Anthony,

 

I did not address this in my note on Monday because I it is probably a small point. I have avoided the word "censored" to describe Kubrick's and Lyne's decisions, because I think this word connotes interference on the part of  other powers over the filmmakers' choices. I don't think a repressive censorship was exercised over either artist. I believe they reached their decisions on their own. Sorry if this is just a matter of word choice with no other significance.

 

 

In my comments, yesterday (Monday) I was not discussing HH´s guilt or his moral responsibilty towards Lolita.  I wished to comment only on what I believe were certain pragmatic film-making choices made by Kubrick and Lyne. Neither film shows Humbert Humbert behind bars.  Unless I'm mistaken, I don't think it's clear in either movie that the story is the postumously released memoir of a criminal.

To address a point that seems to have been made in earlier posts that I've missed (my apologies), I'm not sure that I can accept Humbert Humbert as expecting clemency from any imaginary jury. He has no remorse for killing Quilty, and feels the charge itself should be dropped. As HH says, these notes are written not to save his head, but to save his soul. More importantly, he has made the condition that no one will read this text while Lolita is alive. Even though these notes may be used in "hermetic sessions," I don't see HH expecting a "healing process." He regrets stealing his victim's childhood. But he will never reject his obsession with nymphets. And rather than see his love for Lolita mitigating the crime of murder, it would seem that the humanity she ultimately engendered in him, a degree of emotional depth that might have cleansed him of the (lifelong pattern of) violence, failed completely. HH was able to feel, at last, an abject, tender love for his captive. And he instantly set out to commit murder in the first degree.

 

As poetic and as "fancy" as we can count on a murderer's style to be, HH is, from first to last, a selfish and evil brute.  He shares the sensibility of Hitler's favorite architect, Albert Speer. A civilized, well-read, talented, artistic Nazi who knew, from first to last, that his leader's objective was the foulest genocide that a genocide-intoxicated century ever vomited up.

 

Sandy,        

 

As indicated in a previous paragraph, I do not at all think that, for Lolita, Nabokov decided to abandon his lifelong disapproval of the the general idea.

So, his view of America could not be less "panoramic." It's a brilliant jewel box of individual images, from gas station signs, to neon shadows in puddles, to candid shots of the different types of male and female motor court managers, the different types of hitchhikers... Specifics. Thousands of specifics. But not a "panoramic" view. Anymore than VN's examination and cataloging of individual lepidopteral genitalia was panoramic.

 

Consequently, I cannot find Nabokov "examining a liberal American tendency to "explain" evil - to find that psychology or history mitigated moral repugnance, as with Bolshevism or Psychoanalysis."

 

But I may be badly misunderstanding something here. Especially since I cannot find a way to classify Bolshevism and Psychoanalysis together.

 

"Not only on film, but in the text as well, it is important that the viewer/reader become at least somewhat seduced by the attractive,
urbane European.  For when that happens, a degree of complicity can be brought home in the final hill-top scene."

I'm going to have to forego accepting any degree of complicity with HH. I don't think that this was VN's intention. But I will try to review posts I've missed over the past couple weeks, in which I've been drawn away from the List in order to do other writing, and I certainly apologize for what may look like willful stupidity on my part for having mangled anyone's ideas.

 

Andrew Brown