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[NABOKOV-L] Lolita Roadtrip in San Jose
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S. Klein sends Stark Insidernews about "San Jose Stage Company and PlayGround's 'Lolita Roadtrip' world premier" opening April 6 "Trevor Allen is an award-winning playwright ...Originally commissioned and developed by PlayGround Artistic Director, Jim Kleinmann of San Francisco, "Lolita Roadtrip" is a world premiere at the San Jose Stage Company in downtown San Jose...Lead character Julia (Chloe Bronzan), a rebellious Stanford graduate student researching her theses, and Danny (Patrick Alparone), a hitch-hiking teenaged runaway she picks up, retrace the steps of Vladimir Nabokov's actual 1941 roadtrip from New York to Stanford. This darkly comic play follows their cross-country adventures, while they confront their own dark pasts...."
JM: " retrace the steps of Vladimir Nabokov's roadtrip...while they confront their own dark pasts"?* This kind of psychological modism must be of the same kind as the one that prompted Shade to describe, in Pale Fire, "And to fulfill the fish wish of the womb,/A school of Freudians headed for the tomb."**
However, the overall project itself seems to be fascinating from various exegetic points of view, including the question of Nabokov's passion as a writer and how distant from his original aims the present geographical or social wandering have become - for example, when one establishes as "ground zero" his insistence on aesthetic bliss, bearing in mind (or in one's thrilled spine) that "it is not the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art," and that "the tragic and the obscene exclude each other."*** .
.......................................................................................................................................................
* Instead of focusing on Lolita, let's check what road-pedophile HH writes about his pains and lust for revenge, "'Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze [...] My car is limping, Dolores Haze,/And the last long lap is the hardest,/And I shall be dumped where the weed decays,And the rest is rust and stardust', " before he adds that: "By psychoanalyzing this poem, I notice it is really a maniac's masterpiece. The stark, stiff, lurid rhymes correspond very exactly to certain perspectiveless and terrible landscapes and figures, and magnified parts of landscapes and figures, as drawn by psychopaths in tests devised by their astute trainers."
** - Freud and Nabokov were both keen on evolutionary theories, Nabokov to wonder about personal immortality (kind of why aren't we immortal if we are the products of evolution), whereas Freud, drawing from August Weismann's differentiation of soma from germ-plasm, contrasted the "immortality of the germ-cell" to the individual's irredeemable death (like Samuel Butler once noted: "the hen is the egg's way of making another egg")
*** Maurice Couturier in Zembla: " 'On a Book Entitled Lolita' ...he presented a defense of the book which curiously echoed that put forward by John Ray, the author of the foreword. This article has been reprinted at the end of the novel ever since... For his defense, Nabokov did not invoke legal arguments but literary ones: "For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm."...As he put it at the time in a letter to Girodias: "My moral defense of the book is the book itself. I do not feel under any obligation to do more. However, I went further and wrote the essay on Lolita, a copy of which is now in your hands. On the ethical plane, it is of supreme indifference to me what opinion French, British or any other courts, magistrates, or philistine readers in general, may have of my book..."Nabokov was absolutely sure of being morally and poetically right and of having impeccably good taste. The novel's problems with justice only strengthened his convictions...However, he had had his doubts about the novel earlier on...two years before its first publication, he uncannily mentioned, in a letter to Katharine A. White of the New Yorker, this "enormous, mysterious, heartbreaking novel" which he was in the process of completing after "five years of monstrous misgivings and diabolical labors."... In a letter to Edmund Wilson written the following year, he acknowledged the sensual dimension of the novel but insisted upon its artistic quality: "I consider this novel to be my best thing in English, and though the theme and situation are decidedly sensuous, its art is pure and its fun riotous." Incidentally, the entire paragraph from which this quotation is taken is bracketed and marked in the margin: "all this is a secret." A year after the publication of the book in Paris, he tried to vindicate it in a letter to his friend and colleague Morris Bishop who had got him appointed at Cornell: 'I know that Lolita is my best book so far. I calmly lean on my conviction that it is a serious work of art, and that no court could prove it to be 'lewd and libertine.' All categories grade, of course, into one another: a comedy of manners written by a fine poet may have its 'lewd' side; but Lolita is a tragedy. 'Pornography' is not a an image plucked out of context; pornography is an attitude and an intention. The tragic and the obscene exclude each other.' Nabokov probably meant that obscenity, in such a case, is redeemed by the tragic elements and is not the raison d'être of the book, merely an instrument. Like Flaubert before him, he insisted upon the purity of his intentions but the syllogism he constructed is somewhat lame since he uses a different word in his premise and his conclusion ("pornography" and "obscenity") in order to demonstrate that there is no vulgarity in his novel. He resumed the same line of defense with Pascal Covici a few weeks later: "As a friend and one of the few people who have read the book, you will, I am sure, slap down such rumormongers as contend that the book is pornographic. I know that Lolita is my best book so far. Calmly I lean on my conviction that it is a serious work of art and that no court could prove it to be 'lewd and libertine'."the poerotic novel www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/coutur3.htm -
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JM: " retrace the steps of Vladimir Nabokov's roadtrip...while they confront their own dark pasts"?* This kind of psychological modism must be of the same kind as the one that prompted Shade to describe, in Pale Fire, "And to fulfill the fish wish of the womb,/A school of Freudians headed for the tomb."**
However, the overall project itself seems to be fascinating from various exegetic points of view, including the question of Nabokov's passion as a writer and how distant from his original aims the present geographical or social wandering have become - for example, when one establishes as "ground zero" his insistence on aesthetic bliss, bearing in mind (or in one's thrilled spine) that "it is not the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art," and that "the tragic and the obscene exclude each other."*** .
