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[SIGHTING] LOLITA's child and SPEAK,MEMORY: a surprising parallel
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"Lolita" and "Speak, Memory" are brought together in an article that was published in 2007 in the magazine Ide (São Paulo) v.30 n.45: "The naiveté of a pervert: language and eroticism in Nabokov" (original title: "A ingenuidade de um perverso: linguagem e erotismo em Nabokov" by Eliane Robert Moraes, PUC-SP. Centro Universitário Senac - SP.
The author informs, in her abstract, that "Although the novel Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, owes its reputation to the nymphet, the way it presents the pervert's profile is also remarkable. Humbert Humbert is a character built up on paradoxes. If, on one hand, he is briefly defined as a pervert, on the other, he never corresponds to the caricatures of a sex maniac; in fact, these stereotypes are deeply discussed along the whole narrative. First, by the identification of the pervert to a child, which gains a special meaning when we remember that the novel was written while the author was composing an autobiography, with emphasis on his childhood. In fact, both books play with past and present in particular ways that allow child and adult to interchange their roles. To accomplish this approach, Nabokov's witty plays on words end [up by creating] a peculiar language for perversion."
Here are several excerpts which I did my best to reproduce in English:
"Eliane Moraes mentions the exchange between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson (April 7, 1947) where he informs his friend that he is "writing two things now 1. a short novel about a man who liked little girls" ["The Kingdom by the Sea", the working title of Lolita] and "a new type of autobiography, a scientific attempt to unravel and trace back the all the tangled threads of one's personality" ("The Person in Question", the future Speak, Memory cf. S.Karlinski's notes, p.215), before she ventures to set side by side these two famous books (both published in the 1950s), to observe that they are a product from "a secret pact in the mind of their creator."
The two protagonists, one of them being a definitely ficcional character, are engaged in coming to terms with their past. Inspite of the great differences between them, their writings take as a point of departure their childhood reminiscences. Between the candid child that the Russian writer had been and the lascivious nymphet he conceived, there are more affinities than initially meet the eye. A possible key is suggested by Nabokov himself, in a chapter in "Speak, Memory" when he describes his seventeen-year old passion in St. Petersburg. Even after more than thirty years had passed "Tamara" was remembered with great tenderness, but no regret was mingled to his pain."..my last glimpse of Tamara as she turned...but today no alien marginalia can dim the purity of the pain." (SM 241). He confesses that his nostalgic look backwards results from a "sensuous and particular matter".(SM 250)... "seen through the carefully wiped lenses of time" (SM 230) Nabokov permanently tries to make intensely present what is part of his past, giving a special tonality to his vocation towards the ephemeral. The same mental abilities that Nabokov exhibits in his memoirs, are also those that shape Humbert Humbert's singular confessions. In other words, what both books share is an intricate game between the past and the present in which an adult and a child exchange their respective roles in a variety of ways. This closeness is only made visible by the equally intrincate language games that are present in the novel and in the autobiography. This childish nuancing is already present when Humbert Humbert exclaims:"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta." by which the puerile action of spelling out the letters of a name innaugurate the latent eroticism that is experienced by an adult man who, by confessing to his perversion, sees himself as the anti-thesis of childhood.
