'Barbarous Epithets and Wilful Rhodomontade'

In his review of Bryan Boyd’s Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990), John Simon refers to Pale Fire as “that gargantuan rodomontade.” The verdict is unjust but memorable. Simon’s use of “rodomontade” may have been my first encounter with the word. I don’t recall looking it up in the dictionary, and I seem to have assumed it meant something vaguely contemptible like “extravaganza” or “stunt.” That’s not entirely mistaken, as the OED makes clear: “extravagant boasting or bragging; bravado; boastful or bombastic language.” Simon is echoing a common complaint against Nabokov: that he is show-off, a clever but cold fashioner of literary Fabergé eggs. It’s useful to remember that in Speak, Memory, Nabokov dismisses all Fabergé objects as “emblems of grotesque garishness.” Pale Fire, in fact, contains a plot rich in “human interest,” a quality Nabokov would have detested. In terms of mournful sadness, Hazel Shade’s suicide ranks with Catherine Sloper’s misuse by her father and her suitor in Washington Square and the death of Rudy Bloom as remembered by his father in Ulysses.

I came upon rodomontade again, with a slightly different spelling, in Hazlitt’s “On Familiar Style” (Table Talk, Essays on Men and Manners, 1822). He begins a paragraph with “It is as easy to write a gaudy style without ideas as it is to spread a pallet of showy colours or to smear in a flaunting transparency.” Hazlitt is condemning empty verbiage, filigree as a stand-in for content. He continues, singling out empty-headed theater critics: “Not a glimpse can you get of the merits or defects of the performers: they are hidden in a profusion of barbarous epithets and wilful rhodomontade.” Hazlitt’s target is not a rich, colorful prose style, as in Sir Thomas Browne and Nabokov (and, at his best, Hazlitt), but writers who substitute overwriting and verbal pyrotechnics for substance. Propose your own florid candidate but I nominate the late William H. Gass.

Not that lush prose is always a substitute for mature style. Nabokov has John Shade say in Pale Fire: “First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull.” Kinbote asks: “You appreciate particularly the purple passages?" Shade replies: “Yes, my dear Charles, I roll upon them as a grateful mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane.”