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Re: Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls ...
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JM to Frances Assa: Are you addressing Mary's comments to my posting? Because the lines you quoted [ HH feeling remorse only when he stops seeing her as a nymphet], were laboriously written by me. And this is why I'll take the liberty to reply with two other queries: Isn't it a matter of opinion (which may vary ad infinitum) if this or that trait is in the character of HH - when you offered almost no arguments in support of your view? What other deus ex machina, if not Nabokov, determines HH's putative remorse?
One of my previous comments is in need of a correction. I wrote that I didn't believe that Humbert Humbert was able to distinguish simple traffic rules from human law. I'm not so sure now after I came across the following statement: "all along the highway; in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position (tail left, white eyelashes right) cutting across all human rules of traffic" It's clear that here he is mentioning traffic conventions, signals and rules - not the law.
However the insertion of "cutting across all human rules..." implies in the notion of a "transgression," and he'll take up this image later on, when he writes:"[... ] I was all covered with Quilty — with the feel of that tumble before the bleeding. The road now stretched across open country, and it occurred to me — not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience — that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway and checked the feeling, and the feeling was good."
Humbert Humbert seems to mock a divine law. I argued before that HH believes that he can reign supreme above good and evil (as a Nietzschean touch), but now I need to rconsider this idea. Dostoievsky's works were mentioned during this discussion. His widely quoted sentence, in "The Brothers Karakazov" ("If God doesn't exist, everything is permitted"), couldn't fail to impress me in the present context. I'm almost certain that HH's mangling human law is related, perhaps deliberately so, to Dostoievsky's literary proposition. When HH writes about "traffic rules" and "straight and winding roads that cut across each other" this may be offering an unexplored link to his trespassings.
Jansy Mello
De: frances assa
Para: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Enviada em: segunda-feira, 27 de fevereiro de 2012 10:25
Assunto: Re: [NABOKV-L] Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls ...
Mary, I like what you said about HH feeling remorse only when he stops seeing her as a nymphet. The question I have is why should he have remorse other than because some deus ex machina wants it so. Wouldn't it be more in character on seeing pregnant, mousy Lolita to just go on his merry way and maybe dream of finding yet another nymphet?
Sent from my Windows Phone
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Mary H. Efremov
Sent: 2/27/2012 4:03
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls ...
I think throughout the text of the novel, HH expresses some shame and certainly guilt,but he is unwilling to stop the shameful behaviors.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jansy <jansy@AETERN.US>
To: NABOKV-L <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sent: Sun, Feb 26, 2012 2:36 pm
Subject: [NABOKV-L] Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls ...
JM: It's Humbert who refuses redemption after all (there are different motivations behind these refusals), and VN prefers to kill off most of the characters, just like it happens in his S,M and PF description of life: the novels will shine for a brief crack of light and then their covers close "like giant wings"...
The lines, with an "old poet's" message*, are at odds with what Humbert Humbert has written just before them It's almost as if his bout of sanity had been blown away right then, bringing him closer to HH's mood just before and after he murders Quilty. His state of mind is manic, or he remembers it that way while he is enthussing over his recollections of experiencing a desperately detailed awareness of the natural world (the day is sunny, the flowers are blooming, the clouds are embracing, the abyss is friendly). When he decides to "drive on the wrong side of the road" it's because, in his eyes, having killed Quilty is merely a common infrigement of human laws (which he confuses with traffic signs and conventions). It is when his remorse concerning the damage he inflicted on Lolita must be absent.,despite his missing her presence in the choir of children's voices.
The timing of the moments he is reproducing, while he seems to aim at "redemption," is complex and, at least, threefold. There's the recollection of a long past experience that was stimulated by the "friendly abyss" he is then admiring. But there's also the rendering of what is taking place right at the time when he is writing his confessions behind bars. Perhaps he is still fighting away the realization that the destruction of Lolita's childhood was criminal in more senses than one (not only Quilty's murder or driving on the wrong side of the road).
It's fairly obvious that HH only became a victim of remorse and guilt after he stopped seeing Lolita as a nymphet and his wild urge was under restraint. The winding road he takes in his first recollection, may transgress the straight one, but it also runs in parallel to it once in a while .However, after he kills Quilty, it's his car and his thoughts that oscilate and turn a straight road into a crooked.one (the image, not the spirit, is similar from Charles Kinbote's reference, in PF, to the Biblical "the crooked made straight" and a Daedalian plan).
My chronology may be incorrect It most probably is - and it's a cold comfort to realize that this is not unusual. with readers of HH's confessions.
(we may even forget that there's only his words to prove that Lolita had always loved creepy and dissolute Quilty, making her equally dissolute, even before she met HH). Right now this is as far as I managed to go...
