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Re: Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls ...
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"After rereading the book in later years, with a more sophisticated understanding of it, she reflects that Lolita “didn’t shield me from the perverts, but neither did it send me leaping into their cars. It had little effect on my relationship with men. Instead, it transformed my relationship with literature. I fell in love with books.” Justine Brown
JM: J. Twiggs carefully evaluated the N-L exchanges about Lolita and, for me, it's important that he described how this theme "perturbed," instead of "disturbed", some members of the List. After all the choice of a prefix is not a trifling matter and, here, it invites dialogue and, perhaps, reflection. However, I'm almost certain that I've already said all that I have to say about this matter and I'll be brief for once.
Very often the fields of ethics, psychology, sociology, literature overlap. One has to be careful not to overstep the boundaries of one's experience while dancing from one standpoint to another. Language and culture also offer us a different perspective from which to speak and, like ethics and literature, it can be equally limiting. My occasional clumsiness in English usage has already landed me in various quandaries. Lolita touches me because it is great art and because, as art, it bears witness to what some people name anxiety and "angst," and which for me is better named "mental pain." Nabokov knew about exile, nostalgia and mental pain, as much as he knew about love and beauty.
V.N once described himself as a moralist kicking or scuffing sin ( I think that's how the sentence went - and I'm now unable to quote it correctly or provide its proper context), but I agree with J.Twigges when he calls our attention to the fact that VN was not writing Lolita as a moralist. The lines, by Justine Brown, that J.Twiggs highlighted are marvellous. J.T added "That, in my opinion, is a thought worth endorsing" and, although I have no clue about what each and everyone should think, I also "endorse" it because VN's novel: it transformed my relationship with literature and, because of that, with Nabokov's books. If "Lolita" had not been my first experience with Nabokov I don't think I'd be here now and writing to the List.
-----Mensagem Original-----
De: James Twiggs
Para: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Enviada em: segunda-feira, 20 de fevereiro de 2012 16:41
Assunto: Re: [NABOKV-L] Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls ...
What gives Lolita that extra thing is the confrontation between a cultured European and the American vulgarity embodied by Lolita, with whom he is desperately in love. Then too, one cannot but feel that it’s a portrait of Nabokov’s own passion. And passion delivers.
It’s shameless of me to say this—I know nothing of this man’s inner life—but lust for young girls does emerge elsewhere in his work, and in Lolita he contributed the word “nymphet” to the English language. It’s my intuition that his stuffed-shirtism, so at home after all in the 1950s, is a firewall against an unseemly urge.
--Robert MacLean, “Vladimir Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls”
=====
Although Robert MacLean’s tone, website, and truly bad “poetry” may be irritating to many of us, it’s worth noting that, besides MacLean, at least three prestigious admirers of Nabokov have recently raised the same question that seems to have perturbed some members of the List:
MARTIN AMIS: “The problem with Nabokov” (this is the essay that MacLean refers to and rudely dismisses)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/14/vladimir-nabokov-books-martin-amis
JOHN BANVILLE: “The Still Mysterious Enchanter” (a review of Michael Maar’s Speak, Nabokov)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jul/15/still-mysterious-enchanter/?page=2
MICHAEL MAAR: Speak, Nabokov, chapter 9
At the end of the second paragraph quoted above, MacLean says that “in one of [VN’s] essays he opines that if the criminal could only write about the crime he wouldn’t have to commit it.” Can someone tell me where, if anywhere, VN says this or something similar? It strikes me as an important statement.
In any case, it is a matter of indifference to me whether VN (or anyone else, for that matter) fantasizes about sex with underage girls, so long as he stops short of putting his fantasies into action and, for his own sake, is not reduced to the status of obnoxious outcast eternally hunched over his computer with one hand on the mouse and the other you know where--forever panting, forever miserable. VN himself seems to have been a model of health and good citizenship in both of these regards. I agree with MacLean that sometimes, in interviews, he comes across as a stuffed shirt. For this reason, I find it refreshing that he had a taste for pornography and that he not only published his work in Playboy but also seems to have enjoyed reading the magazine--and no doubt looking at the pictures as well.
