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Re: Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls ...
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JM [to RSGwynn's final words after comparing Burgess's Alex and VN's Humbert: "... perhaps he realizes, on his own, that the means of his own personal exculpation are totally withing his own hands (I'm speaking of the whole, 21-chapter novel). It's a fascinating question: does H. H. find his own redemption (or is it given to him)? I like think that somehow he has managed to find it through the former, not the latter."]
Despite the wealth of information one may glean when using statistical methods to count the frequency of specific words in a novel, building timelines and flow diagrams of intertwining subjects or plots, just as some scientists believe about Maths, I believe that one can never reach the central kernel of any literary "absolute truth."
Recently I got acquainted with Umberto Eco's elaboration on cross-references and citations and with his ideas about a "post-modern loss of innocence." It's probably something that V.N could have grasped a lot sooner and applied in his novels, in a parodical vein, and to the reader's expense (i.e, how is the reader to disentangle the body of his allusions, bobolinks, references?). I think that R.S.Gwynn's personal positioning is courageous in that he is revealing a little about his likes and dislikes. We only need to remember what VN once said about this issue, in his biography of Gogol, ch 4 part 3: "The simple line of images shall reveal the identity of whoorders them as concisely as the docile numbers yielded their treasure to Poe. The crudest curriculum vitae wings and beats its wings in the stil that is peculiar to the subscriber. I doubt that you can even give your phone number without giving something of yourself". The use readers can make of such revelations may be, in turn, coherent or invasively disrespectful (no wonder VN also warned against a certain kind of Freudians, telling them to keep out...) Omniscient narration creates a distance between the novel and the narrator. What about the commentators and critics, is it valid to use it as a shield? At present, the rarefied "universal omniscient narrator" often appears in the guise of an "unreliable narrator." It occurred to me that special schools of literary criticism (some of them unjustly tagged as "psychoanalytic") must exist and that it's formed by "universal omniscient readers," who know what an author's unconscious intentions and innermost thoughts are and feel that they must reveal them in the name of "truth".Knowing these dangers ( as I can only suppose he did), Nabokov may have had his fun while taking protective measures.
Although it's possible, even desirable, to spot the hidden identity of an authorial guiding-hand or unconscious thought, even in novels with no intended social or moral message, unless the plot is very tightly woven (as it's the case of Agatha Christie's Jane Marple, in her fictional town of St. Mary Mead seen as a microcosm that represents human nature everywhere), this is an extremely hard task when we come to novelists, like Vladimir Nabokov. Charles Kinbote seldom acted as an omniscient narrator and, if I'm not mistaken, this only happens when he is hallucinating and inventing Zembla. Otherwise he must stalk John Shade and avoid Sybil when he needs to more information about his biographee. Is it reasonable to suppose that CK is not only a satirical presentation about lieterary commentators (such as VN, himself, operated in EO) but also an authorial ploy to ridicule "omniscient commentators" (they must be as deluded as CK)?
-----Mensagem Original-----
De: Anthony Stadlen
Para: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Enviada em: quarta-feira, 22 de fevereiro de 2012 12:24
Assunto: Re: [NABOKV-L] Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls ...
In a message dated 22/02/2012 14:19:47 GMT Standard Time, Rsgwynn1@CS.COM writes:
Does Humbert ultimately receive some moment of Grace? I like to think he has, as he sits overlooking and overhearing the children near the end of the novel. It does move in a mysterious way, its wonders to perform.
Brian Boyd has long ago pointed to Nabokov's brilliance and insight in having Humbert seductively place this passage just where it is near the end of his narrative. Nabokov ruthlessly exposes readers who are seduced by the rhetoric of a child-rapist and murderer. This does not mean that Humbert's fleeting insight had no validity, but it was fleeting, and he did not have the integrity to act on it.
Anthony Stadlen
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