A casual reference to a "nymphet," followed a few pages later by "But
Bombat's Lolita I was not."* culmintating in a direct reference to Nabokov**,
impelled me to check for any google for references
approaching Nabokov-Rushdie. The digital world
collected information never ceases to surprise me. There's a 2003 PhD
thesis*** on multilingualism and defamiliarisation and also, some recent
interviews with Rushdie, or references to his laudatory preface in
"The Enchanter" by Lila Azam Zanganeh **** A book by R.
Trousdale was also indicated: Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational
Imagination: Novels of Exile and Alternate Worlds
Myself, I cannot "hear" Nabokov's music in Rushdie's
wonderful lines (not yet, at least). However, I look forward to read
J.Taylor's arguments on how "...writers tend to turn the distinctive features of
the foreigner’s perspective on language - semantic ambiguity and linguistic
materiality - to positive effect: semantic ambiguity is used to produce puns,
plays on words and linguistic overdetermination, while in focus on the material
characteristics of language is fundamental to the construction of phonetic and
rhythmic linguistic patterns. As a result, the work under scrutiny is often
characterised by high levels of musicality, iconicity and textual
performativity.." and, of course, Rachel Trousdale's book on "Transnational
Imagination.".
......................................................................................................................................................................
* "The forward pull, which every storyteller ignores at his peril...is
nothing less than the tug of forbidden love. For even as the twenty-year-old
German poet Novalis, "he who clears new territory," took a single look at
twelve-year-old Sophie von Kühn and was doomed, in that instant, to an absurd
love,...just so the ninteen-year-old Ormus Cama, the most handsome young fellow
in Bombay... fell for twelve-year-old Vina, fell flat, as if someone had pushed
him in the back." (p.101)
**- "and the pursuit of the very young by lecherous old humberts - yes,
we'd already heard of the new Nabokov shocker - ..."(p.112)
Cf. Salman Rushdie: "The ground beneath her feet."
1999.
***- Taylor, Juliette (2003) Foreign music: linguistic estrangement
and its textual effects in Joyce, Beckett, Nabokov and Rushdie. PhD thesis,
University of Warwick.
Official URL:
http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b1677912~S9
Abstract
This thesis examines the relationship between multilingualism
and defamiliarisation in Joyce, Beckett, Nabokov and Rushdie. Focusing on
Joyce’s Ulysses, Beckett’s Trilogy, Nabokov’s Bend Sinister, Pale Fire and Ada,
and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the study considers the reasons for these
authors’ uses a foreign languages and examines their specialised compositional
processes. It evaluates the textual effects produced by these processes, and
compares overtly multilingual effects (such as multilingual puns and the
hybridisation of language) to more general characteristics of the authors’
prose-styles, including monolingual forms of defamiliarisation. The prose of all
four authors is characterised by extreme forms of defamiliarisation, and the
thesis develops the concept of ‘linguistic estrangement’ to elucidate a
perceived relationship between each author’s perspective of ideological or
literal estrangement from language and his subsequent estrangement of that
language. In particular, these writers tend to turn the distinctive features of
the foreigner’s perspective on language - semantic ambiguity and linguistic
materiality - to positive effect: semantic ambiguity is used to produce puns,
plays on words and linguistic overdetermination, while in focus on the material
characteristics of language is fundamental to the construction of phonetic and
rhythmic linguistic patterns. As a result, the work under scrutiny is often
characterised by high levels of musicality, iconicity and textual
performativity. Apparently ‘negative’ aspects of language - interlingual
confusion, distortion, mistranslation, misunderstanding and misuse - thus form
the basis of some of the most productive stylistic aspects, and indeed the
radically innovative nature, of each author’s work. The thesis explores a wide
array of evident intentions associated with such processes including, among
others, mimetic, aesthetic, literary historical and socio-political concerns.
Translational processes, interlingual contact and linguistic estrangement are
thus demonstrated to be fundamental to the particular thematic and stylistic
features of the work of each individual author. This study can also, more
generally, be seen to address a central dynamic within modernist (and subsequent
late-modernist and postmodernist) literary production.
Date:June 2003.
Institution:University of Warwick