I came across one example of James Joyce's use
of "literally" and I remembered a heated debate about the same
occurrence in VN* .
James Joyce ( The first
sentence of "The Dead"): " Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off
her feet."
Hugh Kenner, in "Joyce's
Voices" observed: "Whaterver Lily was literally (Lily?) she was not
literally run off her feet. She was (surely?) figuratively run off her feet, but
according to a banal figure. And the figure is hers, the idiom: "literally"
reflects not what the narrator would say (who is he?) but what Lily would say
(...)Joyce is at his subtle game of specifying what pretensions to elegance are
afoot on this occasion, and he does so with great economy...(...) So that first
sentence was written, as it were, from Lily's point of view..."
For Kenner, "one of the reason the quiet little
stories in Dubliners continue to fascinate is that the narrative point
of view unobtrusively fluctuates...The grammar (...) is that of third-person
narrative, imparting a deceptive look of impersonal truth. The diction
frequently tells a different tale." (Quantum books, page 16)
Although I don't think Nabokov's sentence in
Invitation to a Beheading could be interpreted as containing any
special tactics to shift the narrative point of view, by applying the word
"literally", I think that Kenner's interpretation may be helpful to
find other instances in which VN did, indeed, employ a similar procedure (
I got no special examples but certain moments in Ada or Ardor came
to my mind at once), when he intended to present an apparently objective view of
an event being distorted by its participants's very particular
vocabulary. Does anyone remember an example of this kind of thing
taking place in a novel by VN?
When Nabokov criticizes Lermontov's reiterated
use of stale expressions (to be lost in thought, to assume an air, etc or code
sentences as "she grew pale" or "pulling him by the sleeve") his interesting
arguments lead him to conclude that " It is the agglomeration of othervise
insignificant words that come to life. When we start to break the sentence or
the verse line into its quantitative elements, the banalities we perceive are
often shocking... but, in the long run, it is the compount effect that counts,
and this final effect can be traced down to Lermontov to the beautiful timing of
all the parts and particles of the novel" (Mihail Lermontov's A Hero of Our
Time, a foreword).
I wish a "compound effect" of a similar
nature had not been spoiled in TOoL because of its fragmentary
state. There are paragraphs with terrible puns and puerile wordplay
and images (potent potentate, erect a fountain, etc) which, perhaps, in a
proper context would come out quite differently.
JM
(PS: I still cannot get over the Brazilian
translator's choice for "tickly-looking holes" as indicating "like ticks in
their little houses" - but VN did write "tickly",
not "ticklish".)
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* NABOKV-L Archives -- April 2006 (#7)
On
March 26, the Boston Globe's regular Sunday column, "The Word," was devoted to
"adverbial hyperbole" featuring the word "literally," and
included this
tantalizing reference: "Thoreau, Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, and Vladimir
Nabokov have also been fingered as _literally_ abusers." Curious, I asked
the columnist, Jan Freeman, for evidence of VN's guilt. She cited this
example from Invitation to a Beheading, as quoted in both the Oxford English
Dictionary and Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage: "And with
his eyes he literally scoured the corners of the cell." Below is a link to
Freeman's column:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/03/26/a_literal_obsession/Susan Elizabeth Sweeney
Co-Editor,
NABOKV-L
NABOKV-L Archives -- April 2006 (#11)
Jan Freeman
objects to the cliche'd use of 'literally' used as hyperbole. In the context of
the surreal atmosphere of the novel, I think there is ...
NABOKV-L
Archives -- April 2006 (#21)
First, from Sam Schuman: This seems to me
literally a tempest in a teapot...
NABOKV-L Archives -- December 2007 (#18)
R S Gwynn said "If a poet's metaphors are taken literally, no end of damage
can be done to what he or she intends. This has been done, in an especially
...
NABOKV-L Archives -- December 2007 (#38)