and the Novel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 92.