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| jeremy |
 Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 5:15 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 6794
Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)
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Damn, if I'd known there was a prize.
Apart from Lolita, I don't know anything about Nabokov's work or his biography. I just wandered what Nabokov's motivation or inspirtion was in writing Lolita. Was this exploration human sexuality and pyschology typical of his other writing? Was it just the writer in him, the challenging controversialist that led him to tackle such a taboo subject? Did he feel it was a dark secret that deserved to be aired and treated seriously? |
_________________
I am angry, I am ill, and I'm as ugly as sin.
My irritability keeps me alive and kicking.
I know the meaning of life, it doesn't help me a bit.
I know beauty and I know a good thing when I see it. |
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| pedersencr |
| Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 7:35 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 921
Location: New Orleans
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jeremy wrote: Apart from Lolita, I don't know anything about Nabokov's work or his biography. I just wandered what Nabokov's motivation or inspirtion was in writing Lolita. Was this exploration human sexuality and pyschology typical of his other writing? Was it just the writer in him, the challenging controversialist that led him to tackle such a taboo subject? Did he feel it was a dark secret that deserved to be aired and treated seriously?
Jeremy,
That makes two of us, absolutely!
Lolita/Nabokov are new to me also and one of the main questions left after I finished the book was "Why this?" His writing is so brilliant that it seems he could have written anything and succeeded, in my truly humble opinion, so why this, indeed.
He talks all around the subject in his afterword, and offers "aesthetic bliss" as his objective, but that is a non-answer to me if ever I have heard one. Or at least a very incomplete one.
So I have to admit I am getting sucked into learning more about him and his creative process, which is why Speak, Memory is sitting on my desk and I am eagerly looking forward to reading it (as well as Lolita a time or two more).
Any help out there?
Charles |
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| judithannie |
| Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 8:37 am |
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Joined: 14 Aug 2004
Posts: 224
Location: Albuquerque NM
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I had hoped that I would be able to finish reading “Reading Lolita in Teheran” for this discussion but I have only just started. From what I’ve read so far I highly recommend it especially since we have all just finished reading Lolita. I have excerpted some quotes from Salon’s review which I think parallel our discussion of the last few days.
Quote: "Reading Lolita in Tehran" is a tale of Islamist oppression and feminist defiance, but it's also a superb work of literary criticism, a meditation on some of the great works of the Western canon, including Nabokov's "Lolita"
"The desperate truth of Lolita's story is not the rape of a 12-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual's life by another," she writes at one point, while later she says, "Humbert, like most dictators, was interested only in his own vision of other people."
Later, reading about the hysterically self-righteous men who insist that women taunt them by showing an arousing strand of hair or patch of naked throat beneath their scarfs, her point strikes home. "I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me," says Humbert, having kidnapped his orphaned obsession. He brutalizes Lolita both because he claims to love her and because, through her, he wants to recapture his childhood love, Annabel. The regime also brutalizes its women in the name of chivalry -- "A woman in a veil is protected like a pearl in an oyster shell," says one revolutionary slogan -- and in a doomed effort to recapture some lost medieval paradise.
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| judithannie |
| Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 9:15 am |
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Joined: 14 Aug 2004
Posts: 224
Location: Albuquerque NM
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Quote: I find that I like Lolita enormously or really dislike it, depending on whether I'm looking at the writing style, the story line, or the individual characters.
I read Lolita for the first time about 10 years ago. I think I was probably never exposed to it because I attend Catholic schools from 3rd grade through university. So the first time I read it, all I knew was it was very well-respected and it was about in inappropriate relationship between an older man and a much younger girl. I had no idea she was only 12 and so poorly parented and thus perhaps even more vulnerable. Therefore, I was so totally surprised at how much I enjoyed my first reading. So much so that Lolita became one of my top three favorite books. I was completely captivated by by the novel, the use of language and the humor. I just hung on and enjoyed the ride. I was also surprised at Nabacov's seemingly up to date depiction of the relationship between a pedophile to his victim as I mentioned before. Interestingly, I have talked to my neice (15) and my daughter (30) about the book and they are definitley literalists - they cannot divorce themselves from the subject matter and are quite judgmental of HH especially the 15 year old to the point that she hated the book and thought it nasty and "creepy". My daughter on the other hand read it in college and appreciates the book for its artistic merits but interprets it through the eyes of an idealistic young feminist |
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| pedersencr |
| Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 9:38 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 921
Location: New Orleans
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judithannie wrote: I had hoped that I would be able to finish reading “Reading Lolita in Teheran” for this discussion but I have only just started. From what I’ve read so far I highly recommend it especially since we have all just finished reading Lolita.
Hi Judy,
That was the book that got me interested in Lolita in the first place and I haven't been disappointed in either of them. I definitely second your recommendation.
Charles |
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| mitty |
| Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 11:58 am |
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Joined: 02 Aug 2004
Posts: 1359
Location: Way Down Yonder.......
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Joe: There is no way for me to think of this as even a black comedy. There is humor, but life is full of humor and ironies. It would be exceedingly difficult to write about any aspect of life without it.
Humbert is a criminal, no doubt about that. The reason I blame Charlotte mostly though, is because of the way she did not protect her child in any way. She left Lolita completely open to any predator that just happened along. And they are thick on the ground, believe me!