Humbert Humbert is a paradoxical character and he never totally behaves like any common pedophile. Every stereotype is put in check by him. Hs novel may surprise the readers by the economy with which all physical sensations of a character are presented. HH's body seems to remain like a ghost that makes fugitive appearances and, usually, in situations that are not erotic at all. The body of the pervert, in Lolita, is seldom "sexualized". Instead, what HH describes are intense anxieties allied to somatic complaints. "If a violin string can ache, then I was that string," he notes. When at last he is sitting at the edge of Lolita's bed, he mentions that, for "instance (I almost wrote "frinstance"), I had no place to rest my head, and a fit of heartburn (they call those fries "French," grand Dieu!) was added to my discomfort. Also in the shortest chapter (ch.26) he complains:"This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My calendar is getting confused. That must have been around August 15, 1947. Don't think I can go on. Heart, head - everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer." His bodily discomfort overpowers the descriptions of physical pleasure." It's a story that doesn't develop or evolve, it arrives nowhere, rotating in a circular time when everything recurs and is repeated, while its protagonist remains paralyzed.In this way the narrator's prison, his jail, presents a strong image of his internal prision, his perversion. Humbert is a jailed man, in body, sould, hear, heart...everyting. What prison would retains Nabokov's character in the same place, both in body and soul? A possible answer could be: his childhood. The pedophile is someone who cannot rid himself of his childhood, just like Humbert Humbert.. He must remains in search of his lost childhood love.. He cannot overcome his initial naiveté: " I, on my part, was as naïve as only a pervert can be." This unexpected association between the pervert and the naif recalls once again the child in him. He cannot make time move but is fixated in an original time that emprisons his body and his mind. Nabokov inverts in a magic twist the conventional significations to indicate that in the novel the child is no longer Lolita, but Humbert himself, as a pervert. It's even Lolita who seduces poor frail Humber who, in the grand moment, is feeling sickly with a heartburn. It's also HH who is astonished by Lolita's sexual play with Quilty: "And, of course, he was a complete freak in sex matters, and his friends were his slaves. I just could not imagine (I, Humbert, could not imagine!) what they all did at Duk Duk Ranch.." or "All of which goes to show how dreadfully stupid poor Humbert always was in matters of sex." He, the innocent HH, was the child, not Lolita.
However, HH's prison is not only a jail, like the monkey's, in Le Jardin des Plantes. To explore its internal extensions the author resorts to linguistic manoeuvers, using words in different languages to promote the amplification of their meanings: As in: "I pressed the bell button, it vibrated through my whole system. Personne. Je resonne. Repersonne. From what depth this re-nonsense? Woof, said the dog. A rush and a shuffle, and woosh-woof went the door."
Playing with a possible linguistic duplicity, the author can now expand his limits and frontiers to reveal his phantasmatic dimensions. Even Humbert Humbert's name brings in the Spanish "hombre" (man) and the French "ombre" (shade) to transform the character into both a man and his shadow. It's in this kind of chiaroscuro that Nabokov engenders an erotic language which keeps overt sexuality in a state of suspension. Like the pervert's who notes that: "really these are irrelevant matters; I am not concerned with so-called "sex" at all. Anybody can imagine those elements of animality. A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets." Nabokov's language is not a commonplace English altough he explains that, unlike his Russian, it's devoid of all accessories: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses - the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions - which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way."
Lolita brings to us an artificial, imaginary, syncretic language. The writer uses this instrument as a toy, feeling free, like a child, to explore it as an instrument that'll translated his most arcaic erotic experiences when the first words perforated the silence of infancy. Childhood, sex, language - it is as difficult to associate HH's perversion and the life of the little Vladimir.as it is hard to dismiss the parallels that arise betwen the lines of Lolita and Speak, Memory. The ostensive difference between the characters has a special background that, however obscure and distant, allows an approach beteween the two texts. Various scholars link HH's fascination with nymphets to a brief chapter (Ch.7) in Speak, Memory, related to family vacations in Biarritz,the building of sandcastles and the encounter with Colette, VN's "primordial child" whom he can remember in great detail: her greenish eyes, her freckles,the brown curls, the delicate wrist, a wound in the arm, the frail neck, long leg, taut skin, the ticklish ears and a kiss, even though the girl has disappeared in the shadows of the landscape, binding him to that strand of iridiscence he couldn't place. A similar landscape as the one chosen for Lolita's working title: "The Kingdom by the Sea." and HH's experience with Annabel Leigh in mythical Riviera. Lolita's fiction offers the writer a place in which he can develop his hazy recollection of Colette, the predominant physicality of their innocent encounters, making it fit into a niche in his story. An author for whom "imagination is a kind of memory" it's useless to indicate an autobiographic background for his invented novel. What matters is that Nabokov's text operates with a particular language whose matrix is, at the same time, infantile and sensual. This language has its origins in the limbus of childhood but it's condemned to be translated into the words of an adult, be he a writer, or a pervert - and it relies on the texture of reminiscence to gain its singular shape. It's here that Lolita and Speak, Memory meet when body and language are merged into one having childhood as their point of departure. In the biography, the threads are untangled whereas, in the novel, the strands are enmeshed until they become a prison. In his faithful adherence to a theory about the perception of time through matter, the adult writer in his Memoirs transforms bodily sensations into an evidence of things that were lost in the mists of the past. However, this process doesn't occur in the novel: - if HH's body is enmeshed and hidden between the lines of Lolita, the text itself must act perversely over the body of his peculiar language.."
