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Re: Lolita would be impossible to read ...
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In the text mailed by Sandy Klein we find:
"These men and women are not from Mars or Venus but a red planet in which ordinary things become extraordinarily sexual. As if they wear sex goggles, any place or person may become appealing for unleashing the gargantuan girth of their appetite. Not to mention inanimate objects. For one thing, Lolita would be impossible to read since even the title curls off the tongue, and though the pedophiliac context is unappealing to the majority, Nabokov's seductive pen pulsates pure sexual desire for nymphs and sex addicts."
Ciara Fernandez "Between the Sheets: Needy Nymphs Abound" at the http://www.tsl.pomona.edu/?page=lifestyle&article=1688&issue=60
It took me sometime to realize that the comment above was not intended as a criticism but offered a description of the "red planet" people who suffer under an excess of erotic fantasy. I had just been searching through "Lolita" to find clues about VN's game of musky "muscat" to investigate some "Freudian traps" that run along similar lines as Quilty's persecution of Humbert (a game that "fore-shadows" Pale Fire's slow persecution by Gradus in Quilty's protean car-change that contrasts with his identifiable and ever present "mustache".)
A trip along "the musk and the mud, the dirt and the death" led me to my first trap in "Lolita" by VN's curious inversion of the standard "freudian symbolism". Instead of luring the reader into a regressive quest for red caves or padded rooms, like the one in "The Last Tango in Paris" movie, Nabokov describes the phoetus inside the mother as a "tiny madman in his padded cell."
( it reminded me of Beckett's 1955 observation: " we are all born mad, some remain so", in "Waiting for Godot"). Here are the lines in HH's Friday entry:
'Has she already been initiated by mother nature to the Mystery of the Menarche? Bloated feelings. The Curse of the Irish. Falling from the roof. Grandma is visiting. "Mr. Uterus [I quote from a girls' magazine] starts to build a thick soft wall on the chance a possible baby may have to be bedded down there." The tiny madman in his padded cell (...) At dinner tonight the old cat said to me with a sidelong gleam of motherly mockery directed at Lo (I had just been describing, in a flippant vein, the delightful little toothbrush mustache I had not quite decided to grow): "Better don't if somebody is not to go absolutely dotty." .'
More descriptions of Quilty, his "Trappian" mustache and gray cars:
1. I cannot tell you, ladies and gentlemen, the exact day when I first knew with utter certainty that the red convertible was following us (...). I simply ignored the fact that our quiet pursuer, in his converted state, stopped a little behind us at a café or bar(...). As I was in the act of signing a traveler's check ... and saw a terrible thing. A broad-backed man, baldish, in an oatmeal coat and dark-brown trousers, was listening to Lo (...) I saw him scratch his cheek and nod, and turn, and walk back to his convertible, a broad and thickish man of my age, somewhat resembling Gustave Trapp, a cousin of my father's in Switzerland - same smoothly tanned face, fuller than mine, with a small dark mustache and a rosebud degenerate mouth.
2. The driver behind me, with his stuffed shoulders and Trappish mustache, looked like a display dummy, and his convertible seemed to move only because an invisible rope of silent silk connected it with out shabby vehicle.
3. A sparrow alighted with a jumbo bread crumb, was tackled by another, and lost the crumb...When after a few grim stoppages and a bit of deliberate meandering, I returned to the highway, our shadow had disappeared.
4. A veritable Proteus of the highway, with bewildering ease he switched from one vehicle to another (...) He seemed to patronize at first the Chevrolet genus, beginning with a Campus Cream convertible, then going on to a small Horizon Blue sedan, and thenceforth fading into Surf Gray and Driftwood Gray. Then he turned to other makes and passed through a pale dull rainbow of paint shades(...) grays, however, remained his favorite cryptochromism, and, in agonizing nightmares, I tried in vain to sort out properly such ghosts as Chrysler's Shell Gray, Chevrolet's Thistle Gray, Dodge's French Gray...
5. The necessity of being constantly on the lookout for his little mustache and open shirt (...) led me to a profound study of all cars on the road - behind, before, alongside, coming, going, every vehicle under the dancing sun:....The gray car slowing up before us, the gray car catching up with us.
6. There he stood( ...) his little mustache a humid smear, the wool on his chest spread like a symmetrical trophy, his naval pulsating, his hirsute thighs dripping(...) I could sense the musk of her excitement (...) as he leaned against a tree in which a multitude of dappled Priaps shivered. Immediately afterwards a marvelous transformation took place. He was no longer the satyr but a very good-natured and foolish Swiss cousin, the Gustave Trapp I have mentioned more than once (...) This Trapp noticed me from afar and working the towel on his name walked back with false insouciance to the pool.
7.His smudgy mustache twitched. I removed my raincoat (...) "You know," he said, scratching loudly his fleshy and gritty gray cheek (...) To have him trapped, after those years of repentance and rage...