Anyone that has a child--boy or girl, has to be alert to this fact. |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 12:42 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
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Quote: If he's an allegory, then what is he an allegory of?
European culture. The reading of the book as European culture corrupting American culture is fairly common. |
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| jeremy |
| Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 12:57 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 6794
Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)
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Or is that Europe desiring America's zestful youthfulness or is that America seducing Europe with its naive charms or....
The book may work on more than one level, but that does not mean it is not about what it is about. |
_________________
I am angry, I am ill, and I'm as ugly as sin.
My irritability keeps me alive and kicking.
I know the meaning of life, it doesn't help me a bit.
I know beauty and I know a good thing when I see it. |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 1:05 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
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| Agree about that top part. But I really think this work is far removed from literal reality. Reading Humbert as a real-life pedophile to me is about the same as reading "The Tell-Tale Heart" as a case study in insanity. These are imaginative works. |
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| pedersencr |
| Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 1:36 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 921
Location: New Orleans
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Joe,
Judy,
Allow me to follow your posts on reactions to Lolita with this, for your respective consideration. From Vera (p 200) when, in 1953, the manuscript had been typed and was being shown around to potential publishers:
"As much as she [Vera, Nabokov's wife] believed in the sanctity of art, she remained entirely the mother who thought her own twelve-year-old too young to be exposed to Mark Twain. 'But it [Lolita] is a great book,' she reminded her sister-in-law. In the next breath she added, 'And hide it from your son.' She had already warned that Lolita was not a book for children. Elena was not to leave it lying around."
"Pat Covici, the first publisher to read the novel, did not think Lolita even a book for adults. At least not for adults unwilling to serve jail sentences; he advised Nabokov strongly against publishing the novel, and felt that bringing it out anonymously was in particular an open invitation for a court case."
How times change!
Charles |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 2:10 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
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Mitty,
I'm sorry, but Lolita is recognized in literary circles as one of the black comedies of the twentieth century. Any book on literary terms will cite the work as a major example of the genre. |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 2:12 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
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Charles,
No doubt Nabokov's wife was in the majority. That doesn't mean him himself shared that view. I've literally read nothing that suggests he considered the work either dirty or dangerous. He seemed really surprised at the response. Maybe he's not being honest in his reaction, and I've never read a Nabokov biography, but in terms of his own writing on the subject, this is what I've come away with. |
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| pedersencr |
| Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 2:30 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 921
Location: New Orleans
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Joe Vitus wrote: Yambu and Charles,
The thing is, I don't feel like a crime was committed by Humbert. This novel is simply too far away from reality for me to even consider such issues.
Joe, others,
I see that there has been quite a bit of water under the bridge since that was posted.
Regarding the remove from reality, I agree about 200% with you Joe. Although the novel is clearly and very deliberately rooted in the American scene, because Nabokov "wanted to write an American novel," the parody and the satire are so thick at times that I do not see the US that I know at all. I find it easier to believe that I must be looking at a completely artificial ginger-bread countryside with cute little people walking around, wearing cute green clothes and fur-brimmed pointy hats with pom-poms on top, the way one might see them in Santa's workshop, or in the kind of Hansel and Gretel village one sees in store windows around the Christmas season.
I think Nabokov has indeeed masterfully created a completely artificial environment in which to have his characters play out his story. Moreover, in order to allow the story to move forward, I think he has also populated it completely with artificially dumb, dull, unobservant background characters who completely do not see what is going on with Humbert and Lolita. Charlotte is but one glaring example.
I have the feeling that real-life people who deal with the public on a regular basis, like say policemn, desk clerks in motels, physicians and especially school teachers, develop a knowing eye for malfeasance when they see it. Yet none of these people in the novel tumble to the situation of Lolita and Humbert. In fact they are completely oblivious, with the school teachers even concluding that Lolita is not well enough versed in matters of sex!
Against this dumb background it is the two more realistic foreground characters, Humbert and Lolita, who do the living and the suffering.
Appel, in the Introduction to The Annotated Lolita comments (p lii):
"To paraphrase Marianne Moore's well-known line that poetry is 'imaginary gardens with real roads in them,' Nabokov's 'poem' is a parody of death with real suffering in it.' "
No matter how artificial the scenery, I personally react as if the crime is real. And I suffer for Lolita.
Charles |
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| pedersencr |
| Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 2:51 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 921
Location: New Orleans
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Joe,
I don't consider the book to be "dirty" at all and I'm sure that Nabokov didn't either. My point was that he wrote it not to be dirty. Someplace that I can't find now, there is a quote from him to the effect that he was not at all interested in physically portraying the organs or activities of sex; instead his interest was entirely in exploring the drives and emotions between people. Nevertheless, there are scenes that are conveniently interrupted, including the pivotal encounter between Humbert and Annabel, that miraculously stop at just the right spot to survive any censor.
My all-time favorite literary description of a complete sexual encounter in its entirety surely has to be Nabokov's:
"Venus came and went."
Charles |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 3:33 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
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Charles,
I'm really in agreement with you. In terms of allegory, I'll take it farther. The book is less of a novel than an anti-Pilgram's Progress. But I agree with you that he tied it to the American scene. A very stylized, unrealistic depiction, but like a cartoon in the New Yorker reflectve of, and commenting upon, the society we live in. |
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