.......................................................................................................................................................
* Instead of focusing on Lolita, let's check what road-pedophile HH writes about his pains and lust for revenge, "'Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze [...] My car is limping, Dolores Haze,/And the last long lap is the hardest,/And I shall be dumped where the weed decays,And the rest is rust and stardust', " before he adds that: "By psychoanalyzing this poem, I notice it is really a maniac's masterpiece. The stark, stiff, lurid rhymes correspond very exactly to certain perspectiveless and terrible landscapes and figures, and magnified parts of landscapes and figures, as drawn by psychopaths in tests devised by their astute trainers."
** - Freud and Nabokov were both keen on evolutionary theories, Nabokov to wonder about personal immortality (kind of why aren't we immortal if we are the products of evolution), whereas Freud, drawing from August Weismann's differentiation of soma from germ-plasm, contrasted the "immortality of the germ-cell" to the individual's irredeemable death (like Samuel Butler once noted: "the hen is the egg's way of making another egg")
*** Maurice Couturier in Zembla: " 'On a Book Entitled Lolita' ...he presented a defense of the book which curiously echoed that put forward by John Ray, the author of the foreword. This article has been reprinted at the end of the novel ever since... For his defense, Nabokov did not invoke legal arguments but literary ones: "For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm."...As he put it at the time in a letter to Girodias: "My moral defense of the book is the book itself. I do not feel under any obligation to do more. However, I went further and wrote the essay on Lolita, a copy of which is now in your hands. On the ethical plane, it is of supreme indifference to me what opinion French, British or any other courts, magistrates, or philistine readers in general, may have of my book..."Nabokov was absolutely sure of being morally and poetically right and of having impeccably good taste. The novel's problems with justice only strengthened his convictions...However, he had had his doubts about the novel earlier on...two years before its first publication, he uncannily mentioned, in a letter to Katharine A. White of the New Yorker, this "enormous, mysterious, heartbreaking novel" which he was in the process of completing after "five years of monstrous misgivings and diabolical labors."... In a letter to Edmund Wilson written the following year, he acknowledged the sensual dimension of the novel but insisted upon its artistic quality: "I consider this novel to be my best thing in English, and though the theme and situation are decidedly sensuous, its art is pure and its fun riotous." Incidentally, the entire paragraph from which this quotation is taken is bracketed and marked in the margin: "all this is a secret." A year after the publication of the book in Paris, he tried to vindicate it in a letter to his friend and colleague Morris Bishop who had got him appointed at Cornell: 'I know that Lolita is my best book so far. I calmly lean on my conviction that it is a serious work of art, and that no court could prove it to be 'lewd and libertine.' All categories grade, of course, into one another: a comedy of manners written by a fine poet may have its 'lewd' side; but Lolita is a tragedy. 'Pornography' is not a an image plucked out of context; pornography is an attitude and an intention. The tragic and the obscene exclude each other.' Nabokov probably meant that obscenity, in such a case, is redeemed by the tragic elements and is not the raison d'être of the book, merely an instrument. Like Flaubert before him, he insisted upon the purity of his intentions but the syllogism he constructed is somewhat lame since he uses a different word in his premise and his conclusion ("pornography" and "obscenity") in order to demonstrate that there is no vulgarity in his novel. He resumed the same line of defense with Pascal Covici a few weeks later: "As a friend and one of the few people who have read the book, you will, I am sure, slap down such rumormongers as contend that the book is pornographic. I know that Lolita is my best book so far. Calmly I lean on my conviction that it is a serious work of art and that no court could prove it to be 'lewd and libertine'."the poerotic novel www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/coutur3.htm -
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/