Subject
[NABOKJOV-L} several issues( paidos, pedos) and fiction.
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S.Blackwell: [...] He can't stop exploiting Dolly, who, having escaped him physically, is recaptured by him aesthetically (or just narratively). She has very little voice in HH's text. He has total control over her enduring image (and the necessity of her death means that she can't correct the record: he assures himself the last word).
J.Aisenberg: I've come across this maddening notion... either justifies anything a character does or mystically rots their souls inside out. Isn't this what's underlying Jansy's point about H.H. "only" be in jail for Q's murder? If I understood the point, isn't this why it seems strange then for Humbert to have gone into all that side business about his crimes against Lolita, which to modern readers is really is far more damning than his killing? ...This is an interesting legal and social development, which affects responses to the book, I think.
K.Montserrat: I have one question: Does someone know if these legal concepts you're talking about, were the same 50 years ago, I mean, when the novel Lolita was published in the United States?
JM: On-line dictionaries are a disappointment in that they bring, as Aisenberg and Studdard believe it to be correct, the origin of "pederast" linked to the Greek for "paidos", child .
For example, online entry on pederasty :"sodomy with a boy," 1609, from Mod.L. pæderastia, from Gk. paiderastia "love of boys," from paiderastes "pederast," from pais (gen. paidos) "child, boy" (see pedo-) + erastes "lover," from erasthai "to love." Pederast is 1730s, from Fr. pédéraste, from Gk. paiderastes.
Paidos, as in pediatrics or pedophily, is not the word used in "pederast". Pederasty has no original link with "paidos" in anything I learned in the past. I'll have to find my archives but in Latin, as used by Catullus in an exemplary fashion, it means "bottom" ( any bottom, a boys' or a girl's, adult or still "paidos") I'm sure others can help. It is a very strange misconception ( mine? It could be, online dics have been very impressively authoritativw in their "etymological" information and I speak no Greek)
I vote for S.Blackwell's third hypothesis concerning HH's confessions. After all, we mustn't forget that Lolita is entirely a creation of HH's. As it happens with a work of fiction, to discuss legal variations and interpretation, or varying ages of consent along history, is nice but not necessary to understand the novel itself. "Lolita", by its presentation of exploitation, violence, complaisance, perversion, aso aso ... serves in a most "universal" way, independently of culture or of age. It does stimulate, as only a work of art can do, the development of one's sensitivity to existing legal concepts, social blindness, the need to understand what's happening around us.But, as I see it, the novel Lolita is "self-explanatory": its treasures lie in the novel per se, and in the way we deal with what HH can provoke in every reader.
HH brings to us the portrait of a very powerful twisted mind ( unfortunately easily found anywhere and at all times):Through HH Nabokov effectively demonstrates how such minds function.
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J.Aisenberg: I've come across this maddening notion... either justifies anything a character does or mystically rots their souls inside out. Isn't this what's underlying Jansy's point about H.H. "only" be in jail for Q's murder? If I understood the point, isn't this why it seems strange then for Humbert to have gone into all that side business about his crimes against Lolita, which to modern readers is really is far more damning than his killing? ...This is an interesting legal and social development, which affects responses to the book, I think.
K.Montserrat: I have one question: Does someone know if these legal concepts you're talking about, were the same 50 years ago, I mean, when the novel Lolita was published in the United States?
JM: On-line dictionaries are a disappointment in that they bring, as Aisenberg and Studdard believe it to be correct, the origin of "pederast" linked to the Greek for "paidos", child .
For example, online entry on pederasty :"sodomy with a boy," 1609, from Mod.L. pæderastia, from Gk. paiderastia "love of boys," from paiderastes "pederast," from pais (gen. paidos) "child, boy" (see pedo-) + erastes "lover," from erasthai "to love." Pederast is 1730s, from Fr. pédéraste, from Gk. paiderastes.
Paidos, as in pediatrics or pedophily, is not the word used in "pederast". Pederasty has no original link with "paidos" in anything I learned in the past. I'll have to find my archives but in Latin, as used by Catullus in an exemplary fashion, it means "bottom" ( any bottom, a boys' or a girl's, adult or still "paidos") I'm sure others can help. It is a very strange misconception ( mine? It could be, online dics have been very impressively authoritativw in their "etymological" information and I speak no Greek)
I vote for S.Blackwell's third hypothesis concerning HH's confessions. After all, we mustn't forget that Lolita is entirely a creation of HH's. As it happens with a work of fiction, to discuss legal variations and interpretation, or varying ages of consent along history, is nice but not necessary to understand the novel itself. "Lolita", by its presentation of exploitation, violence, complaisance, perversion, aso aso ... serves in a most "universal" way, independently of culture or of age. It does stimulate, as only a work of art can do, the development of one's sensitivity to existing legal concepts, social blindness, the need to understand what's happening around us.But, as I see it, the novel Lolita is "self-explanatory": its treasures lie in the novel per se, and in the way we deal with what HH can provoke in every reader.
HH brings to us the portrait of a very powerful twisted mind ( unfortunately easily found anywhere and at all times):Through HH Nabokov effectively demonstrates how such minds function.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/