“Setting his myriad faces in his text” is a paraphrase of Vladimir Nabokov's paraphrase of a passage from James Joyce's Ulysses which Nabokov discusses in his Cornell lectures. In his examination of Ulysses, Nabokov demonstrates his fascination with authorial presence, a device known from time immemorial and customarily employed in various creative media, such as literature, fine arts, and cinema. In particular, Nabokov draws his students' attention to Joyce's “Man in the Brown Macintosh,” whose identity Nabokov interprets as follows:
Do we know who he is? I think we do. The clue comes in chapter 4 of part two, the scene at the library. Stephen is discussing Shakespeare and affirms that Shakespeare himself is present in his, Shakespeare's, works. Shakespeare, he says, tensely: “He has hidden his own name, a fair name, William, in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvas …” and this is exactly what Joyce has done – setting his face in a dark corner of this canvas [emphasis added]. The Man in the Brown Macintosh who passes through the dream of the book is no other than the author himself.
(LL, 319–20)As this passage suggests, Nabokov was fascinated with manifestations of authorial presence in the works of his predecessors and contemporaries, such as Shakespeare and Joyce. At the same time, Nabokov tended to encode his own presence as author in his texts, a habit which has long been noted by Nabokov scholars.