Pynchon/Nabokov

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

In addition to Deborah Madsen's fine study there is also
Beverly Lyon Clark's _Reflections of Fantasy: The Mirror-Worlds
of Carroll, Nabokov, and Pynchon_. (Peter Lang, 1986.) In 
chapters on VN and TP Clark concentrates on _Pale Fire_, _Ada_,
and _Lot 49_, and her bottomline is quite close to Madsen's:

Nabokov's fantasy worlds in _PF_ and _Ada_ are prevalently
metaphoric, Pynchon's in _Lot 49_ is prevalently metonymic.

That is, referring to Jakobson's definition of metaphor and
metonymy, Nabokov creates distinct, substitutive fantasy worlds
that are in a parallel relation to the "reality level" of the
narrative world; Pynchon creates fantasy worlds that have an
embarrassing proximity with this "reality" level: the existence
of some autonomous fantasy world (or some modernistic realm of
aesthetic autonomy) proves impossible.

In my M.A. thesis I compared this with de Man's reading of 
Proust in _Allegories of Reading_. Young "Marcel" proclaims
the superiority of metaphor (and the power of imagination) in
passages that are, nevertheless, based on metonymic structuration.
Likewise, but much more modestly, Oedipa hypothesizes some 
"separate, silent, unsuspected" world, which, however, seems
to keep collapsing into her "real" world in oscillative motion.
But the unshaped metonymicality that we have here is obviously
not the metonymic cause and effect of traditional realistic prose. 


Heikki