sending it again.
-----Mensagem Original-----
Enviada em: sexta-feira, 24 de fevereiro de 2012 13:10
Assunto: Re: [NABOKV-L] Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls
...
RS Gwynn: "I think, or like to
think, that he has effected his own catharsis, his own redemption, before
dying. He surely has nothing tangible to gain by writing these things in
his "confessions." It does strike me as a "moral" ending to the novel, if
such is possible. Burgess extends the same possibility of redemption to
Alex in the "missing" 21st chapter of A Clockwork Orange, as does Dostoyevsky to
Raskolnikov, even though "that is another story," as does Tolstoy to Ivan
Ilyich, who, in his own way, is a great sinner too. In most classic novels
the protagonist dies with some grace, with the possible exception of poor Emma,
to whom none is offered by either God or the author."
JM: It seems that it's Humbert himself who cannot find his way to
grace and redemption. Even if fleetingly, he is quite lucid now.
"... 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."(The Annotated Lolita, page 282)
.