Pairings in Nabokov and Pynchon

[Tim Strzechowski]

Something to keep an eye on as many of us prepare for the start of the Vineland/Pale Fire simul-read:


"It is always tempting to see Nabokov's paired characters (Kinbote and Shade, Humbert and Quilty, Van and Ada) as opposing sides of a single, divided self, and to read the novels in which the paired characters appear as attempts to fuse this divided self into a psychological whole.  In Pale Fire it is especially tempting to see Shade's detached, thoughtful objectivity and Kinbote's rash, intense subjectivity as the two poles of the artistic personality, perhaps even of Nabokov's own personality.  Nabokov's interest, however, is not in psychological reconciliation; the attributes of his paired characters are, instead, distillations of irreconcilable ways of viewing the world and the self.  The public event and the private response to it, the objective fact and the subjective feeling, the outer and inner realities, the text and the commentary, make equally convincing claims as the place to begin the search for significance.  In Nabokov's terms, one of the chief values of art is that because it is fundamentally metaphoric it is able to speak of two things at once, to juxtapose the irreconcilable inner and outer realities in a single vision, as Pale Fire juxtaposes Shade's poem with Kinbote's commentary [...]" (30-31).


Lucy Maddox, Nabokov's Novels in English   U of Georgia Press   1983



"[...] Vineland may, however, teach us to read Pynchon, whose coherence emerges from loosely pleated variations on a group of related themes and ideas.  For Pynchon, the order that makes plot meaningful is not established according to the old-fashioned principles of unity and economy, the full working-out of implications inherent in a single situation.  Coherence is especially not expressed through one-way linear time.  Rather, the narrative develops its own unique logic of connectedness through permutations, comparisons, inversions, and variations.  Vineland, in particular, juggles doubles and pairs, configurations of two both alike and dissimilar.  As befits a story of double-dealing, the novel is full of images of duplicity: of doubles, twins, partners, and foils, involved in acts of deception, conversion, and disguise.  Some of the central characters feel deep, inner, divisions; each has a reflected other self or double.  The world, too, is zygomorphic; reality itself is not single, any more than Pynchon's narrative is, but rather bifurcated, entwined, duplicitous.  Repeated allusions invoke a second or alternative reality beside the one characters seem to inhabit -- like the other "mode of meaning behind the obvious" intuited by Oedipa Maas when she understands how reduced the possibilities have become in America [...]"  (101-02).


Susan Strehle, "Pynchon's 'Elaborate Game of Doubles' in Vineland"  The Vineland Papers  1994


Perhaps worth commenting on before we begin the discussions, too?



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