Subject
Fw: pynchon-l-digest V2 #3415 PALE FIRE
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>
> Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 09:21:29 +1000
> From: jbor <jbor@bigpond.com>
> Subject: Re: NPPF: Preliminary: The Epigraph
>
> >> <<Sure (except, to make this point, you, or Rorty,
> >> *are* mulling over and worrying about it). The fact
> >> that he's a bond trader doesn't automatically preclude
> >> him from having a way with descriptive adjectives,
> >> adverbs and imagery, of course.
>
> on 15/7/03 10:39 PM, Malignd at malignd@yahoo.com wrote:
>
> > Well, yes, it's possible, of course, that there are
> > bond traders who write like Fitzgerald, but if a
> > reader or if Fitzgerald brings that into the novel, it
> > becomes the single most interesting thing about the
> > novel. Who's this bland chap nextdoor who writes so
> > well? Why's he mucking about trading bonds? And yes,
> > Rorty and I are mulling it, but so what? The point is
> > still the same: Fitzgerald is not intending that
> > Carraway be framed by the reader as someone who writes
> > like a poet, who is wasting his life on Wall Street.
>
> Sure, this isn't ever an element of the plot. But I also think there is a
> distance between Nick and Fitzgerald, and that part of this is effected in
> the way that Nick's idealism and a certain jejuneness spills over into his
> prose style. I'd have to go back and reread it, but Nick's youth and
> gaucheness does come across through his imaginative retelling of the
events.
>
> >> Is Kinbote totally "mad", or just occasionally
> >> deluded? (Eg. How would he have kept his job at
> >> Wordsmith if altogether insane?) This aside, many
> >> great artists and writers were cot-cases. And, does he
> >> really write exactly "like Nabokov"? There are quite a
> >> few assumptions made in this and I'm still not sure
> >> that I see it as a valid argument.
> >
> > Whether or not he's "mad" is not crucial to my point;
> > let's say he isn't. There's still the fact that he
> > writes very well and, yes, I'd say "like Nabokov" and
> > that fact seems relevant and inescapable in
> > considering the question of internal authorship, even
> > if one's conclusion is to discard the idea that one
> > wrote the other.
>
> But there are errors and incongruities in Kinbote's writing, such as the
> "your favorite" in the second paragraph of the Foreword, which is
> grammatically and cohesively inconsistent with the rest of that paragraph.
> Nabokov has had Kinbote write deliberately in this manner, and it's not
the
> way Nabokov would write a Foreword to a critical edition of, say _Eugene
> Onegin_. Sure, there are flashes of inspired writing, but Kinbote is also
> pathologically verbose and he is unable to control the tone of his
writing,
> and much of what he does write, and the way he it is written, is
> inappropriate to the context in which he is writing, and these are
stylistic
> flaws which Nabokov has consciously endowed him with as an aspect of the
> characterisation.
>
> It's worth following the hypothesis through.
>
> best
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 22:51:18 -0400
> From: Terrance <lycidas2@earthlink.net>
> Subject: Re: VLVL2 (1) Zoyd's =?iso-8859-1?Q?WORK=A0?=
>
>
> Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 22:22:10 -0500
> From: "Tim Strzechowski" <dedalus204@comcast.net>
> Subject: VLVL2 and NPPF: Birds [was VLVL2 (1): Annotations (pp. 3 - 4)]
>
> > Must remember that bird references are ubiquitous in VL, and tend to be
> > associated with the communication of stories and ideas, often of an
> > ahistorical kind (see for ex the story telling parrot on p. 223). The
> > militant jays (which figure symbolically in the ending) conspicuously
> > contrast with the pigeons - TP is tipping his hand that he is working
> > within a dialectic. Jays are among the most aggressive and striking
> > looking of birds while pigeons are commonplace, rather dirty, but a
member
> > of the dove family and thus associated with peace. I believe (must check
> > this later), whereas jays will disrupt other bird's nests, pigeons mate
> > for life, an obvious contrast between domestic felicity and potential
> > domestic tragedy. (And sonically, pigeon = Pynchon) PIgeons are also
> > associated with messaging in other ways, i.e. stool pigeons, and, of
> > course, with being a victim; jays are militant, of this world, while
> > pigeons are badly suited to this world, i.e. icons of another world.