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The author informs, in her abstract, that "Although the novel Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, owes its reputation to the nymphet, the way it presents the pervert's profile is also remarkable. Humbert Humbert is a character built up on paradoxes. If, on one hand, he is briefly defined as a pervert, on the other, he never corresponds to the caricatures of a sex maniac; in fact, these stereotypes are deeply discussed along the whole narrative. First, by the identification of the pervert to a child, which gains a special meaning when we remember that the novel was written while the author was composing an autobiography, with emphasis on his childhood. In fact, both books play with past and present in particular ways that allow child and adult to interchange their roles. To accomplish this approach, Nabokov's witty plays on words end [up by creating] a peculiar language for perversion."
Here are several excerpts which I did my best to reproduce in English:
"Eliane Moraes mentions the exchange between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson (April 7, 1947) where he informs his friend that he is "writing two things now 1. a short novel about a man who liked little girls" ["The Kingdom by the Sea", the working title of Lolita] and "a new type of autobiography, a scientific attempt to unravel and trace back the all the tangled threads of one's personality" ("The Person in Question", the future Speak, Memory cf. S.Karlinski's notes, p.215), before she ventures to set side by side these two famous books (both published in the 1950s), to observe that they are a product from "a secret pact in the mind of their creator."
The two protagonists, one of them being a definitely ficcional character, are engaged in coming to terms with their past. Inspite of the great differences between them, their writings take as a point of departure their childhood reminiscences. Between the candid child that the Russian writer had been and the lascivious nymphet he conceived, there are more affinities than initially meet the eye. A possible key is suggested by Nabokov himself, in a chapter in "Speak, Memory" when he describes his seventeen-year old passion in St. Petersburg. Even after more than thirty years had passed "Tamara" was remembered with great tenderness, but no regret was mingled to his pain."..my last glimpse of Tamara as she turned...but today no alien marginalia can dim the purity of the pain." (SM 241). He confesses that his nostalgic look backwards results from a "sensuous and particular matter".(SM 250)... "seen through the carefully wiped lenses of time" (SM 230) Nabokov permanently tries to make intensely present what is part of his past, giving a special tonality to his vocation towards the ephemeral. The same mental abilities that Nabokov exhibits in his memoirs, are also those that shape Humbert Humbert's singular confessions. In other words, what both books share is an intricate game between the past and the present in which an adult and a child exchange their respective roles in a variety of ways. This closeness is only made visible by the equally intrincate language games that are present in the novel and in the autobiography. This childish nuancing is already present when Humbert Humbert exclaims:"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta." by which the puerile action of spelling out the letters of a name innaugurate the latent eroticism that is experienced by an adult man who, by confessing to his perversion, sees himself as the anti-thesis of childhood.
Humbert Humbert is a paradoxical character and he never totally behaves like any common pedophile. Every stereotype is put in check by him. Hs novel may surprise the readers by the economy with which all physical sensations of a character are presented. HH's body seems to remain like a ghost that makes fugitive appearances and, usually, in situations that are not erotic at all. The body of the pervert, in Lolita, is seldom "sexualized". Instead, what HH describes are intense anxieties allied to somatic complaints. "If a violin string can ache, then I was that string," he notes. When at last he is sitting at the edge of Lolita's bed, he mentions that, for "instance (I almost wrote "frinstance"), I had no place to rest my head, and a fit of heartburn (they call those fries "French," grand Dieu!) was added to my discomfort. Also in the shortest chapter (ch.26) he complains:"This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My calendar is getting confused. That must have been around August 15, 1947. Don't think I can go on. Heart, head - everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer." His bodily discomfort overpowers the descriptions of physical pleasure." It's a story that doesn't develop or evolve, it arrives nowhere, rotating in a circular time when everything recurs and is repeated, while its protagonist remains paralyzed.In this way the narrator's prison, his jail, presents a strong image of his internal prision, his perversion. Humbert is a jailed man, in body, sould, hear, heart...everyting. What prison would retains Nabokov's character in the same place, both in body and soul? A possible answer could be: his childhood. The pedophile is someone who cannot rid himself of his childhood, just like Humbert Humbert.. He must remains in search of his lost childhood love.. He cannot overcome his initial naiveté: " I, on my part, was as naïve as only a pervert can be." This unexpected association between the pervert and the naif recalls once again the child in him. He cannot make time move but is fixated in an original time that emprisons his body and his mind. Nabokov inverts in a magic twist the conventional significations to indicate that in the novel the child is no longer Lolita, but Humbert himself, as a pervert. It's even Lolita who seduces poor frail Humber who, in the grand moment, is feeling sickly with a heartburn. It's also HH who is astonished by Lolita's sexual play with Quilty: "And, of course, he was a complete freak in sex matters, and his friends were his slaves. I just could not imagine (I, Humbert, could not imagine!) what they all did at Duk Duk Ranch.." or "All of which goes to show how dreadfully stupid poor Humbert always was in matters of sex." He, the innocent HH, was the child, not Lolita.