Jansy
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"These men and women are not from Mars or Venus but a red planet in which ordinary things become extraordinarily sexual. As if they wear sex goggles, any place or person may become appealing for unleashing the gargantuan girth of their appetite. Not to mention inanimate objects. For one thing, Lolita would be impossible to read since even the title curls off the tongue, and though the pedophiliac context is unappealing to the majority, Nabokov's seductive pen pulsates pure sexual desire for nymphs and sex addicts."
Ciara Fernandez "Between the Sheets: Needy Nymphs Abound" at the http://www.tsl.pomona.edu/?page=lifestyle&article=1688&issue=60
It took me sometime to realize that the comment above was not intended as a criticism but offered a description of the "red planet" people who suffer under an excess of erotic fantasy. I had just been searching through "Lolita" to find clues about VN's game of musky "muscat" to investigate some "Freudian traps" that run along similar lines as Quilty's persecution of Humbert (a game that "fore-shadows" Pale Fire's slow persecution by Gradus in Quilty's protean car-change that contrasts with his identifiable and ever present "mustache".)
A trip along "the musk and the mud, the dirt and the death" led me to my first trap in "Lolita" by VN's curious inversion of the standard "freudian symbolism". Instead of luring the reader into a regressive quest for red caves or padded rooms, like the one in "The Last Tango in Paris" movie, Nabokov describes the phoetus inside the mother as a "tiny madman in his padded cell."
( it reminded me of Beckett's 1955 observation: " we are all born mad, some remain so", in "Waiting for Godot"). Here are the lines in HH's Friday entry:
'Has she already been initiated by mother nature to the Mystery of the Menarche? Bloated feelings. The Curse of the Irish. Falling from the roof. Grandma is visiting. "Mr. Uterus [I quote from a girls' magazine] starts to build a thick soft wall on the chance a possible baby may have to be bedded down there." The tiny madman in his padded cell (...) At dinner tonight the old cat said to me with a sidelong gleam of motherly mockery directed at Lo (I had just been describing, in a flippant vein, the delightful little toothbrush mustache I had not quite decided to grow): "Better don't if somebody is not to go absolutely dotty." .'
More descriptions of Quilty, his "Trappian" mustache and gray cars:
1. I cannot tell you, ladies and gentlemen, the exact day when I first knew with utter certainty that the red convertible was following us (...). I simply ignored the fact that our quiet pursuer, in his converted state, stopped a little behind us at a café or bar(...). As I was in the act of signing a traveler's check ... and saw a terrible thing. A broad-backed man, baldish, in an oatmeal coat and dark-brown trousers, was listening to Lo (...) I saw him scratch his cheek and nod, and turn, and walk back to his convertible, a broad and thickish man of my age, somewhat resembling Gustave Trapp, a cousin of my father's in Switzerland - same smoothly tanned face, fuller than mine, with a small dark mustache and a rosebud degenerate mouth.
2. The driver behind me, with his stuffed shoulders and Trappish mustache, looked like a display dummy, and his convertible seemed to move only because an invisible rope of silent silk connected it with out shabby vehicle.
3. A sparrow alighted with a jumbo bread crumb, was tackled by another, and lost the crumb...When after a few grim stoppages and a bit of deliberate meandering, I returned to the highway, our shadow had disappeared.
4. A veritable Proteus of the highway, with bewildering ease he switched from one vehicle to another (...) He seemed to patronize at first the Chevrolet genus, beginning with a Campus Cream convertible, then going on to a small Horizon Blue sedan, and thenceforth fading into Surf Gray and Driftwood Gray. Then he turned to other makes and passed through a pale dull rainbow of paint shades(...) grays, however, remained his favorite cryptochromism, and, in agonizing nightmares, I tried in vain to sort out properly such ghosts as Chrysler's Shell Gray, Chevrolet's Thistle Gray, Dodge's French Gray...
5. The necessity of being constantly on the lookout for his little mustache and open shirt (...) led me to a profound study of all cars on the road - behind, before, alongside, coming, going, every vehicle under the dancing sun:....The gray car slowing up before us, the gray car catching up with us.
6. There he stood( ...) his little mustache a humid smear, the wool on his chest spread like a symmetrical trophy, his naval pulsating, his hirsute thighs dripping(...) I could sense the musk of her excitement (...) as he leaned against a tree in which a multitude of dappled Priaps shivered. Immediately afterwards a marvelous transformation took place. He was no longer the satyr but a very good-natured and foolish Swiss cousin, the Gustave Trapp I have mentioned more than once (...) This Trapp noticed me from afar and working the towel on his name walked back with false insouciance to the pool.
7.His smudgy mustache twitched. I removed my raincoat (...) "You know," he said, scratching loudly his fleshy and gritty gray cheek (...) To have him trapped, after those years of repentance and rage...
Jansy
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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