Jansy Mello replied to my latest post as follows:
“I was not criticizing VN’s allusions in any way. Great part of the fun that can also be found during a full experience of reading VN’s works resides in his tongue-in-cheek observations and malicious winks to his readers. What I argued against was at the particular instance that’s was brought up by Arnie Perlstein since it suggests that VN was merely showing off his clever reading of Austen and enlisting the complicity of other similarly subtle readers just for the pleasure of the game. In this case he’d be leaving out the seriousness of the “barely-hidden sexual horror” that could have been witnessed and transformed into art by writer Jane, now by glossing over the theme of “rape” in a kind of ego-trip. This just doesn’t seem to belong to VN’s spirit. In the context of HH’s detailed confessions, a covert reference to JA at this point seems to be inconsequential and unnecessary. I tried to show that VN had other means to express his admiration for JA, just that. “

 Then, Jansy, if I understand you correctly, above, we do not disagree at all, since I do not for one second believe that Nabokov “was merely showing off his clever reading of Austen and enlisting the complicity of other similarly subtle readers just for the pleasure of the game”. Nor do I for one second believe that “he’d be leaving out the seriousness of the ‘barely-hidden sexual horror’…in a kind of ego trip”

 You’ve misunderstood me—while I do believe that Nabokov was extremely clever and subtle, and did enjoy leaving all those ‘malicious winks” to his readers, I also believe that he, like Jane Austen, wrote these veiled tales of sexual horror for deadly serious and honorable reasons.

 In both cases, Austen and Nabokov were showing their readers how easy it is to fall into the trap (Trapp) of accepting the hypocritical rationalizations of evildoers as not being evil after all. Most readers of Mansfield Park come away believing that Sir Thomas Bertram was a well intentioned but clueless father who did his best to run a Christian household but failed---when I say that in the shadow story of Mansfield Park (as brilliantly captured by Patricia Rozema in her 1999 film adaptation, starring Harold Pinter playing the role of Sir Thomas with unsurpassed dark perfection) Sir Thomas is a moral monster in every conceivable way, a truly evil monster who believes his own B.S.

 And similarly, it seems clear to me that Nabokov has taken this even one step further, by capturing the reader in the first person narrative of Humbert Humbert, and thereby leading many readers down the garden path of overlooking or underestimating the evil that is so serpentinely rationalized by HH throughout the novel.

When careful re-readers eventually understand that we have been "had", it makes the moral lesson that much more powerful--we recognize that we all have the potential to be like Sir Thomas Bertram and Humbert Humbert, and to rationalize our sins, even make them sound like good things.

In short, that Nabokov and Austen were both diabolically clever and subtle does not mean they were not also the authors of works of the greatest genius and moral value.

Cheers, ARNIE

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