Subject
Hairy Hermpahrodite Explained (with tongue-in-cheek)x] (fwd)
Date
Body
EDITOR's NOTE. Thomas Braun has a point. While a-/be-musement has its
place on NABOKV-L, let's declare a moratorium on hairy handed sons (&
daughters) of toil--barring new information.
----------------------
From: "Thomas E.Braun" <cawriter@usa.net>
I have been reading, with increasing bemusement, the various responses to this
issue. In my view, far too much is being made of this. Not everything in
"Lolita" is some sort of overly complex riddle. Just as Nabokov, to make
Humbert appear as an aesthete and not a pervert, had his "hero" refer to
Lolita's act of fellatio as something done "the hard and nauseous way"
(instead of using more direct language), so VN here has his creature use
flowery language (which Humbert may be using to help in his legal defense!) to
mask the simple act of masturbation - something he apparently had to do so
seldom while he was availing himself of Dolores several times per day, it
seemed like a congress with a total stranger.
Thomas E. Braun
cawriter@hotmail.com
NABOKV-L <chtodel@humanitas.ucsb.edu> wrote:
> "Finally, I did achieve an hour's slumber--from which I was aroused by
> gratuitous and horribly exhausting congress with a small hairy
> hermaphrodite, a total stranger." (LOLITA, Part One, Chapter 27)
>
> I've been focussing on this passage in conjunction with a chapter I'm
> writing on envisioning Humbert as a perverted version of "real" artists
> like Godunov-Cherdyntsev. The reader's eyes tend to gravitate towards that
> hairy hermaphrodite, but lets expand our scope outwards in both directions
> first. We can read this sentence as a metapoetic nightmare. Gratuitous
> and stranger both have metapoetic resonance. Etymologically, we can link
> "gratuitous" (parodically, antonymically) to the theme of gratitude
> (blagodarnost') that is so central to The Gift. (Dollinin's recent zametki
> is a good place to start). (Whom should Humbert thank for this dream?) The
> stranger can be placed in the line of estrangement that is, again, so
> central to The Gift. (The word strange is often used in The Gift to refer
> to the working of fate. It is often translated as queer, which is
> completely appropriate and should eventually earn Nabokov a place as a
> paradoxical forerunner not only of postmodernism but also of queer
> studies.) Congress is a sexual reference operating on an obvious and
> punning level (as do many words beginning with these three letters in all
> of Nabokov's English fiction -- the clue is dropped in his diatribe against
> Rowe (to whom, in my opinion, many apologies are owed)). The hairy
> hermpaphrodite is Humbert's version of his muse, Aphrodite's flowing hair
> here reduced to a crude, exclusively physical sexual organ (of ambiguous
> gender, as befits Humbert's character). In other words, a metapoetic
> primal scene.
>
> E. Naiman
____________________________________________________________________
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place on NABOKV-L, let's declare a moratorium on hairy handed sons (&
daughters) of toil--barring new information.
----------------------
From: "Thomas E.Braun" <cawriter@usa.net>
I have been reading, with increasing bemusement, the various responses to this
issue. In my view, far too much is being made of this. Not everything in
"Lolita" is some sort of overly complex riddle. Just as Nabokov, to make
Humbert appear as an aesthete and not a pervert, had his "hero" refer to
Lolita's act of fellatio as something done "the hard and nauseous way"
(instead of using more direct language), so VN here has his creature use
flowery language (which Humbert may be using to help in his legal defense!) to
mask the simple act of masturbation - something he apparently had to do so
seldom while he was availing himself of Dolores several times per day, it
seemed like a congress with a total stranger.
Thomas E. Braun
cawriter@hotmail.com
NABOKV-L <chtodel@humanitas.ucsb.edu> wrote:
> "Finally, I did achieve an hour's slumber--from which I was aroused by
> gratuitous and horribly exhausting congress with a small hairy
> hermaphrodite, a total stranger." (LOLITA, Part One, Chapter 27)
>
> I've been focussing on this passage in conjunction with a chapter I'm
> writing on envisioning Humbert as a perverted version of "real" artists
> like Godunov-Cherdyntsev. The reader's eyes tend to gravitate towards that
> hairy hermaphrodite, but lets expand our scope outwards in both directions
> first. We can read this sentence as a metapoetic nightmare. Gratuitous
> and stranger both have metapoetic resonance. Etymologically, we can link
> "gratuitous" (parodically, antonymically) to the theme of gratitude
> (blagodarnost') that is so central to The Gift. (Dollinin's recent zametki
> is a good place to start). (Whom should Humbert thank for this dream?) The
> stranger can be placed in the line of estrangement that is, again, so
> central to The Gift. (The word strange is often used in The Gift to refer
> to the working of fate. It is often translated as queer, which is
> completely appropriate and should eventually earn Nabokov a place as a
> paradoxical forerunner not only of postmodernism but also of queer
> studies.) Congress is a sexual reference operating on an obvious and
> punning level (as do many words beginning with these three letters in all
> of Nabokov's English fiction -- the clue is dropped in his diatribe against
> Rowe (to whom, in my opinion, many apologies are owed)). The hairy
> hermpaphrodite is Humbert's version of his muse, Aphrodite's flowing hair
> here reduced to a crude, exclusively physical sexual organ (of ambiguous
> gender, as befits Humbert's character). In other words, a metapoetic
> primal scene.
>
> E. Naiman
____________________________________________________________________
Get free email and a permanent address at http://www.netaddress.com/?N=1