Some time in April I started a message which was interrupted and misplaced in my archives. It was related to a review sent to the Nab-List by someone named Farmer (which I couldn't locate), dated from April 13,2010.

Farmer notes that " '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."

I tried to compare Farmer's comment with another, from ADA, using Nabokov's words: "the lewd, ludicrous and vulgar mistake of the Signy-Mondieu analysts consists in their regarding a real object, a pompon, say, or a pumpkin as a significant abstraction of the real object," but I got nowhere.

Farmer's comment seems clear enough to me: the girl Dolores was an icon through which Humbert could access the "spiritual ideal of the nymphet." A living fetish.
Nabokov's, on the contrary, remains puzzling, also because VN often returned to these two "real objects" (pompom, pumpkin) in various novels, in a figurative sense (particularly in KQKn) like the red and white camelias in the movie (perhaps also in Dumas' novel).
Could anyone help me to figure out what Nabokov intended as a criticism of "Signy-Mondieu" (Freud, I presume)?

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.

Search the archive	Contact the Editors	Visit "Nabokov Online Journal"
Visit Zembla	View Nabokv-L Policies	Manage subscription options