It's
> > interesting that Pynchon describes Zoyd's inability to read or
understand
> > the message of the other-worldly pigeons a the beginning of his own
book,
> > seemingly an ironic invocation to readers, and that he uses the phrase,
> > "but none of whom . . . he could ever get get to in time." The contrast
is
> > subtly made between what doesn't understand "in time," that is the
> > profane, and what might understand 'out of time,' the sacred.
> >
>
> This is excellent, and I must admit I hadn't thought before about the
> significance of birds in this book in particular. This gives me something
> to look more closely at in the upcoming chapters.
>
> For those reading PF, is there a similar significance to birds in the
novel?
>
> Tim
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 22:44:39 -0500
> From: "Tim Strzechowski" <dedalus204@comcast.net>
> Subject: Re: VLVL2 and NPPF: Missed Communication
>
> > If missed communication can be taken as Zoyd's disconnectedness with the
> > world around him, then Kinbote becomes an easy parallel. My sense of
> > chapter one of VL (and I haven't read it in over a decade, so this one
> > chapter I read yesterday feels fairly new to me), is of a sort of Rip
van
> > Winkle waking up to a world that has changed while he slept, but not
> > realizing it right away (not getting the message).
> >
> > Similarly, one approach to PF is to view Kinbote (as the alias of
Russian
> > scholar V. Botkin) as one who feels dispossessed by his homeland, left
in
> > the past as it were by the new Soviet system to which he doesn't find
any
> > connection, and Zembla is the homeland he creates to replace it.
Neither
> > character is living in the world as it is in the present.
> >
>
> Excellent comparison between the two characters. Curiously, it's made all
> the more compelling because one work is told in 3rd person and the other
in
> 1st person, no? I wonder how the narrative voice impacts the ways in
which
> we, as readers, perceive the missed communications?
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 23:05:13 -0500
> From: "Tim Strzechowski" <dedalus204@comcast.net>
> Subject: Re: VLVL2 (1): Narrator's Voice
>
> > The one thing that leapt out at me after I read the introduction to Pale
> > Fire one day and the first section of Vineland the next day was the
> > vocabulary levels. As with GR and M&D, I needed the dictionary at hand
> > as I read through the intro to PF. Sure, most of the words were
> > decipherable through context, and some were halfway familiar, but
reading
> > with the dictionary open for me adds another dimension of enjoyment to a
> > work of literature. The startling thing to me was that there were NO
> > words that needed a dictionary in the opening section to Vineland. I've
> > read the book at least a half a dozen times before and this never
crossed
> > my mind, but I think this is where much of the disrespect that Vineland
> > gets from Pynchon fans comes from, the fact that any reasonably read
> > tenth grader could cruise through this novel.
> >
> > I found the narrator's voice in Vineland to be similar to that of the
> > narrator in Gravity's Rainbow, a warm caring person aghast at the events
> > he is describing.
> >
> > I think the cries that "Pynchon has lost it!" that were heard after the
> > release of Vineland have to do with the vocabulary. But it seems pretty
> > clear to me that Pynchon made a conscious choice to write in a more
> > vernacular tone.
> >
>
>
> I personally hear a much more consistent voice in VL that that found in
GR.
> It seems like in GR the voice and its tone can change at any given moment,
> sometimes within the same scene, or the same paragraph, or even the same
> sentence. The narrative voice in GR is much more slippery to me than in
VL
> where, for the most part, Pynchon has kind of a "que pasa," hipster tone,
> much as you describe. Now, it may gain complexity as the novel continues
> (and if I recall correctly, I believe it does), but that's kind of how I
> hear it.
>
> And yes, the vocabulary is definitely more sophisticated in PF, as is the
> sentence structure and overall tone of the piece. Nabokov is able to
affect
> beautifully that Old World European scholarly voice (perfected, I think,
in
> _Lolita_) via his diction, his syntax, his tone, and it contrasts sharply
> with the narrative voice in VL.
>
> Tim
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 21:26:00 -0700
> From: "s~Z" <keithsz@concentric.net>
> Subject: NPPF/VLVL2 Fw: What means Zoyd?
>
> Zoyd is code for Boyd, one of many Nabokov allusions in the text.
>
> ------------------------------
>
> End of pynchon-l-digest V2 #3415
> ********************************
>
> To unsubscribe, send a message to waste@waste.org
> with "unsubscribe pynchon-l-digest" in the message body.
> Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 09:21:29 +1000
> From: jbor <jbor@bigpond.com>
> Subject: Re: NPPF: Preliminary: The Epigraph
>
> >> <<Sure (except, to make this point, you, or Rorty,
> >> *are* mulling over and worrying about it). The fact
> >> that he's a bond trader doesn't automatically preclude
> >> him from having a way with descriptive adjectives,
> >> adverbs and imagery, of course.
>
> on 15/7/03 10:39 PM, Malignd at malignd@yahoo.com wrote:
>
> > Well, yes, it's possible, of course, that there are
> > bond traders who write like Fitzgerald, but if a
> > reader or if Fitzgerald brings that into the novel, it
> > becomes the single most interesting thing about the
> > novel. Who's this bland chap nextdoor who writes so
> > well? Why's he mucking about trading bonds? And yes,
> > Rorty and I are mulling it, but so what? The point is
> > still the same: Fitzgerald is not intending that
> > Carraway be framed by the reader as someone who writes
> > like a poet, who is wasting his life on Wall Street.
>
> Sure, this isn't ever an element of the plot. But I also think there is a
> distance between Nick and Fitzgerald, and that part of this is effected in
> the way that Nick's idealism and a certain jejuneness spills over into his
> prose style. I'd have to go back and reread it, but Nick's youth and
> gaucheness does come across through his imaginative retelling of the
events.
>
> >> Is Kinbote totally "mad", or just occasionally
> >> deluded? (Eg. How would he have kept his job at
> >> Wordsmith if altogether insane?) This aside, many
> >> great artists and writers were cot-cases. And, does he
> >> really write exactly "like Nabokov"? There are quite a
> >> few assumptions made in this and I'm still not sure
> >> that I see it as a valid argument.
> >
> > Whether or not he's "mad" is not crucial to my point;
> > let's say he isn't. There's still the fact that he
> > writes very well and, yes, I'd say "like Nabokov" and
> > that fact seems relevant and inescapable in
> > considering the question of internal authorship, even
> > if one's conclusion is to discard the idea that one
> > wrote the other.
>
> But there are errors and incongruities in Kinbote's writing, such as the
> "your favorite" in the second paragraph of the Foreword, which is
> grammatically and cohesively inconsistent with the rest of that paragraph.
> Nabokov has had Kinbote write deliberately in this manner, and it's not
the
> way Nabokov would write a Foreword to a critical edition of, say _Eugene
> Onegin_. Sure, there are flashes of inspired writing, but Kinbote is also
> pathologically verbose and he is unable to control the tone of his
writing,
> and much of what he does write, and the way he it is written, is
> inappropriate to the context in which he is writing, and these are
stylistic
> flaws which Nabokov has consciously endowed him with as an aspect of the
> characterisation.
>
> It's worth following the hypothesis through.
>
> best
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 22:51:18 -0400
> From: Terrance <lycidas2@earthlink.net>
> Subject: Re: VLVL2 (1) Zoyd's =?iso-8859-1?Q?WORK=A0?=
>
>
> Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 22:22:10 -0500
> From: "Tim Strzechowski" <dedalus204@comcast.net>
> Subject: VLVL2 and NPPF: Birds [was VLVL2 (1): Annotations (pp. 3 - 4)]
>
> > Must remember that bird references are ubiquitous in VL, and tend to be
> > associated with the communication of stories and ideas, often of an
> > ahistorical kind (see for ex the story telling parrot on p. 223). The
> > militant jays (which figure symbolically in the ending) conspicuously
> > contrast with the pigeons - TP is tipping his hand that he is working
> > within a dialectic. Jays are among the most aggressive and striking
> > looking of birds while pigeons are commonplace, rather dirty, but a
member
> > of the dove family and thus associated with peace. I believe (must check
> > this later), whereas jays will disrupt other bird's nests, pigeons mate
> > for life, an obvious contrast between domestic felicity and potential
> > domestic tragedy. (And sonically, pigeon = Pynchon) PIgeons are also
> > associated with messaging in other ways, i.e. stool pigeons, and, of
> > course, with being a victim; jays are militant, of this world, while
> > pigeons are badly suited to this world, i.e. icons of another world.
