J.Aisenberg observed that Humbert
Humbert "seems to parody sympathy" and I remembered having read a related
comment quite recently.
I just found it again. In TRLSK: " the amazing fact that a man writing of
things which he really felt at the time of writing, could have
had the power to create simultaneously — and out of the very things which
distressed his mind — a fictitious and faintly absurd character."
V. also acknowledges: As often was the
way with Sebastian Knight he used parody as a kind of springboard for
leaping into the highest region of serious emotion. J. L. Coleman has
called it 'a clown developing wings, an angel mimicking a tumbler
pigeon'..."
Fairy-tale Mr. Silbermann, whose peculiar arithmetic concerning his
"fees" seemed to place him in permanent debt to V.- but who
provided our narrator with "real" names and addresses - says: "I fink it is ewsyless. You can't see the odder side of the moon.
Please donnt search de woman. What is past is past" (pag. 132). He not only quotes
one of SK's short-stories (the one with Mr. Siller, I think),
but profetically, he also announces Lolita's wisdom*: " the past is
the past."
...............................................................................
*- I quote J .Aisenberg: "when
Lolita steadfastly refuses to be moved by natural wonders during their trip and
reads a paper instead; or when Lolita in her last appearance says, "the past is the past"...
What moves me are not Humbert grotesque howls, but when
Lolita says, "you mean you're giving us four thousand bucks?"
: