Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0025062, Sat, 8 Feb 2014 21:56:06 -0500

Subject
Re: [Old SIGHTING] Nabokov's Berlin: Nabokov, art and evil
Date
Body
My question on "significance" for Brian meant really: did truth slip out
in your Boydian slip? Would Humbert, as Nabokov imagined him, have sneered
at the Shade household? Nabokov shows him at a critical moment of his life
handing Quilty his poem in imitation of Eliot's Ash Wednesday -- Eliot,
whom Nabokov called a "fake". Would Humbert the sophisticated aesthete (and
also posturing penitent contemplating a turn to religion perhaps reminiscent
of Eliot's) have looked down on Shade's poetry, as well as on Shade's
loving marriage and decidedly non-nymphet daughter?

Anthony Stadlen
"Oakleigh"
2A Alexandra Avenue
GB - London N22 7XE
Tel.: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857
For Existential Psychotherapy and Inner Circle Seminars see:
_http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com_ (http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/)




In a message dated 07/02/2014 19:47:24 GMT Standard Time,
b.boyd@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ writes:

Anthony also asks is there a significance in my slip. Only that I have
long pondered Nabokov’s use of light-and-shade names in his three biggest
English novels: Haze, Humbert Humbert, Clare (“Clare Obscure” at one point)
Quilty, Shade, Lucette.


Brian




On 8/02/2014, at 7:14 am, Brian Boyd <_b.boyd@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ_
(mailto:b.boyd@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ) > wrote:


Indeed, Anthony: Haze. A Boydian slip.


On 8/02/2014, at 12:58 am, Anthony Stadlen <_STADLEN@AOL.COM_
(mailto:STADLEN@AOL.COM) > wrote:



I hope you will allow me to register that I agree wholeheartedly with what
Brian Boyd says here. It is exactly what I have been trying to convey over
the years when questions of the ethics of Lolita are discussed.

Incidentally, does Brian mean Haze when he writes Shade, and is there a
significance in his slip, if it is one?

Anthony Stadlen
"Oakleigh"
2A Alexandra Avenue
GB - London N22 7XE
Tel.: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857
For Existential Psychotherapy and Inner Circle Seminars see:
_http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com_ (http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/)




In a message dated 07/02/2014 02:23:17 GMT Standard Time,
_b.boyd@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ_ (mailto:b.boyd@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ) writes:

Agreed, Jansy. Humbert sneers at the Shade household and America in
general for their poor taste, while himself exemplifying far poorer morals. The
following (from my article “Arts, Humanities, Sciences, Uses” in the
current special issue on “Use” in literature and the humanities, in New
Literary History, 2013, 53, 577-96, pp. 593–94) makes not quite the same point,
but a similar one: Nabokov’s critique, although he thinks that art and
imagination are ultimately on the side of good (see the foreword to The Waltz
Invention), of any notion that by themselves they guarantee good:




The best art, like the best science, critiques itself, both building on
and challenging what has gone before. In Lolita, Nabokov throws down a
strong challenge to his own chosen art. Despite John Ray, the pages that follow
his foreword show literature cannot guarantee superior sensitivity or
conduct. It is no accident that the two men who prey on Lolita are both
littérateurs, one a scholar and poet who tries to marshal Dante, Petrarch, and Poe
as precursors, exemplars, and excusers of his own love for Lolita, the
other a playwright who knows his Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Molière, Sheridan,
Shaw, and Maeterlinck and who has fashioned “many plays for children.”
Humbert, the lone, tense, scholarly European, draws on literature as exalted
romantic aestheticism, as if it underwrites what he thinks the rare
elevation and refinement of his passion. Quilty, the relaxed, gregarious, and
populist American, sees little difference between art and commerce, piquant
pleasure and pornography, the slick and the sleazy. Both are “well-read” in
literature, but neither is morally better for it. . . .



As Nabokov shows, literature does not guarantee elevation of conduct or
extension of sympathies: those who engage with literature are too various,
and literature itself would run counter its own deepest nature if it sought
to impose a rigid, and rigidly enforced, uniformity of response on the
diversity of real readers. But here in Lolita, Nabokov invites good readers, as
we respond to Humbert’s perspective, to reject that perspective precisely
for its failing to consider or see Lolita’s. Lolita invites us to
confront the human capacity to ignore the suffering of others, in the supposedly
refined Humbert; to see beyond the blinkers of our own roles as protagonists
and narrators of our own stories, and beyond the privileges and power our
education may give us; to expand our sympathies to those with little power
or voice. Literature at its best, Nabokov suggests, can invite, though
never ensure, an expansion of human possibilities, into a world where “
curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy” become “the norm”—ecstasy in its root
sense of standing outside oneself, not at all in the sense of Humbert on the
davenport crushing out against Lolita’s left buttock “the last throb of
the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever known.”


Art guarantees nothing, Nabokov’s critique of Humbert and Quilty
suggests, but then this complex world precludes large guarantees.



Brian Boyd


On 6/02/2014, at 1:54 pm, Jansy Mello <_jansy.nabokv-L@AETERN.US_
(mailto:jansy.nabokv-L@AETERN.US) > wrote:





"Nabokov, who saw in art the possibility of redemption, was tempted to
think taste ruled out evil.". Nabokov in Berlin by Lesley Chamberlain
(July/August 2010 - Standpoint Magazine)

I isolated this commentary by Lesley Chamberlain with the hope that some
Nabler would clash against it or chime in. His wording is careful, but the
intention is clear (taste rules out evil and redemption is possible through
art). Nevertheless, what Nabokov expresses, when speaking through a
possibly sincere Humbert, denies L.C's conclusion. Isn't he saying that art is a
melancholy consolation for the pains and horrors which are a part of
earthly life or that the hope of a redemption is selfish because it doesn't make
past wrongs to other people acceptable?

In "Lolita" we find that: "Unless it can be proven to me — to me as I am
now, today, with my heart and by beard, and my putrefaction — that in the
infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named
Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this
can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the
treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of
articulate art. To quote an old poet:
The moral sense in mortals is the duty
We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty."
and, in the last lines: "I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret
of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the
only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita." No examples that
corroborate L.C's thesis occur to me now...


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