Creative Freedom in Nabby and the Pynch

[Jasper Fidget]

Nabokov, From an interview with Alfred Appel, Jr., "Wisconsin Studies in
Contemporary Literature", vol. XVIII, no. 2, 1967, reprinted in _Strong
Opinions_.

"Appel: One often hears from writers talk of how a character takes hold
of them and in a sense dictates the course of the action.  Has this ever
been your experience?

VN: I have never experienced this.  What a preposterous experience!
Writers who have had it must be very minor or insane.  No, the design of
my novel is fixed in my imagination and every character follows the
course I imagine for him.  I am the perfect dictator in that private
world insofar as I alone am responsible for its stability and truth.
Whether I reproduce is as fully and faithfully as I would wish, is
another question.  Some of my old works reveal dismal blurrings and
blanks." (p 69)

>From an interview with Alvin Toffler in Playboy, Jan, 1964:

"Toffler: A contribution to society?

VN: A work of art has no importance whatever to society.  It is only
important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important
to me.  I don't give a damn for the group, the community, the masses,
and so forth.  Although I do not care for the slogan 'art for art's
sake' -- because unfortunately such promoters of it as, for instance,
Oscar Wilde and various dainty poets, were in reality rank moralists and
didacticists -- there can be no question that what makes a work of
fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its
art, only its art." (p 33)

>From the same interview:

"Toffler: What is your reaction to the mixed feelings vented by one
critic in a review which characterized you as having a fine and original
mind, but 'not much trace of a generalizing intellect,' and as 'the
typical artist who distrusts ideas'?"

VN: [...] The middlebrow or the upper Philistine cannot get rid of the
furtive feeling that a book, to be great, must deal in great ideas.  Oh,
I know the type, the dreary type!  He likes a good yarn spiced with
social comment; he likes to recognize his own thoughts and throws in
those of the author; he wants at least one of the characters to be the
author's stooge.  If American, he has a dash of Marxist blood, and if
British, he is acutely and ridiculously class-conscious; he finds it so
much easier to write about ideas than about words; he does not realize
that perhaps the reason he does not find general ideas in a particular
writer is that the particular ideas of that writer have not yet become
general." (p 41)


> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org 
> [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of Bandwraith at aol.com
> Sent: Sunday, June 15, 2003 6:12 AM
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Creative Freedom in Nabby and the Pynch

> Creation as either a verb or noun, with a little or a big C, begs the
question of > > > > constraint, or the flipside, freedom. The Orwellian
dialectic comes briefly to mind, > > but is quickly supplanted by
Pynchon's comments in the Foreword regarding the ability > > of
characters to develop independently of their author's original
> designs- not merely slaves, they.
 
> I think one area of interesting comparison and contrast between the
two author's might > be this notion of creative freedom.

> respectfully