VLVL2 (1): Narrator's Voice

[Elainemmbell at aol.com]

In a message dated 7/15/2003 11:51:08 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
tobylevy at juno.com writes:

> But it seems pretty
> clear to me that Pynchon made a conscious choice to write in a more
> vernacular tone.
> 

Yes!  And reading this tone opposite (or beside) PF produces very fascinating 
results.  The low-culture references in the poem leap out as if phrased in 
another language, and as if with the aid of a vernacular dictionary.   The poet 
seems much more comfortable, to my reading, with phrases like "the svelte 
/stilettos of a frozen stillicide" (Ls 34-35) than with "the phantom of my little 
daughter's swing" (L57).
Pale Fire the poem and the book provide an endless, almost Mel Brooks level 
running class and diction joke...for instance Kinbote's shock that Shade would 
"deign to touch" a tabloid newspaper (P22) or his disingenuous claim about not 
being "used to the rather fatiguing jesting and teasing that goes on among 
American intellectuals of the inbreeding academic type"...when actually there's 
nothing about inbred intellectualism he is not "used to"!  

So everything relating to the lowbrow world of sports and TV and commerce in 
Pale Fire is playing out a class puzzle: what's valuable after all and who 
gets to say so and in which patois?  Nabokov (not Kinbote) hoists academia on its 
own petard, imho, throughout this book.

Pynchon's vernacular tone and his hundreds of lowbrow referents read 
sincerely to me and have a more direct narrative function in VL than anything does in 
Pale Fire.  Large points are made and grand questions asked but the language 
choice seems to prove the point that great thought can be accessed by people of 
narrower diction, or by 10th graders, or smart dogs.

But just in case I'm not making sense here, forgive me, and "Let me not 
pursue the tabulation of nonsense." (PF p25) 
Elaine M.M. Bell, Writer
(860) 523-9225
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