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Article: Hafid Bouazza on LOLITA in Hollands Diep
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A&H.Bouazza, write about HH's "Lolita was safely solipsized," considering that this "neologism implies that outside of Humbert's will Lolita has no consciousness of her own... [she was his] 'own creation, another , fanciful Lolita - perhaps more real than Lolita'. Philosophically speaking, this is the exact opposite of solipsism!" The " 'epiphany' above the small mining town" may be disregarded, "because Brian Boyd has already shown how deceptive it is." In conclusion: "The question that preoccupied Nabokov remains: crime and art. Humbert is a pedophile and a murderer, but is he also an artist? We encounter the same theme in Despair and Laughter in the Dark. Is mastery of the word also the word's mercy?"
JM: In "Lolita," Humbert's feels that his mind has been split in two because, although "taboos strangulated" him, there were those psychoanalysts who "wooed me with pseudoliberations of pseudolibidoes. The fact that to me the only object of amorous tremor were sisters of Annabel's, her handmaids and girl-pages, appeared to me at times as a forerunner of insanity." However, inspite of a sort of post-modernist dismissal of an "arc of the character," there is no denying that HH's words sound true when he recognizes that, if it cannot be proven that "in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art." HH's flash of sanity doesn't last long, since Nabokov is far too sane to stake his beliefs in this kind of "arc," or in his mastery of the word, outside the realm of his articulate art ( ie, he was not a solipsist and he is the artist).*
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* Ian McEwan's "Atonement" has the narrator, Briony, express the most undivided and extreme form of "artistic solipsism," that surprises the reader with a double turn of authorial intervention...
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JM: In "Lolita," Humbert's feels that his mind has been split in two because, although "taboos strangulated" him, there were those psychoanalysts who "wooed me with pseudoliberations of pseudolibidoes. The fact that to me the only object of amorous tremor were sisters of Annabel's, her handmaids and girl-pages, appeared to me at times as a forerunner of insanity." However, inspite of a sort of post-modernist dismissal of an "arc of the character," there is no denying that HH's words sound true when he recognizes that, if it cannot be proven that "in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art." HH's flash of sanity doesn't last long, since Nabokov is far too sane to stake his beliefs in this kind of "arc," or in his mastery of the word, outside the realm of his articulate art ( ie, he was not a solipsist and he is the artist).*
...........................................................................
* Ian McEwan's "Atonement" has the narrator, Briony, express the most undivided and extreme form of "artistic solipsism," that surprises the reader with a double turn of authorial intervention...
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/