Amis, Banville, and Maar can, of course, speak for themselves, but those readers who haven’t yet seen VN’s 1928 poem “Lilith”--quoted in part by Banville and in its entirety by Maar--may be in for a shock. As for Ada, I dislike it not for its high quotient of smut (including underage sex and incest) but for its coy pretentiousness. And although The Original of Laura is barely a trifle, it is most certainly not an innocent trifle. A passion for sex, much of it with very young girls, runs throughout VN’s work, from early in his career to the very end--sometimes to good artistic effect and, as Amis and Banville point out, sometimes not.
In his response to MacLean, Brian Boyd offers as an “antidote” a brief essay by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. In my view, we should all be grateful to Masson for bringing to light the sadly hilarious story of poor Emma Eckstein, whose nose had the misfortune of falling into the hands of two crackpots called Freud and Fliess, and whose “treatment” had long been covered up by the psychoanalytic establishment represented by Kurt Eissler and Anna Freud. (This is the case referred to by Ms. Efremov.) Even so, I don’t think Masson is the right person to be lecturing us about Nabokov. In her book In the Freud Archives, Janet Malcolm reveals, or rather lets Masson reveal in his own words, that he is (or at least was) a less than trustworthy person much given to simplistic black-and-white thinking. As Anthony Stadlen says, Masson’s own book on Freud, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory is both wrongheaded and superficial. He might have added that the book’s main effect was to help fuel the fire of the false-memory and satanic-panic uproars that wrecked the lives of many innocent Americans for the better part of twenty years. More to the point, perhaps, is the fact that incest is a pervasive theme in world literature and also (as Jansy points out) in the general folk-wisdom of parents everywhere and everywhen. VN would hardly have needed to go to Freud for inspiration. Furthermore, if VN had been writing as a straight moralist--as John Ray, Jr., for example, or Jeffrey Masson--he would surely not have ended Lolita as he did, with Dolores as the “normal” one of the two, quietly and gracefully giving the boot to the monster who had raped and tormented her for so long. We should also note that during the seduction-theory period, the traumas that Freud considered important in the formation of neuroses occurred much earlier in life than the abuse Humbert inflicted on Dolores, who showed no signs of neurosis at the time Humbert appeared in her life. She was too much the average twelve-year-old to have needed the attention of a psychiatrist or analyst. In short, I suspect that Lolita is far too complex a novel for Masson to enlighten us about. Anyhow, if VN’s purpose in writing was to put a stop to a widespread social evil, then the book would have to be deemed a colossal failure. To see what I mean, one has only to Google the word “Lolita” or to be otherwise aware of the significance of the word all over the planet.
In a charming essay from Salon, published in 1998, Justine Brown describes her first reading of Lolita when she was herself twelve years old. The book was given to her by an older woman friend, as a warning about the dangers of child molestation. Other friends were more direct: “Now everyone will want to screw you,” one of them told her. These warnings were in vain. During this first reading, Brown’s sympathies were all with Humbert. After rereading the book in later years, with a more sophisticated understanding of it, she reflects that Lolita “didn’t shield me from the perverts, but neither did it send me leaping into their cars. It had little effect on my relationship with men. Instead, it transformed my relationship with literature. I fell in love with books.” That, in my opinion, is a thought worth endorsing. For anyone interested in reading Brown’s essay, here’s the link:
http://www1.salon.com/mwt/feature/1998/07/31feature.html
I should add that I agree entirely with Sam Gwynn about the supposed sighting of VN at the Sun Valley Lodge.
Finally, I wish to thank Ms. Efremov for bringing MacLean’s essay to our attention. Despite her own misgivings, and although I think she’s wrong about VN being ahead of his time vis-à-vis Freud, I believe (obviously) that MacLean opens up several interesting questions about major themes in VN’s work--questions that are considered at greater length by Amis, Banville, and Maar.
Jim Twiggs
P.S. I apologize for not mentioning by name all who have commented on the subject of MacLean. I especially apologize if I’ve failed to give proper credit on one point or another. If I’ve committed errors of fact, I trust I’ll be duly corrected.Date: Friday, February 10, 2012, 8:30 AM
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JM: J. Twiggs carefully evaluated the N-L exchanges about Lolita and, for me, it's important that he described how this theme "perturbed," instead of "disturbed", some members of the List. After all the choice of a prefix is not a trifling matter and, here, it invites dialogue and, perhaps, reflection. However, I'm almost certain that I've already said all that I have to say about this matter and I'll be brief for once.
