A.Stadlen: I have not hypothesized that Nabokov was a "paedophile". This word is used ambiguously to describe both sexual desire for children and actual sexual molestation of children. A man who desires children sexually may behave impeccably. He is entitled to keep quiet about his desire. But, if he makes a point of denying it, he is a liar. I am not sure if this is the case with Nabokov, but it does rather look as if it may have been.Nabokov is clear in his condemnation of child abuse -- though, if it doesn't matter whether what he said is true or not, why should those who are disagreeing with me believe his condemnation? Why, indeed, should they believe anything he ever said?

 

Jansy Mello: I cannot grasp your point concerning Nabokov’s “denials” or your questions about V.N’s deliberate moments of “unreliableness”, parody, satire and humor. NB: as I observed before, the extension of this word outside the field of “unreliable narrators” is highly disputable.

You seem to demand a “confession” from Nabokov when non-social fantasies (pedophilia, sadism, masochism, whatever) are expressed in his novels and probed from the outside by his interviewers (when they try to act as “inquisitors”).
After Freud described the mechanisms of mental defense against psychic suffering it became widely recognized that such mechanisms, like splitting, repression causing negation and denial (“Verneinung” in our case reigning supreme), are unconscious. In such circumstances, VN wouldn’t be able to consciously recognize when, how and to what extent the events he described in words were related to his image of himself ( we know he saw himself as a moralist “cuffing sin” who could expel evil like the protruding gargoyles from a  cathedral).

 

I don’t need to remind you of S.Freud’s words about neurotic fantasies (I couldn’t find the exact quotes right now, but words about them: “ It is worth noting, however, that Freud wasn't particularly interested in curing what he called "perversions," i.e. sexual behaviors that don't fit into the non-incestuous reproductive heterosexual model. He addresses the question of where "perversions" come from in the first essay in Three Essays. Freud is more interested in the problem of NEUROSIS, which he defines as the negative version of perversion. Perversions might be thought of as libidinal drives that may be socially inappropriate (or even illegal), but which get expressed and acted on; neuroses, by contrast, are libidinal drives that get repressed into the unconscious, but which are so powerful that the unconscious has to spend a lot of energy to keep these drives from coming back into consciousness. The effort required to keep such ideas or drives repressed can cause HYSTERIA, PARANOIA, OBSESSION-COMPULSION, and other neurotic disorders./”* http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~sflores/KlagesFreud.html ), or about the dream-work.  V.Nabokov’s novels often develop in a  “dreamlike” style, with alternating states of successful and unsuccessful dream-censorship when perverse themes are still safely protected from being acted out in the external world because of their appearance through the medium of writing and language.
And, returning to my last posting: why do most readers try to identify the author of “Lolita” with the aggressor HH and not in the victim, Lo? (the conscious representation of painful or traumatic experiences may result from a double reversion of figures and roles: from adult to child, from girl into boy, from victim to aggressor).

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*- I’m not sure that I can fully agree with “Klages Freud,” employed in the quoted lines. The exact words are to be found in Freud’s “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality”.