Pynchon/Nabokov

[Paul Mackin]

On Sun, 4 Feb 1996 Ronkarate at aol.com wrote:

 
> Can anyone suggest further reading on the two, or perhaps interject more
> thoughts concerning their connection and/or thematic similarities?


Michael Wood's _The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction_
mentions Pynchon twice.

In discussing the story 'The Vane Sisters', and specifically Cynthia's 
theory about ghosts, Wood says: ". . . it resembles the disease of the 
world sketched out in Pynchon's _V_, whose subtle symtoms  blended in 
with the events of history, 'no different one by one one  altogether -- 
fatal'. Except that Cynthia's ghosts seem kindlier, less 
sinister, at worst a little mean."

There is of course no implication that P. might have gotten some
of his inspiration for presences from beyond from N.? The book is
about N., not about P. 

In discussing _Pale Fire_, in a slightly vague (to me) context
(Death, Figments) Wood says:

"A character in a novel by Thomas Pynchon, a one-time student of
Nabokov's at Cornell, thinks the First World War 'destroyed a kind
of privacy, perhaps the privacy of dream. Committed us . . . to work
out three o'clock anxieties, excesses of character, political 
hallucinations on a live mass, a real human population.' . . . "

				P.