It's
> > interesting that Pynchon describes Zoyd's inability to read or
understand
> > the message of the other-worldly pigeons a the beginning of his own
book,
> > seemingly an ironic invocation to readers, and that he uses the phrase,
> > "but none of whom . . . he could ever get get to in time." The contrast
is
> > subtly made between what doesn't understand "in time," that is the
> > profane, and what might understand 'out of time,' the sacred.
> >
>
> This is excellent, and I must admit I hadn't thought before about the
> significance of birds in this book in particular. This gives me something
> to look more closely at in the upcoming chapters.
>
> For those reading PF, is there a similar significance to birds in the
novel?
>
> Tim
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 22:44:39 -0500
> From: "Tim Strzechowski" <dedalus204@comcast.net>
> Subject: Re: VLVL2 and NPPF: Missed Communication
>
> > If missed communication can be taken as Zoyd's disconnectedness with the
> > world around him, then Kinbote becomes an easy parallel. My sense of
> > chapter one of VL (and I haven't read it in over a decade, so this one
> > chapter I read yesterday feels fairly new to me), is of a sort of Rip
van
> > Winkle waking up to a world that has changed while he slept, but not
> > realizing it right away (not getting the message).
> >
> > Similarly, one approach to PF is to view Kinbote (as the alias of
Russian
> > scholar V. Botkin) as one who feels dispossessed by his homeland, left
in
> > the past as it were by the new Soviet system to which he doesn't find
any
> > connection, and Zembla is the homeland he creates to replace it.
Neither
> > character is living in the world as it is in the present.
> >
>
> Excellent comparison between the two characters. Curiously, it's made all
> the more compelling because one work is told in 3rd person and the other
in
> 1st person, no? I wonder how the narrative voice impacts the ways in
which
> we, as readers, perceive the missed communications?
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 23:05:13 -0500
> From: "Tim Strzechowski" <dedalus204@comcast.net>
> Subject: Re: VLVL2 (1): Narrator's Voice
>
> > The one thing that leapt out at me after I read the introduction to Pale
> > Fire one day and the first section of Vineland the next day was the
> > vocabulary levels. As with GR and M&D, I needed the dictionary at hand
> > as I read through the intro to PF. Sure, most of the words were
> > decipherable through context, and some were halfway familiar, but
reading
> > with the dictionary open for me adds another dimension of enjoyment to a
> > work of literature. The startling thing to me was that there were NO
> > words that needed a dictionary in the opening section to Vineland. I've
> > read the book at least a half a dozen times before and this never
crossed
> > my mind, but I think this is where much of the disrespect that Vineland
> > gets from Pynchon fans comes from, the fact that any reasonably read
> > tenth grader could cruise through this novel.
> >
> > I found the narrator's voice in Vineland to be similar to that of the
> > narrator in Gravity's Rainbow, a warm caring person aghast at the events
> > he is describing.
> >
> > I think the cries that "Pynchon has lost it!" that were heard after the
> > release of Vineland have to do with the vocabulary. But it seems pretty
> > clear to me that Pynchon made a conscious choice to write in a more
> > vernacular tone.
> >
>
>
> I personally hear a much more consistent voice in VL that that found in
GR.
> It seems like in GR the voice and its tone can change at any given moment,
> sometimes within the same scene, or the same paragraph, or even the same
> sentence. The narrative voice in GR is much more slippery to me than in
VL
> where, for the most part, Pynchon has kind of a "que pasa," hipster tone,
> much as you describe. Now, it may gain complexity as the novel continues
> (and if I recall correctly, I believe it does), but that's kind of how I
> hear it.
>
> And yes, the vocabulary is definitely more sophisticated in PF, as is the
> sentence structure and overall tone of the piece. Nabokov is able to
affect
> beautifully that Old World European scholarly voice (perfected, I think,
in
> _Lolita_) via his diction, his syntax, his tone, and it contrasts sharply
> with the narrative voice in VL.
>
> Tim
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 21:26:00 -0700
> From: "s~Z" <keithsz@concentric.net>
> Subject: NPPF/VLVL2 Fw: What means Zoyd?
>
> Zoyd is code for Boyd, one of many Nabokov allusions in the text.
>
> ------------------------------
>
> End of pynchon-l-digest V2 #3415
> ********************************
>
> To unsubscribe, send a message to waste@waste.org
> with "unsubscribe pynchon-l-digest" in the message body.