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Fw: Fw: Linguistic showoffs
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----- Original Message -----
From: STADLEN@aol.com
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Sunday, September 14, 2003 1:17 AM
Subject: Re: Fw: Linguistic showoffs
In a message dated 14/09/2003 00:45:02 GMT Standard Time, chtodel@cox.net writes:
>>"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?
Surely, VN's style cannot be judged by what he makes his "creature" Humbert do with HIS "fancy prose style", explicitly acknowledged by "Humbert" on his first page.
Anthony Stadlen