However, HH's prison is not only a jail, like the monkey's, in Le Jardin des Plantes. To explore its internal extensions the author resorts to linguistic manoeuvers, using words in different languages to promote the amplification of their meanings: As in: "I pressed the bell button, it vibrated through my whole system. Personne. Je resonne. Repersonne. From what depth this re-nonsense? Woof, said the dog. A rush and a shuffle, and woosh-woof went the door."
Playing with a possible linguistic duplicity, the author can now expand his limits and frontiers to reveal his phantasmatic dimensions. Even Humbert Humbert's name brings in the Spanish "hombre" (man) and the French "ombre" (shade) to transform the character into both a man and his shadow. It's in this kind of chiaroscuro that Nabokov engenders an erotic language which keeps overt sexuality in a state of suspension. Like the pervert's who notes that: "really these are irrelevant matters; I am not concerned with so-called "sex" at all. Anybody can imagine those elements of animality. A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets." Nabokov's language is not a commonplace English altough he explains that, unlike his Russian, it's devoid of all accessories: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses - the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions - which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way."
Lolita brings to us an artificial, imaginary, syncretic language. The writer uses this instrument as a toy, feeling free, like a child, to explore it as an instrument that'll translated his most arcaic erotic experiences when the first words perforated the silence of infancy. Childhood, sex, language - it is as difficult to associate HH's perversion and the life of the little Vladimir.as it is hard to dismiss the parallels that arise betwen the lines of Lolita and Speak, Memory. The ostensive difference between the characters has a special background that, however obscure and distant, allows an approach beteween the two texts. Various scholars link HH's fascination with nymphets to a brief chapter (Ch.7) in Speak, Memory, related to family vacations in Biarritz,the building of sandcastles and the encounter with Colette, VN's "primordial child" whom he can remember in great detail: her greenish eyes, her freckles,the brown curls, the delicate wrist, a wound in the arm, the frail neck, long leg, taut skin, the ticklish ears and a kiss, even though the girl has disappeared in the shadows of the landscape, binding him to that strand of iridiscence he couldn't place. A similar landscape as the one chosen for Lolita's working title: "The Kingdom by the Sea." and HH's experience with Annabel Leigh in mythical Riviera. Lolita's fiction offers the writer a place in which he can develop his hazy recollection of Colette, the predominant physicality of their innocent encounters, making it fit into a niche in his story. An author for whom "imagination is a kind of memory" it's useless to indicate an autobiographic background for his invented novel. What matters is that Nabokov's text operates with a particular language whose matrix is, at the same time, infantile and sensual. This language has its origins in the limbus of childhood but it's condemned to be translated into the words of an adult, be he a writer, or a pervert - and it relies on the texture of reminiscence to gain its singular shape. It's here that Lolita and Speak, Memory meet when body and language are merged into one having childhood as their point of departure. In the biography, the threads are untangled whereas, in the novel, the strands are enmeshed until they become a prison. In his faithful adherence to a theory about the perception of time through matter, the adult writer in his Memoirs transforms bodily sensations into an evidence of things that were lost in the mists of the past. However, this process doesn't occur in the novel: - if HH's body is enmeshed and hidden between the lines of Lolita, the text itself must act perversely over the body of his peculiar language.."
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Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
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