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Subject:
RES: [NABOKV-L]{SIGHTING] reference to V.N and "Lolita" in
M.Drabble's "The Pure Gold Baby" ' |
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From:
Jansy Mello <jansy.mello@outlook.com> |
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Date:
7/29/2015 11:09 PM |
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To:
'Vladimir Nabokov Forum' <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU> |
A Sklyarenko: “…In Lolita Quilty tries to tempt Humbert with “the infolio de-luxe Bagration Island
by the explorer and psychoanalist Melanie Weiss, a
remarkable lady, a remarkable work - drop that gun - with
photographs of eight hundred and something male organs she
examined and measured in 1932 on Bagration, in the Barda
Sea, very illuminating graphs, plotted with love under
pleasant skies - drop that gun...”
Jansy Mello: The indication of an “explorer and psychoanalyst
Melanie Weiss” presents another game with names and contrasts,
alluding to the “black and white” type of crude
interpretations, like the one related to Dr. Ivor Black, and
here, with Melanie=black and Weiss=white. However, I suppose
he is also referring to the real child psychoanalyst Melanie
Klein and, perhaps, to Margaret Mead, a cultural
anthropologist.
While I did some checking on Margaret Mead (I
wanted to remember where her main explorations took
place…islands, but which?), I found a reference to the lines
by Nabokov, now quoted by A.Sklyarenko, in a novel by Margaret
Drabble , “The Pure Gold Baby”, where she seems
to be doubling some of Margaret Mead’s own contributions and,
in a quick evaluation, curiously misreading Nabokov *. I copied bits of the paragraphs in question:
“In her sixties, she was to become interested in
popular conceptions of anthropology and its use as a motif in
fiction …Margaret Mead herself was the butt of endless reductive
and sexist jokes [ ]Towards the end of Lolita,
arch-parodist Vladimir Nabokov produces a classic example of
anthropology- mockery, admittedly put into the mouth of a sexual
pervert pleading for his life at gunpoint [ ] Jess was
horrified by a late rereading of this classic novel. She had
disliked it in her twenties, when she was too young and innocent
to understand it, but in her sixties she understood it and was
appalled by it [ ] Initially, she had been rereading Lolita
in search of unqualified and obsessive and exclusive love,
which she found there too, as she had dimly remembered them –
but tarnished, perverted, tarnished. There is genius, but there
is coldness. Jess’s heart cannot afford to give space to
coldness…” ( The Pure Gold Baby” by M. Drabble).
………………………………………………………………….