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[NABOKOV-L] Excerpts from "Lolita"
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S.Blackwell: [...] why HH wrote his confession...Some possibilities:
1. He feels remorse, and the "local palliative of articulate art" is his best and only (but completely inadequate) available penance (there is a fair amount of self-flagellation in the text, some of it concealed). He hopes that some small "good" can be salvaged from something horrible, even if it is no compensation.
JM: excerpts that show HH's momentary insights,remorse and lasting pain ( to add examples for SB's hypothesis number one):
1. Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!
2. What drives me insane is the twofold nature of this nymphet ... all this gets mixed up with the exquisite stainless tenderness seeping through the musk and the mud, through the dirt and the death, oh God, oh God. And what is most singular is that she, this Lolita, my Lolita, has individualized the writer's ancient lust, so that above and over everything there is - Lolita.
3. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. ...a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smearing pink, a sigh, a wincing child.
4.....She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past...brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds... but thank God it was not that echo alone that I worshipped. .. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another's child...still mine...
5. 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...
6.. I have still other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain... my Lolita remarked: "You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own"; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate ... anything of genuine kind. .. She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I, using for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own last teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such outbursts of rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my poor, bruised child.... there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller..
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1. He feels remorse, and the "local palliative of articulate art" is his best and only (but completely inadequate) available penance (there is a fair amount of self-flagellation in the text, some of it concealed). He hopes that some small "good" can be salvaged from something horrible, even if it is no compensation.
JM: excerpts that show HH's momentary insights,remorse and lasting pain ( to add examples for SB's hypothesis number one):
1. Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!
2. What drives me insane is the twofold nature of this nymphet ... all this gets mixed up with the exquisite stainless tenderness seeping through the musk and the mud, through the dirt and the death, oh God, oh God. And what is most singular is that she, this Lolita, my Lolita, has individualized the writer's ancient lust, so that above and over everything there is - Lolita.
3. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. ...a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smearing pink, a sigh, a wincing child.
4.....She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past...brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds... but thank God it was not that echo alone that I worshipped. .. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another's child...still mine...
5. 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...
6.. I have still other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain... my Lolita remarked: "You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own"; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate ... anything of genuine kind. .. She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I, using for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own last teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such outbursts of rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my poor, bruised child.... there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller..
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/