Nabokov and Pynchon

[Hull, Rick L.]

I am not aware of "any scholarly discussion of the connection" between these 
two author's novels.  Had I been a better academic, I might have looked into 
this myself.  As it is, my former life might be viewed as an unexamined 
connection, since I chose to do my thesis on Pynchon and my dissertation on 
Nabokov.  As far as I know, pure coincidence operated here -- beyond the 
obvious reason that I was floored by both authors.

But I have wondered what Pynchon might have taken away from those famous 
lectures in Literature 311-312, "Masters of European Fiction."  Nabokov 
surely must have struck a sympathetic chord in his repeated admonition to 
his students to "caress the details . . . the divine details"; both authors 
are justly famous for their details--imaginative as well as realistic.  And 
it is easy to picture the future author of that Big Book of Exploded Ideas, 
_GR_, chuckling at Nabokov's blunt declaration that "style and structure are 
the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash."  But I think the first half 
of that dictum may have resounded differently in the future famous student's 
ears than was intended by the future (pre-_Lolita_) famous teacher. 
 Nabokov's prose is a model of playful but generally unremittingly gorgeous 
style, and his novels are models of tight (if tricky) structure.  The 
earliest reviews of Pynchon pointed out that for all the evidence he showed 
of being able to compose some of the most eloquent sentences this language 
has seen this century, his preference was for a flippant, shape-shifting 
style that hovered nearer the diction of underground comics than that of 
authors firmly established in the Canon.  (Although as some critics have 
suggested, this willful "unstyling" may reflect a Joycean self-suspicion of 
sentimentality.)  As for structure, I think we'd have to conclude that 
Pynchon's reflects his obsession with entropy:  every orderly passage in his 
novels is more than compensated for  by anarchical antiplot lines and 
picaresque episodes.   So style and structure are a concern for Pynchon, but 
mainly as something to be concerned about falling into.  The "tightest" of 
Pynchon's novels, _Lot 49_, clearly demonstrates the fallacy of trying to 
pin down apparent order.

In mentioning entropy, I have touched on an obvious similarity between these 
two authors:  in each, the artistic sensibility was unusually informed by a 
scientific sensibility; the physics major and the lepidopterist constantly 
peered over the hunched shoulders of the writer.  And this is how it should 
be, Nabokov explained to his students:  "The best temperament for a reader 
to have, or to develop, is a combination of the artistic and the scientific 
one," because that is how the artist operated in writing the work.  In the 
end, there was simply no separating the two temperaments.  Nabokov even saw 
them as interchangeable.  In one breath he would tell his students that good 
readers must read, like the artist wrote, with "an artist's passion and a 
scientist's patience," and then two breaths later he would announce, "It 
seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the 
long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition [earlier 
equated with "passion"] of science."  (All of these quotations, by the way, 
are from Nabokov's published lectures, which come in two volumes: _Lectures 
on Literature_ and _Lectures on Russian Literature_.)  The end result of 
this artist-scientist merger is the kind of detachment so valued by writers 
like Flaubert and Joyce -- a detachment that some critics and readers of 
both Nabokov and Pynchon (as well as contemporaries of F and J) have decried 
as an offputting "coolness."  Well sure, be cool but care.

Lastly, I've read somewhere (perhaps in the collected "interviews" in 
_Strong Opinions_) that Nabokov had no recollection of any student named 
Thomas Pynchon.  But I wonder about this.  How could Nabokov, an avowed 
admirer of Hawthorne, not recall that name?  (Maybe he only read the short 
stories.)  Nor is there any record of his commenting on (or even reading) 
his most famous student's work.  But then he was notably averse to plugging 
the works of his contemporaries.  (The only blurb ascribed to Nabokov was a 
quick compliment -- taken from an interview -- of Edmund White's wonderful 
(and Nabokovian) novel _Forgetting Elena_.)  But that same source recorded 
Vera Nabokov's mentioning that she thought she did remember this Pynchon 
person; she helped her husband grade his student's tests, and she remembered 
that TP had (if I remember correctly) an "interesting" handwriting.

Rick Hull
flh1 at ccdod1.em.cdc.gov