Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0015411, Mon, 13 Aug 2007 12:35:56 -0300

Subject
Re: [Rambling Thoughts on VN SIGHTINGS] Tragic Britney,
brought down just like Lolita ...
From
Date
Body
Sandy Klein sent an article on "Tragic Britney, brought down just like Lolita ..."
Complete article at following URL:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/08/12/do1205.xml , by Jenny McCartney, Sunday Telegraph (August,2007)

Part of its wording: "One of the saddest little public dramas of our times, captured daily by gleeful paparazzi, is the ongoing nervous breakdown of the pop star Britney Spears[...]Spears's breakdown reminds me of a tragedy contained within a novel, and the novel in question is Nabokov's Lolita, the story of how Humbert Humbert, a fastidious European aesthete and paedophile, seduced and destroyed a 12-year-old American girl. Lolita, despite the furore caused by its subject matter, has always seemed to me an intensely sad and moral novel: it exposes not only Humbert's chillingly selfish fascination with exploiting the precocious sexuality [...] but also his towering indifference to the fact that he has ruined her character and future prospects. [...] when she leaves Humbert, it is for the arms of another predator, until she finally winds up pregnant[...] "

A "predatory" frequency rising up in the present? By sheer marvellous coincidence someone called my attention to an article entitled "Predator Angler" where a newsagent accused an African fisherman for having killed a million-year old fish, considered extinct until then...
As if his intervention was not revelatory of a mistaken assumption on that kind of fish, he was introduced to the reader as an echologically unsound cruel fisherman.
This fishy story, as it was explained to me, serves to illustrate how a past circumstance, thought to be over and done with until some kind of angler brings it to the surface of the present, can still surprise us, as N. Krushcheva's s words did, by showing us how concepts from a 1917 "revolutionary realism" remain alive and ready to surface in the present, and as ready to repel or enchant us as VN's "more ancient fictive worlds". So...

Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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






Attachment