Nabokov too made what we might call cameo appearances in his novels, although the use of the first person narrative somewhat complicates what are and aren't "cameos" in his case. At the end of Bend Sinister (1947), the first book Nabokov wrote in America, the writer clearly makes a cameo. The bulk of the novel is written in third person, but at the story's conclusion Krug, the protagonist, is shot and the narrative is magically transformed into the first person as we find Nabokov, the writer, finishing his manuscript and getting up to look out his window. At this point he notes "I knew that the immortality I had conferred upon the poor fellow (Krug) was a slippery sophism, a play upon words."13

Another cameo occurs at the end of Pnin (1957) when Nabokov roars into the narrative in his car as the professor hired to replace Pnin. Arguments could also be made that the forward to Lolita (1955, U.S. 1958) authored by John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. functions as a form of cameo appearance, but Nabokov's authorial voice is so strong through both this novel and Pale Fire that there is hardly any necessity for a cameo appearance as such in these two works.

The Technique of Self Reference
By "technique of self reference" I mean that Hitchcock's films and Nabokov's novels contain a number of self references (above and beyond the cameos) that—if perceived by the viewer or reader—lend a uniquely heightened sense of artificiality and self consciousness to the experience. Pale Fire is perhaps the best example of this self-referential technique in Nabokov's fiction. Both John Shade and Charles Kinbote of the novel have a considerable amount in common with their creator, Nabokov; Shade is the brilliant writer (and professor at the aptly named Wordsmith College) living a cloistered life in the environment of academia, while Kinbote is the exiled king from the country of Zembla. Nabokov, the lifelong academic who considered himself an exile from his homeland of Russia, must certainly have strongly identified with his two characters. But there is a further, more specific biographical aspect to Pale Fire: the assassination of Shade by Jacob Gradus is a working out of Nabokov's complicated feelings about the assassination of his own father, who was shot to death (probably accidentally) by a Czar loyalist in 1922 while living life as an exile.

The biographical nature of Hitchcock's work has been considerably commented upon since the director's death in 1980. In Dark Side of Genius, Donald Spoto goes to considerable lengths to detail the biographical references in Shadow of a Doubt (1943), including the fact that Hitchcock named the mother character, Emma, after his own mother who was dying in England at the time the film was made.14 In another personal work, I Confess (1953), Hitchcock names the wife of the film's villain, Otto Keller, after his own wife, Alma. He also completes a pun a la Nabokov (or James Joyce) by having the killer in the film named Keller. And Hitchcock was not above referring to himself in his films; in his next movie, Dial "M" for Murder (1954), Tony Wendes and T.J. Swann discuss the porter at their college whom Swann framed for a robbery. The porter's name, mentioned several times: "poor old Alfred." These intrusions of "real life" on the artificial world of the film and novel only serve to heighten the self-reflexive effect and remind the viewer/reader that they are experiencing the creation of an imaginary world. Hitchcock, in fact, created a neat visual metaphor for this effect in Psycho by filling the Bates Motel and home with mirrors that reflected the world back on the film's characters (and viewers).

Hitchcock also appears to have made reference to his own films on several occasions. North by Northwest is a film in the "picaresque" tradition of several of Hitchcock's earlier works, most notably The Thirty Nine Steps (1935), his first major British film. Thornhill and Eve in North by Northwest spend the night on the train in room 3901, an allusion, no doubt, to The 39 Steps. Several of the characters in Rope (1948), Hitchcock's first independent production, at one point are clearly referring to Hitchcock's own Notorious (1946) in a discussion about recent movies they have seen. In the concluding scene of Psycho, the psychiatrist "explains" Norman Bates condition while a calendar on the wall behind him reads "17"; this is, perhaps, a reference to Hitchcock's early film Number Seventeen (1932) made at British International.15 Nabokov was also not above this type of playful self reference. In the poem "Pale Fire," John Shade writes "Hurricane/Lolita spread from Florida to Maine," a clear reference to the fact that Lolita became a bestseller after its eventual publication in the United States in 1958.