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Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2008 2:41 PM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] [NABOKOV-L] Excerpts from "Lolita"
J.Aisenberg: "the self-flagellation is sort of genuine...Nabokov said somewhere that
he wanted the story to be about a man obsessed with a girl who only at
the end learns to love her as a man should love a woman, but by that
point it would be too late. Yet it doesn't read that way. Probably it's
because Humbert never realizes that what attracts him to Lolita is all
the things he complains about, her comic books and movies, her slang
and her early sexuality...at odds with the Anabel Leigh mythos from
which Lolita is supposed to have grown...he never seems like he loves
her, since he never knows her.... That bit about there being behind her
awful juvenile cliches "a garden and a twilight, and a palace
gate".Doesn't the image, drenched in its absurd dusty European poetic
lineage, completely wrong in application to Lolita...And that "oh my
poor, bruised child..." ... this woe is me stuff, with its silly
classist tone, seems to parody sympathy ..."
JM: JA, your conclusion
that HH "seems to parody sympathy"
made me realize that there's often in HH a
tone similar to F.Pessoa's who once wrote that "the poet is such a liar
that he feigns to be feeling the pain which he is then truly feeling."
( "O poeta é um fingidor e finge tão completamente que chega a fingir
que é dor a dor que deveras sente").... Actually, the same spirit
arises in other writings of VN, too.
In a way I disagree with
your song-of-experience assumption that true love, necessarily, must
also be "selfless love", therefore matter-of-factedly distant from
childhood nostalgias and fairy-tale dreams. You are probably right
since I'm unable to, in cold-blood, define or describe this "erastes"
kind of love (so unlike "charitas"!!!!).
HH's woe-is-me often drives me to tears (
even the simple exclamation, "my Lolita", in the way he inscribes it,
touches me deeply). For me the
"palace gate" means, for one, the trite "my
home is my castle" lyrical mental state, road-side motels included.
HH, contrary to many other men, really loves
his Lolita and this happens not only after the "choir of children"
bit: "All I want to
stress is that my discovery of her was a fatal consequence of that
"princedom by the sea" in my tortured past.". Besides, from Lolita
onwards VN himself changed from lofty protestations of cosmic
spiritual love (ever present in his Russian short-stories) towards a
more flesh-and-blood, object-directed kind of love with all the losses
it entails (no more endless ressurection by a Greek metempsychotic
passage from lass into flower, into brook or star).
Following the list of "my Lolita" links with
Catullus, I remembered having wiki-read,
quite recently, that "Boswell's Life, along with
other biographies, documented Johnson's behaviour and mannerisms in
such detail that they have informed the posthumous diagnosis of
Tourette syndrome"[...] "Tourette's was once considered a rare and
bizarre syndrome, most often associated with the exclamation of obscene
words or socially inappropriate and derogatory remarks (coprolalia).
However, this symptom is present in only a small minority of people
with Tourette's".
HH's
displeasure with Lolita's slang and easy profanities, if set close to a
couple of lines of this poet's Carmina XVI ( obviously there is not the
slightest proof that VN had ever kept these in mind, at any time),
suggests a very peculiar twist in relation to the "words and
actions" expressed in HH's "confessions".
A rough
translation I found for these lines taught me that faithful
Catullus believes that: "...it is suitable that a dutiful poet
be chaste/ Himself, but not at all necessary that his verses be;/
Which only then have wit and charm,/ When they are erotic or not decent
enough...[...]"
Did HH, while censoring Lolita's unpoetic expletives, act like
Satan rebuking sin or...well, back to the beginning: "why did HH write
his confessions"?