From HP to PH...those curious reversed
"spider-redips" we so often come across without realizing we'd been looking
at things from the opposite side of a bridge... AB's yesterday's lines about "teaching Lolita" made me realize
why it seemed impossible to say anything on this subject. Why English
explorers love the desert and those that live in them dream with the
oasis...
I'm not an English teacher nor do
I belong to any department of literature in America, England,France or
Brazil but, over the last thirty years,
I taught psychology and psychoanalysis and clinical cases ( begining
with Freud's Schreber, Hans, Dora, Emma, and those my students brought up
for discussion). These were never "fiction", as it happens with
"Lolita", "LATH" or "Hamlet".
Whenever I imagined myself "teaching Lolita"
as a work of art my interest wouldn't focus on Humbert Humbert's
perversion and paedophilia, moral and psychological issues or some such
themes, neither on Nabokov's own "refusal" in relation to Freud. I
would explore his poetical images, his words, his enigmas, or the importance of
what VN described as the "lilting luminous letter L" as synesthaesia gaining
shape in art...
If I should teach Lolita I would work on themes
like: "First Love" or "Love as a form of Madness" since this
novel is, above everyting else, a wonderful tragic love story. I
would let psychiatrists, sociologists and moralists worry about the
rest!
Jansy