JM: I consider "Pale Fire" to be exemplary of "deceit." In "Strong Opinions" (p.11) Nabokov states that "all art is deception and so is nature; all is deception in that good cheat, from the insect that mimics a leaf to the popular enticements of procreation." before he continues, stating that "deception in chess, as in art, is only part of the game; it's part of the combination, part of the delightful possibilities, illusions, vistas of thought, which can be false vistas, perhaps..."
 
PS (on one of the kinds of "false vistas of thought"...), extracted from Charles Schulz, in 1969's "It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown."
 

Lucy:
Well, look here! A big yellow butterfly! It’s unusual to see one this time of year unless, of course, he flew up from Brazil... I’ll bet that’s it! They do that sometimes, you know... They fly up from Brazil, and they...

Linus:
This is no butterfly... This is a potato chip!

Lucy:
Well, I’ll be! So it is! I wonder how a potato chip got all the way up here from Brazil?

 

PS n.2: 19th Century' Huxley's "Player on the Other Side" (excerpt)

Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every one of us would, one day or other, depend upon his winning or losing a game of chess. Don't you think that we should all consider it to be a primary duty to learn the names and the moves of the pieces; to have a notion of a gambit, and a keen eye for all the means of giving and getting out of check? Do you not think that we should look with a disapprobation amounting to scorn, upon the father who allowed his son, or the state which allowed its members, to grow up without knowing a pawn from a knight? ...The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.

Would Nabokov, as a writer, fit into Huxley's description of "one's adversary"  Fiction is not a game of life and fortune, is it (except for the author or editors)?  

 

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