NPPF: preliminary - epigraph

[Burns, Erik]

Foax:

jbor wrote:

>And Kinbote certainly expresses strong opinions
>about those "scholars" who he sees as "blockheads".

A-and someone asked if there was any _Lot 49_ criticism that connected it to
_PF_ -- well, I don't know the answer to that one (I'm just a blockhead, not
an academic) but we can always generate some.

To wit:

"Among them ['those dear daft numina who'd mothered over Oedipa's so
temperate youth'] they had managed to turn the young Oedipa into a rare
creature indeed, unfit perhaps for marches and sit ins, but just a whiz at
pursuing strange words in Jacobean texts." (_Lot 49,_ pp 71-72, Viking UK
edition, 2000).

Oed's no hippie, she's an _academic_ (speak with sneer).

Meanwhile, in _Lot 49_ Pynchon also displays the sneering attitude to Freud
and pyschoanalysis that Nabokov famously also displayed (and not only in
naming his main character for a famous disorder's mad king (yet another PF
echo!)):

"'I came,' she [Oedipa] said, 'hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy'
'Cherish it!' cried Hilarius, fiercely. 'What else do any of you have? Hold
it tightly by its little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or
the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when
you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to
be.'" (pp 95-96, same edition)

Seems to me, that ways lies Kinboteville, with its amusement parks and log
cabins.

(cf. VN's _Speak Memory_, (re. the "Viennese Quack"): "We will leave him and
his fellow travelers to jog on, in their third-class carriage of thought,
through the police state of sexual myth (incidentally, what a great mistake
of the part of dictators to ignore psychoanalysis -- a whole generation
might be so easily corrupted that way!)." (found here
http://www.dutchgirl.com/foxpaws/biographies/O_Window_in_the_Dark!/nabokovap
pendixe.html, with a ton of other VN/Freud comments, all of them unkind.)

Finally, my inner Kinbote hears an echo of Zembla and its King in this:

"She remembered drifters she had listened to, Americans speaking their
language carefully, scholarly, as if they were in exile from somewhere else
invisible yet congruent with the cheered land she lived in ... [big snip of
gorgeous scary writing about America & Tristero] ...Another mode of meaning
behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true
paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the
appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was
just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to
be at all relevant to it, was an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into
some paranoia." (pp 125-126, same edition)

As I tried to argue yesterday, I think there are certainly affinities
between Kinbote & Oedipa -- they are at different phases of madness (he's
gone, she's nearing the cusp). This does not an influence make, surely not a
direct one, but it raises the probability of familiarity, sure - and
interest.

etb