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QUERY re: Lolita's subjectivity (Lolita vs. Dolores),Ceil
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SES: Nabokov himself, in alluding to his character in "On a Book Entitled Lolita" or in interviews, almost always calls her Lolita... Nevertheless, in the novel itself, I find a difference between Humbert's pet name and her other names. I also find it ironic--and yet completely understandable--that Humbert's name for her is the one that is commonly used.
MR: For me, Jansy's notion of absence-as-presence [ the reader doesn't need to "know or to guess who the actual (fictional) Dolores Haze might be" because her "absence" is, by itself, an extremely effective literary instrument...] seems most akin to my experience of the book... When I mentioned accessing Lo's subjectivity, I was asking myself, can I think as Dolores thinks?... I do not, however, feel like I can get inside Dolores's mind to anywhere near the extent that I can enter HH's.
JM:
(a) Wallace Stevens ( "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon") wrote: "I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw/ or heard or felt came not but from myself;" In the same spirit, VN's characters and worlds may be seen as extensions or derivations from a constructed "I" ( like in Stevens) - an "I" that is commonly associated to the name "Vladimir Nabokov" - and who may acquire an "independent life" ("Lolita is famous, not I,'' Nabokov once said about his nymphet and novel.) Although I can see what Matt means by "subjectivity", like him I also find myself unable to "get inside Dolores' mind", perhaps because as a reader I became a figment among other figments. And yet it is as figments that we are able to reach out and feel empathy for any other Dolores or Lolita - "out there", through the mirror.
Edgar Allan Poe's narrators ( in "The Fall of the House of Usher," for example), guide the reader's emotions by minute descriptions of their own moods, thoughts, moral judgements or their responses to closed spaces and foggy environment. Whenever any Nabokov-narrator writes a confession or suggests thoughts and moods, like Poe's, isn't it then that VN is (rather sensibly) at his most "unreliable"?
(b) Advised by A.Bouazza to look into ADA for other instances of the word "ceil" [ PF: "when he fell ill and soon expired under his splendid painted bed ceil with its reproductions of Altamira animals..."] Ifound these excerpts to share:
1. " '- the nuance of willows, and counting the little sheep on her ciel de lit which Fowlie turns into "the sky's bed" instead of "bed ceiler." ;
2. Thus seen from above, as if reflected in the ciel mirror that Eric had naively thought up in his Cyprian dreams..." (ceil and its variant ciel )
3. My first recollection goes back to mid-July, 1870, i.e., my seventh month of life (with most people, of course, retentive consciousness starts somewhat later, at three or four years of age) when, one morning, in our Riviera villa, a chunk of green plaster ornament, dislodged from the ceiling by an earthquake, crashed into my cradle. The 195 days preceding that event being indistinguishable from infinite unconsciousness, are not to be included in perceptual time, so that, insofar as my mind and my pride of mind are concerned, I am today (mid-July, 1922) quite exactly fifty-two, et trêve de mon style plafond peint.
I was surprised by the quantity of cave aurochs, plaster plafonds, ceil-ceiling paintings, panoplies and such found in VN.
The closing lines in ADA, too, are revealing: Not the least adornment of the chronicle is the delicacy of pictorial detail: a latticed gallery; a painted ceiling; a pretty plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots of a brook; butterflies and butterfly orchids in the margin of the romance;.[..] and much, much more...
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MR: For me, Jansy's notion of absence-as-presence [ the reader doesn't need to "know or to guess who the actual (fictional) Dolores Haze might be" because her "absence" is, by itself, an extremely effective literary instrument...] seems most akin to my experience of the book... When I mentioned accessing Lo's subjectivity, I was asking myself, can I think as Dolores thinks?... I do not, however, feel like I can get inside Dolores's mind to anywhere near the extent that I can enter HH's.
JM:
(a) Wallace Stevens ( "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon") wrote: "I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw/ or heard or felt came not but from myself;" In the same spirit, VN's characters and worlds may be seen as extensions or derivations from a constructed "I" ( like in Stevens) - an "I" that is commonly associated to the name "Vladimir Nabokov" - and who may acquire an "independent life" ("Lolita is famous, not I,'' Nabokov once said about his nymphet and novel.) Although I can see what Matt means by "subjectivity", like him I also find myself unable to "get inside Dolores' mind", perhaps because as a reader I became a figment among other figments. And yet it is as figments that we are able to reach out and feel empathy for any other Dolores or Lolita - "out there", through the mirror.
Edgar Allan Poe's narrators ( in "The Fall of the House of Usher," for example), guide the reader's emotions by minute descriptions of their own moods, thoughts, moral judgements or their responses to closed spaces and foggy environment. Whenever any Nabokov-narrator writes a confession or suggests thoughts and moods, like Poe's, isn't it then that VN is (rather sensibly) at his most "unreliable"?
(b) Advised by A.Bouazza to look into ADA for other instances of the word "ceil" [ PF: "when he fell ill and soon expired under his splendid painted bed ceil with its reproductions of Altamira animals..."] Ifound these excerpts to share:
1. " '- the nuance of willows, and counting the little sheep on her ciel de lit which Fowlie turns into "the sky's bed" instead of "bed ceiler." ;
2. Thus seen from above, as if reflected in the ciel mirror that Eric had naively thought up in his Cyprian dreams..." (ceil and its variant ciel )
3. My first recollection goes back to mid-July, 1870, i.e., my seventh month of life (with most people, of course, retentive consciousness starts somewhat later, at three or four years of age) when, one morning, in our Riviera villa, a chunk of green plaster ornament, dislodged from the ceiling by an earthquake, crashed into my cradle. The 195 days preceding that event being indistinguishable from infinite unconsciousness, are not to be included in perceptual time, so that, insofar as my mind and my pride of mind are concerned, I am today (mid-July, 1922) quite exactly fifty-two, et trêve de mon style plafond peint.
I was surprised by the quantity of cave aurochs, plaster plafonds, ceil-ceiling paintings, panoplies and such found in VN.
The closing lines in ADA, too, are revealing: Not the least adornment of the chronicle is the delicacy of pictorial detail: a latticed gallery; a painted ceiling; a pretty plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots of a brook; butterflies and butterfly orchids in the margin of the romance;.[..] and much, much more...
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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