EDNOTE. Nick Grundy poses an interesting question. Can anyone point out a case of VN linguistic virtuosisty that is that is "unmotivated"?
    I am, by the way, glad to hear some are finding the Pynchon list material of interest. Some aren't, I know. It is hard to follow at times (and, much as I would like to), I don't follow it closely  for time reasons  but a lot of interesting explication, especially in the form of possibly relevant cut and paste stuff. NABOKV-L might try something of the sort ere long. Reactions?
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Nick Grundy
To: Nabokov-L
Sent: Saturday, September 13, 2003 1:54 PM
Subject: Linguistic showoffs

Just going through some of the pynchon-l crosspostings which built up while I was on holiday, and I came across this:

>>"The main favor I ask of a serious critic is sufficient perceptiveness to
>> understand that whatever term or trope I use, my purpose is not to be
>> facetiously flashy or grotesquely obscure but to express what I feel and
>> think with the utmost truthfulness and [precision]." --VN

To which David Morris responded:

> Like so many quotes from Nabokov, I find this one preposterous.  VN is nothing
> if not a liguistic [sic] show-off, especially in his later works.

This attitude has always surprised me, not least because it rather implies a sort of inverse intellectual snobbery - someone showing off is by definition bloody good, after all.  More to the point, though, it strikes me as the wrong reaction - one of the pleasures of reading VN has, for me, always been that it requires an effort.  The example that leaps to mind is Humbert's “enormous molar, with an abscess as big as a maraschino cherry”, where the incongruity of the simile forces the reader consciously to imagine it; it cannot be imagined without some effort.

I appreciate I'm pretty certain to be preaching to the converted here, but it took me ages to get off the pynchon-l last time (although it is an excellent read, and their discussion of Pale Fire has been by turns absolutely fascinating and pleasantly combative), so I won't post this there.  However, can anyone come up with a passage from VN which strikes them as *exclusively* linguistic showing-off?

Nick.