"Nabokov, who saw in art the possibility of redemption, was
tempted to think taste ruled out evil.". Nabokov in Berlin
by Lesley Chamberlain (July/August 2010 - Standpoint Magazine)
I isolated this commentary by Lesley Chamberlain with the hope that some
Nabler would clash against it or chime in. His wording is careful, but the
intention is clear (taste rules out evil and redemption is possible through
art). Nevertheless, what Nabokov expresses, when speaking through a
possibly sincere Humbert, denies L.C's conclusion. Isn't he saying that art
is a melancholy consolation for the pains and horrors
which are a part of earthly life or that the hope of
a redemption is selfish because it doesn't make past wrongs to other
people acceptable?
In "Lolita" we find that: "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."
and, in the last
lines: "I am thinking of
aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the
refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my
Lolita." No examples that corroborate L.C's thesis
occur to me now...