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Nabokov already ingeniously toy with romantic triangles to produce more intricate patterns. His novels approach the condition of puzzles—
Pale Fire
was rigged on the scheme of an annotated poem and the introduction playfully invited us to buy two copies to read it properly. Novels by other men play hopscotch with us, or invite us to shuffle the pages and make our own plots. Robbe-Grillet gives us an overlapping sequence of repetitions of actions; all such inventions have a somewhat capricious air, but I think the two directions, of novel as philosophy, of novel as object, will be fruitfully pursued. Heightened intellectual demands should compress the conventional size of the novel; hundreds of thousands of words in Dickens’ time, it may settle at around two hundred pages, the length of a mystery story, of
Candide
, or of a novel by Samuel Beckett.
    The surface of the page, now a generally dead rectangle of gray, a transparent window into the action, could be a lively plane of typographic invention, as it was for Apollinaire—a surface that says “This is printing” much as Impressionism forsook the licked illusionistic surface and announced, “This is painting.” The comic strip offers a blend of picture and word that, though it has not attained the status of high art, has, in strips like the old “Krazy Kat” and the contemporary “Peanuts,” climbed rather high. I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece. Artistically, this century has belonged to the eye; concrete poetry, medieval manuscripts, and Egyptian hieroglyphs all hint at paths of accommodation in an ecumenical movement among eye-oriented media.
    If these suggestions sound frivolous, let me say that tale-telling
is
a kind of toying, and that something of primitive magic does linger about the manipulation of verbal dolls. When the speaker was an undergraduate student of “creative writing,” a guest writer, John Hawkes, told our class—amazingly, I thought—“When I want a character to fly, I just say, ‘He flew.’ ” We are, all of us novelists, like neoclassic playwrights captive to the three unities, prisoners of conventions we cannot imagine our way around; a wonderful freedom awaits us, and extraordinary opportunities. Let me admit to the hopeful fancy that some book such as I haveimagined—a short novel, approaching the compact, riddling condition of an object—may serve as the vehicle of a philosophic revolution. That a new Rousseau or a new Marx or a new Kierkegaard may choose to speak to us through the Novel. That the Novel, relieved of some of its old duties as an emotional masseur, may prove to be a light and nimble messenger. That, though at the moment the Novel roosts a little heavily in the bookshops, to fly it only needs him to come along who will say, “It flies.”
From
Humor in Fiction
‡
    T HE TITLE of this talk has been assigned to me; and, though I confess I find it congenial, I confess also that I can hardly imagine a language
less
international than that of written humor. For humor, written or otherwise, operates in the nuancé margins of experience and communication; not only is a pun lost in translation from one language to another, but also lost are rhythm, slang, and the many fine halftones of verbal allusion. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, in parenthetically discussing the failure of Shakespeare’s humor to amuse him, ventures the surprising thought that “humor … is an oral genre, a sudden spark in conversation, not a written thing.” And, if we reflect upon those occasions when we laugh, we perceive how delicate and complex are the forces giving rise to our reaction, how close to pathos or banality these forces verge, and how difficult it is to describe, later, what, in the heat of conversation or, it may be, in the forward surge of reading, seemed so funny.
    The phenomenon of humor, or laughter, has not failed to attract