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Re: : Re: Aisenberg's thoughts on PF]
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Having moved from Kinbote-Shade's beards into Quilty-Humbert Humbert's (noting that Beardsley figures prominently in "Lolita"), Barrie Karp's message, followed by James Veitch's link to L.Olivier's letter,came as a surprise.
B.Karp concluded, after her "most recent reading of Lolita, is that it is not convincing that this is what HH feels ("then life is a joke") and may be more what VN feels."
I'd been tracking down isolated phrases from "Lolita" to compare them with VN's Russian short-stories ("Sounds", for example) in which love is a gigantic, but formless ecstatic feeling that only later develops into Lolita's "solipsistic-nympholepsy". And yet, also through HH's words, this fantasy "love" once or twice unfolds onto a new level of consciousness and emotion [And what is most singular is that she, this Lolita, my Lolita, has individualized the writer's ancient lust, so that above and over everything there is - Lolita.[...] ...and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else[...].... but thank God it was not that echo alone that I worshipped.]. These rare phrases are not at all typical of a pervert's mind...
J. Veitch's contribution gives us access to Laurence Olivier's (Dec.5,1959) letter to S.Kubrick, where we read that his doubts arose "from a conviction that the chief merit in the book lies in the author's brilliant original and witty descriptive powers and I can't see how this particular virtue is photographable. I fear that told in terms of dialogue the subject would be reduced to the level of pornography to which I'm afraid quite a few people already consign it.". In 1997, Lolita director Adrian Lyne's script-writer, Stephen Schiff, expressed similar fears but went on with the project.
Nevertheless, Olivier's observation is fundamental in that he emphasizes the novel's verbal dimension, something that places "Lolita" in an emminently non-filmable (ie: photography, dialogues) category. Olivier may have been proved wrong in some aspects ( SK's movie was successfully filmed) but there are various "verbal seeds" in the novel that remained intact.
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B.Karp concluded, after her "most recent reading of Lolita, is that it is not convincing that this is what HH feels ("then life is a joke") and may be more what VN feels."
I'd been tracking down isolated phrases from "Lolita" to compare them with VN's Russian short-stories ("Sounds", for example) in which love is a gigantic, but formless ecstatic feeling that only later develops into Lolita's "solipsistic-nympholepsy". And yet, also through HH's words, this fantasy "love" once or twice unfolds onto a new level of consciousness and emotion [And what is most singular is that she, this Lolita, my Lolita, has individualized the writer's ancient lust, so that above and over everything there is - Lolita.[...] ...and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else[...].... but thank God it was not that echo alone that I worshipped.]. These rare phrases are not at all typical of a pervert's mind...
J. Veitch's contribution gives us access to Laurence Olivier's (Dec.5,1959) letter to S.Kubrick, where we read that his doubts arose "from a conviction that the chief merit in the book lies in the author's brilliant original and witty descriptive powers and I can't see how this particular virtue is photographable. I fear that told in terms of dialogue the subject would be reduced to the level of pornography to which I'm afraid quite a few people already consign it.". In 1997, Lolita director Adrian Lyne's script-writer, Stephen Schiff, expressed similar fears but went on with the project.
Nevertheless, Olivier's observation is fundamental in that he emphasizes the novel's verbal dimension, something that places "Lolita" in an emminently non-filmable (ie: photography, dialogues) category. Olivier may have been proved wrong in some aspects ( SK's movie was successfully filmed) but there are various "verbal seeds" in the novel that remained intact.
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/