“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:

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.