EDNOTE. Nick Grundy poses an interesting question.
Can anyone point out a case of VN linguistic virtuosisty that is that is
"unmotivated"?
I am, by the way, glad to hear
some are finding the Pynchon list material of interest. Some aren't, I know. It
is hard to follow at times (and, much as I would like to), I don't follow it
closely for time reasons but a lot of interesting explication,
especially in the form of possibly relevant cut and paste stuff. NABOKV-L might
try something of the sort ere long. Reactions?
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, September 13, 2003 1:54 PM
Subject: Linguistic showoffs
Just going through some of the pynchon-l crosspostings which
built up while I was on holiday, and I came across this:
>>"The
main favor I ask of a serious critic is sufficient perceptiveness to
>>
understand that whatever term or trope I use, my purpose is not to
be
>> facetiously flashy or grotesquely obscure but to express what I
feel and
>> think with the utmost truthfulness and [precision]."
--VN
To which David Morris responded:
> Like so many quotes
from Nabokov, I find this one preposterous. VN is nothing
> if not a
liguistic [sic] show-off, especially in his later works.
This attitude
has always surprised me, not least because it rather implies a sort of inverse
intellectual snobbery - someone showing off is by definition bloody good, after
all. More to the point, though, it strikes me as the wrong reaction - one
of the pleasures of reading VN has, for me, always been that it requires an
effort. The example that leaps to mind is Humbert's “enormous molar, with an abscess as big as a
maraschino cherry”, where the incongruity of the simile forces the reader
consciously to imagine it; it cannot be imagined without some effort.
I
appreciate I'm pretty certain to be preaching to the converted here, but it took
me ages to get off the pynchon-l last time (although it is an excellent read,
and their discussion of Pale Fire has been by turns absolutely fascinating and
pleasantly combative), so I won't post this there. However, can anyone
come up with a passage from VN which strikes them as *exclusively* linguistic
showing-off?
Nick.