Hafid Bouazza [to Jansy]
"With all due respect for my brother Abdellah, but it was I who wrote the
article and he who translated it. My thoughts may not be his, nor my
interpretations his (and he has contributed to this site much longer than I
have). For the rest: I come to the same conclusion as you do: 'In the final
analysis it is the writer Vladimir Nabokov [emphasis added, HB] who gives us
genius and a moral dilemma - besides a masterpiece.'
"
JM: Hafid, accept my apologies. Your are totally
right and I shouldn't have placed your initials together when I
addressed you (the author of the original article) and your brother (who posted
both original and translation). The theme, the
part related to solipsism, present in your commentary, came right at a time
I'd been working on it, through James Bonney's thesis relating solipsism in
Nabokov's Lolita (private tyranny) and in VN's former novels (public
tyranny). As you may well realize,
philosophical solipsism lies outside my field of competence. As a psychoanalyst,
I'm used to terms like egocentrism, narcisim, altruism, psychosis, perversion,
autistic states, aso. All of these are related to an
individual's apprehension of an "external reality."
A few comments about "Lolita" and HH's
solipsization:
In the beginning of ch. 32 (AL,I) HH wrote: "...
in order to enjoy my phantasms in peace I firmly decided to
ignore what I could not help perceiving..." Had it been possible
for the words "I firmly decided to ignore" to have
been expressed by someone else in the novel, "solipsism" in
fiction and psychopathological acumen would have been
harmonized. The Freudian theory holds
that a pervert has a split
mind: he simultaneously recognizes and ignores a
conflictual fact which he cannot bring himself to solve (he doesn't
need to consciously and wilfully "ignore it" before he acts out his
fantasy); a neurotic deals with conflicts
by repressing one part of what he's perceived, and
is conscious of only the other part. However,
since Humbert Humbert is a fictional
character, Nabokov's rendering of HH's "deliberate" solipsism (the
neologism HB mentioned) is quite fascinating:
At the end of ch. 31 we learn that
Humbert cannot accept spiritual
comfort, from a Catholic priest, after he realizes that his Lolita shall remain
"polluted". He wants to pay for his sins, for as long as he lives,
should her condition not be altered by his having
been granted God's pardon. Human law and ordinary morality don't
abide by absolute grace, as it is offered by St.Peter's church (they
are closer to Saint Paul's vision, in his letters to the Corinthians
- quoted by VN in Pale Fire - concerning the particular sin of
inducing innocent people into sin*), and we find that Humbert, quite
surprisingly, seems to admit that, like a criminal who must pay
for his crimes, he must pay for the harm he has inflicted on Lolita.
These lines are pretty amazing:
"... under the guidance of an intelligent ... confessor,
to whom, in a moment of metaphysical curiosity, I had turned over a Protestant's
drab atheism for an old-fashioned popish cure, I had hoped to deduce from my
sense of sin the existence of a Supreme Being... Alas, I was unable to transcend
the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever
lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita
forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her....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."
..........................................................................
* I wonder I Humbert Humbert's rejection
of a divine pardon isn't related to Nabokov's childhood experience with the
Orthodox Church, instead of the Roman faith.