VLVL2 (1): Narrator's Voice

[Tim Strzechowski]

> The one thing that leapt out at me after I read the introduction to Pale
> Fire one day and the first section of Vineland the next  day was the
> vocabulary levels.  As with GR and M&D, I needed the dictionary at hand
> as I read through the intro to PF.  Sure, most of the words were
> decipherable through context, and some were halfway familiar, but reading
> with the dictionary open for me adds another dimension of enjoyment to a
> work of literature.  The startling thing to me was that there were NO
> words that needed a dictionary in the opening section to Vineland.  I've
> read the book at least a half a dozen times before and this never crossed
> my mind, but I think this is where much of the disrespect that Vineland
> gets from Pynchon fans comes from, the fact that any reasonably read
> tenth grader could cruise through this novel.
>
> I found the narrator's voice in Vineland to be similar to that of the
> narrator in Gravity's Rainbow, a warm caring person aghast at the events
> he is describing.
>
> I think the cries that "Pynchon has lost it!" that were heard after the
> release of Vineland have to do with the vocabulary.  But it seems pretty
> clear to me that Pynchon made a conscious choice to write in a more
> vernacular tone.
>


I personally hear a much more consistent voice in VL that that found in GR.
It seems like in GR the voice and its tone can change at any given moment,
sometimes within the same scene, or the same paragraph, or even the same
sentence.  The narrative voice in GR is much more slippery to me than in VL
where, for the most part, Pynchon has kind of a "que pasa," hipster tone,
much as you describe.  Now, it may gain complexity as the novel continues
(and if I recall correctly, I believe it does), but that's kind of how I
hear it.

And yes, the vocabulary is definitely more sophisticated in PF, as is the
sentence structure and overall tone of the piece.  Nabokov is able to affect
beautifully that Old World European scholarly voice (perfected, I think, in
_Lolita_) via his diction, his syntax, his tone, and it contrasts sharply
with the narrative voice in VL.

Tim