Subject
Re: The Great American Novel ...
From
Date
Body
Sandy Klein sent http://www.christianhumanist.org/chb/2010/04/the-great-american-novel/ ( The Great American Novel, 13 April 2010,Michial Farmer). His article mentions Platonism, solipsism, cruelty. Finally, in the spirit of "Christian Humanism," the author offers an amazing argument in his concluding lines. I'm not sure that I understood his admonitory note, though.
Farmer wrote with such relish and thought about "Postmodernism" ( quoting John Barth: "It all adds up to a postmodern jig of sorts, provided we agree with John Barth’s definition of literary postmodernism as 'a smiling nihilism'.” ), that his denunciation of it ( if that's what it is), and the "bedeviling" of Nabokov, by the power of seduction of his words with their nihilistic message, caught me most unexpectedly. He writes:
"The message is clear—to the degree that Lolita, the product of a man who declared that he “detest[ed] symbls and allegories,” can be said to have a message—and it is a distinctly postmodern one. The world, Nabokov seems to tell us, is full of predators who wish to impose their understanding of the world upon us, to pin us like a butterfly in a display case; we must learn to lie, learn to keep moving ourselves, in order to escape them.With this in mind, the Christian may have more to fear from the philosophical implications of the novel than from any plot-level disgust over paedophilia..."
Petter Naeess wrote:Thank you all for enlightenment about the "Fido" (ie. Plato) passage. My less than scholarly interpretation on first reading would explain how I managed to change Plato to Fido over the years. It still gives me a laugh, though!
JM: And yet, change Plato to Fido (Phaedo?) was what you did.
Still, the vague recollection of a "Fido" in VN remains (and I would never have landed in Plato's "Phaedo").I wonder where.
...............................................................................................................................
(excerpts) For Michial Farmer, Lolita "is quite possibly the most revolting novel of the twentieth century. It is also among the most beautiful. Its staggering power comes from its prose...Lolita feels like the work of a man in love with a brand-new language, an impression furthered by Nabokov’s own description of the novel as “the record of my love affair with the . . . English language.” [...]Writing qua writing doesn’t get any better than Lolita, and it’s no surprise that one finds echoes of its distinctive tone all through the English-language literature of the intervening decades. (I hear it most strongly, to the point of impersonation, in John Updike’s A Month of Sundays, but it’s there in everyone from Pynchon to Rushdie.) Humbert Humbert's plea "leads to a postmodern labyrinth of existence/non-existence so twisted that no amount of string can help me find my way back out of it again. But Humbert is right—we must embrace him, however tentatively, if we are to feel the queer and elliptical power of his story. We must transcend ourselves and the moral judgments we instinctually make of Humbert...The problem is that neither Nabokov nor Humbert will allow us to do so in any kind of full way...Nabokov thus introduces the “social moral” reading of Humbert’s life in order to dismiss it; and since it’s actually we who must do the dismissing, the point is made all the more strongly... It is to this simultaneous authorial presence and absence, I believe, that people are referring when they offer Lolita as an early postmodern novel.[...] All of this is to say that Humbert keeps moving—and yet he doesn’t want to. He is in love with a material form that is by its very definition ephemeral; one can be a nymphet for only so long before one grows into one of the adult women that so disgust Humbert. The solution, of course, is to make a Platonic idol out of Dolores Haze: “I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.” That’s why it’s not really right to refer to Dolores as Lolita except through Humbert’s eyes—“Lolita” is the spiritual ideal of The Nymphet; Dolores Haze is a temporary manifestation. To love the spiritual ideal through Dolores’s bodily reality, Humbert must discard Dolores as a real individual. And so he does [...].
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/
Farmer wrote with such relish and thought about "Postmodernism" ( quoting John Barth: "It all adds up to a postmodern jig of sorts, provided we agree with John Barth’s definition of literary postmodernism as 'a smiling nihilism'.” ), that his denunciation of it ( if that's what it is), and the "bedeviling" of Nabokov, by the power of seduction of his words with their nihilistic message, caught me most unexpectedly. He writes:
"The message is clear—to the degree that Lolita, the product of a man who declared that he “detest[ed] symbls and allegories,” can be said to have a message—and it is a distinctly postmodern one. The world, Nabokov seems to tell us, is full of predators who wish to impose their understanding of the world upon us, to pin us like a butterfly in a display case; we must learn to lie, learn to keep moving ourselves, in order to escape them.With this in mind, the Christian may have more to fear from the philosophical implications of the novel than from any plot-level disgust over paedophilia..."
Petter Naeess wrote:Thank you all for enlightenment about the "Fido" (ie. Plato) passage. My less than scholarly interpretation on first reading would explain how I managed to change Plato to Fido over the years. It still gives me a laugh, though!
JM: And yet, change Plato to Fido (Phaedo?) was what you did.
Still, the vague recollection of a "Fido" in VN remains (and I would never have landed in Plato's "Phaedo").I wonder where.
...............................................................................................................................
(excerpts) For Michial Farmer, Lolita "is quite possibly the most revolting novel of the twentieth century. It is also among the most beautiful. Its staggering power comes from its prose...Lolita feels like the work of a man in love with a brand-new language, an impression furthered by Nabokov’s own description of the novel as “the record of my love affair with the . . . English language.” [...]Writing qua writing doesn’t get any better than Lolita, and it’s no surprise that one finds echoes of its distinctive tone all through the English-language literature of the intervening decades. (I hear it most strongly, to the point of impersonation, in John Updike’s A Month of Sundays, but it’s there in everyone from Pynchon to Rushdie.) Humbert Humbert's plea "leads to a postmodern labyrinth of existence/non-existence so twisted that no amount of string can help me find my way back out of it again. But Humbert is right—we must embrace him, however tentatively, if we are to feel the queer and elliptical power of his story. We must transcend ourselves and the moral judgments we instinctually make of Humbert...The problem is that neither Nabokov nor Humbert will allow us to do so in any kind of full way...Nabokov thus introduces the “social moral” reading of Humbert’s life in order to dismiss it; and since it’s actually we who must do the dismissing, the point is made all the more strongly... It is to this simultaneous authorial presence and absence, I believe, that people are referring when they offer Lolita as an early postmodern novel.[...] All of this is to say that Humbert keeps moving—and yet he doesn’t want to. He is in love with a material form that is by its very definition ephemeral; one can be a nymphet for only so long before one grows into one of the adult women that so disgust Humbert. The solution, of course, is to make a Platonic idol out of Dolores Haze: “I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.” That’s why it’s not really right to refer to Dolores as Lolita except through Humbert’s eyes—“Lolita” is the spiritual ideal of The Nymphet; Dolores Haze is a temporary manifestation. To love the spiritual ideal through Dolores’s bodily reality, Humbert must discard Dolores as a real individual. And so he does [...].
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/