..........................................................................
*"... Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to me — to me as I am now, today, with my heart and by beard, and my putrefaction — that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art. To quote an old poet: The moral sense in mortals is the duty/We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty."(The Annotated Lolita, page 282)
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One of my previous comments is in need of a correction. I wrote that I didn't believe that Humbert Humbert was able to distinguish simple traffic rules from human law. I'm not so sure now after I came across the following statement: "all along the highway; in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position (tail left, white eyelashes right) cutting across all human rules of traffic" It's clear that here he is mentioning traffic conventions, signals and rules - not the law.
However the insertion of "cutting across all human rules..." implies in the notion of a "transgression," and he'll take up this image later on, when he writes:"[... ] I was all covered with Quilty — with the feel of that tumble before the bleeding. The road now stretched across open country, and it occurred to me — not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience — that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway and checked the feeling, and the feeling was good."
Humbert Humbert seems to mock a divine law. I argued before that HH believes that he can reign supreme above good and evil (as a Nietzschean touch), but now I need to rconsider this idea. Dostoievsky's works were mentioned during this discussion. His widely quoted sentence, in "The Brothers Karakazov" ("If God doesn't exist, everything is permitted"), couldn't fail to impress me in the present context. I'm almost certain that HH's mangling human law is related, perhaps deliberately so, to Dostoievsky's literary proposition. When HH writes about "traffic rules" and "straight and winding roads that cut across each other" this may be offering an unexplored link to his trespassings.
Jansy Mello
De: frances assa
Para: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Enviada em: segunda-feira, 27 de fevereiro de 2012 10:25
Assunto: Re: [NABOKV-L] Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls ...
Mary, I like what you said about HH feeling remorse only when he stops seeing her as a nymphet. The question I have is why should he have remorse other than because some deus ex machina wants it so. Wouldn't it be more in character on seeing pregnant, mousy Lolita to just go on his merry way and maybe dream of finding yet another nymphet?
Sent from my Windows Phone
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Mary H. Efremov
Sent: 2/27/2012 4:03
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls ...
I think throughout the text of the novel, HH expresses some shame and certainly guilt,but he is unwilling to stop the shameful behaviors.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jansy <jansy@AETERN.US>
To: NABOKV-L <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sent: Sun, Feb 26, 2012 2:36 pm
Subject: [NABOKV-L] Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls ...
JM: It's Humbert who refuses redemption after all (there are different motivations behind these refusals), and VN prefers to kill off most of the characters, just like it happens in his S,M and PF description of life: the novels will shine for a brief crack of light and then their covers close "like giant wings"...
The lines, with an "old poet's" message*, are at odds with what Humbert Humbert has written just before them It's almost as if his bout of sanity had been blown away right then, bringing him closer to HH's mood just before and after he murders Quilty. His state of mind is manic, or he remembers it that way while he is enthussing over his recollections of experiencing a desperately detailed awareness of the natural world (the day is sunny, the flowers are blooming, the clouds are embracing, the abyss is friendly). When he decides to "drive on the wrong side of the road" it's because, in his eyes, having killed Quilty is merely a common infrigement of human laws (which he confuses with traffic signs and conventions). It is when his remorse concerning the damage he inflicted on Lolita must be absent.,despite his missing her presence in the choir of children's voices.
The timing of the moments he is reproducing, while he seems to aim at "redemption," is complex and, at least, threefold. There's the recollection of a long past experience that was stimulated by the "friendly abyss" he is then admiring. But there's also the rendering of what is taking place right at the time when he is writing his confessions behind bars. Perhaps he is still fighting away the realization that the destruction of Lolita's childhood was criminal in more senses than one (not only Quilty's murder or driving on the wrong side of the road).
It's fairly obvious that HH only became a victim of remorse and guilt after he stopped seeing Lolita as a nymphet and his wild urge was under restraint. The winding road he takes in his first recollection, may transgress the straight one, but it also runs in parallel to it once in a while .However, after he kills Quilty, it's his car and his thoughts that oscilate and turn a straight road into a crooked.one (the image, not the spirit, is similar from Charles Kinbote's reference, in PF, to the Biblical "the crooked made straight" and a Daedalian plan).
My chronology may be incorrect It most probably is - and it's a cold comfort to realize that this is not unusual. with readers of HH's confessions.
(we may even forget that there's only his words to prove that Lolita had always loved creepy and dissolute Quilty, making her equally dissolute, even before she met HH). Right now this is as far as I managed to go...
..........................................................................
*"... Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to me — to me as I am now, today, with my heart and by beard, and my putrefaction — that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art. To quote an old poet: The moral sense in mortals is the duty/We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty."(The Annotated Lolita, page 282)
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/