The first time that I read Lolita I was about 20, happily partnered with what we might call an adventurous and experienced girl friend, and supplied with a worry-free supply of cash from home. The book had been urged on me by an older and smarter friend of mine. I was not especially moved by the book.
The next time I read it I was in my late twenties. The girl friend had broken my heart by deserting me as casually as one says goodbye to a casual dinner companion. Eventually, though, I met another young woman and fell in love with all of her -- soul and spirit, flaws and gifts -- and not just her body. I was flat broke. My job was miserably compensated and my colleagues and superiors were thugs and losers. I quit, with no new job in sight.
I hungered for almost all the pretty girls I saw, but I was determined to be faithful to my wife, and I succeeded at that, though there were some close calls.
The fact is, I experienced a lot of disappointment and pain, and I found out just how meager and mean I could be if I didn’t make a serious effort to act civilized. And when I read Lolita again, it made me laugh out loud. I was awed by Nabokov's skill as a writer. I decided to read everything by and about Nabokov that I could put my hands on, and I did just that.
The moral is, kids can't "get" brilliant and subtle irony or understand the humor one finds in terror and pain, even — or especially -- when the story is told by a genius. I think it was Beckett who said something to the effect that nothing is funnier than pain.
The kids are okay. Only the technology and the clothes change; most of us become human beings eventually. All that’s needed are a fair share of the undeserved beatings that life is so eager to mete out to everyone, good, bad, or indifferent.
The spirit and the soul come to the surface only after we've felt the surprise of injustice, the frailty of friendships, the meanness of the wealthy and the generosity of the poor (and, of course, vice versa -- and for no good reason), and the sheer arbitrary unfairness
that threads its way through life. That’s when you learn to laugh.
Andrew Brown
On 1/4/07 12:20 PM, "NABOKV-L" <NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU> wrote:
> In regard to Lewis' remarks, I can only imagine what it would be like to
>
> confront most of the college students I have taught in the past few
> years
> with Lolita. The one critical faculty most of them come prepared to
> wield
> is the judgement of characters - and boy do they wield it. It is a
> faculty they are as likely to have picked up from Jerry Springer as
> their
> high school teachers. Thus, I learned from my students, Oedipus Rex is
> merely a squalid tale of incest in which Oedipus "could have made
> different choices."
>
> Despite all the talk of ours being an age of irony, my students are
> unable
> to comprehend the cosmic ironies of tragedy or the self-assailing irony
> of
> a George Orwell in "Shooting an Elephant," which they regularly view as
> Orwell bragging about shooting a poor elephant. It is little wonder
> that
> they can't laugh with Humbert Humbert. Part of this, I will grant, is
> poor reading skills. Part of it is something that seems a great deal
> harder to remedy: moralism without empathy.
>
> Francine Prose wrote a good essay about 5 years ago for Harper's called
> (I
> believe) "I know why the caged bird can't read," which I recommend to
> anybody else who has noticed this depressing trend. (I sound like I'm
> blaming the students, for example, and to her credit she doesn't).
>
> Vic Perry
>
> [EDNOTE. I have taught Lolita to college students off and on for over
> twenty years now, and have found that my current students not only miss
> the black humor but are also less likely to find Humbert even the least
> bit sympathetic, which makes their experience of the novel quite, quite
> different than mine. -- SES]
>
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