Pairings in Nabokov and Pynchon

[Terrance]

> > They both go to the
> > heart of what concerns me: a comparison of creative freedom
> > in Pynchon and Nabokov. Not just for the authors, but for their
> > readers, as well. Do the texts, and their discernible designs,
> > encourage freedom or attempt to seduce one into giving it up?
> 
> In many ways, doesn't all text seduce one into reliquishing personal
> freedom.  Even a text as "open" or "loose" as, say, Finnegans Wake (in which
> the reader can start or finish at any given point, read at any of numerous
> levels, comprehend or not comprehend any/all/none of it, etc.) must succeed
> in the reader abandoning all preconceptions of how text must be handled or
> examined.

But when the sun was set on the West, 
The Theorist arose and said;--

(translation from the French)

What little freedom and sense we once possessed
Has quite gone out of our heads!
We lost them when we took up books. 


And since that day we wander still
In the prison and madhouse yards 
Singing -- 


"O somewhere, behind bars, locked up, insane ... 
Might I find my Freedom seduced like  Jumbly Jane Again!
Forever I'll seek in prisons and jails my Liberty and Jubmbly Girl
My Whore!
Till I find my free and Jumbly Jane Girl once more!"

The White Knight raised his ledger
and brought it down on the Theorist's empty head
"On your account," the Knight admonished, Jumbly Jane is in the red."

"She's locked up in Bedlam," the Theorist insisted. 

"Debtor's prison!" The Knight exclaimed. 

And they argued like that for an hundred years.