Very often the fields of ethics, psychology, sociology, literature overlap. One has to be careful not to overstep the boundaries of one's experience while dancing from one standpoint to another. Language and culture also offer us a different perspective from which to speak and, like ethics and literature, it can be equally limiting. My occasional clumsiness in English usage has already landed me in various quandaries. Lolita touches me because it is great art and because, as art, it bears witness to what some people name anxiety and "angst," and which for me is better named "mental pain." Nabokov knew about exile, nostalgia and mental pain, as much as he knew about love and beauty.
V.N once described himself as a moralist kicking or scuffing sin ( I think that's how the sentence went - and I'm now unable to quote it correctly or provide its proper context), but I agree with J.Twigges when he calls our attention to the fact that VN was not writing Lolita as a moralist. The lines, by Justine Brown, that J.Twiggs highlighted are marvellous. J.T added "That, in my opinion, is a thought worth endorsing" and, although I have no clue about what each and everyone should think, I also "endorse" it because VN's novel: it transformed my relationship with literature and, because of that, with Nabokov's books. If "Lolita" had not been my first experience with Nabokov I don't think I'd be here now and writing to the List.
-----Mensagem Original-----
De: James Twiggs
Para: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Enviada em: segunda-feira, 20 de fevereiro de 2012 16:41
Assunto: Re: [NABOKV-L] Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls ...
What gives Lolita that extra thing is the confrontation between a cultured European and the American vulgarity embodied by Lolita, with whom he is desperately in love. Then too, one cannot but feel that it’s a portrait of Nabokov’s own passion. And passion delivers.
It’s shameless of me to say this—I know nothing of this man’s inner life—but lust for young girls does emerge elsewhere in his work, and in Lolita he contributed the word “nymphet” to the English language. It’s my intuition that his stuffed-shirtism, so at home after all in the 1950s, is a firewall against an unseemly urge.
--Robert MacLean, “Vladimir Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls”
=====
Although Robert MacLean’s tone, website, and truly bad “poetry” may be irritating to many of us, it’s worth noting that, besides MacLean, at least three prestigious admirers of Nabokov have recently raised the same question that seems to have perturbed some members of the List:
MARTIN AMIS: “The problem with Nabokov” (this is the essay that MacLean refers to and rudely dismisses)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/14/vladimir-nabokov-books-martin-amis
JOHN BANVILLE: “The Still Mysterious Enchanter” (a review of Michael Maar’s Speak, Nabokov)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jul/15/still-mysterious-enchanter/?page=2
MICHAEL MAAR: Speak, Nabokov, chapter 9
At the end of the second paragraph quoted above, MacLean says that “in one of [VN’s] essays he opines that if the criminal could only write about the crime he wouldn’t have to commit it.” Can someone tell me where, if anywhere, VN says this or something similar? It strikes me as an important statement.
In any case, it is a matter of indifference to me whether VN (or anyone else, for that matter) fantasizes about sex with underage girls, so long as he stops short of putting his fantasies into action and, for his own sake, is not reduced to the status of obnoxious outcast eternally hunched over his computer with one hand on the mouse and the other you know where--forever panting, forever miserable. VN himself seems to have been a model of health and good citizenship in both of these regards. I agree with MacLean that sometimes, in interviews, he comes across as a stuffed shirt. For this reason, I find it refreshing that he had a taste for pornography and that he not only published his work in Playboy but also seems to have enjoyed reading the magazine--and no doubt looking at the pictures as well.
Amis, Banville, and Maar can, of course, speak for themselves, but those readers who haven’t yet seen VN’s 1928 poem “Lilith”--quoted in part by Banville and in its entirety by Maar--may be in for a shock. As for Ada, I dislike it not for its high quotient of smut (including underage sex and incest) but for its coy pretentiousness. And although The Original of Laura is barely a trifle, it is most certainly not an innocent trifle. A passion for sex, much of it with very young girls, runs throughout VN’s work, from early in his career to the very end--sometimes to good artistic effect and, as Amis and Banville point out, sometimes not.
In his response to MacLean, Brian Boyd offers as an “antidote” a brief essay by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. In my view, we should all be grateful to Masson for bringing to light the sadly hilarious story of poor Emma Eckstein, whose nose had the misfortune of falling into the hands of two crackpots called Freud and Fliess, and whose “treatment” had long been covered up by the psychoanalytic establishment represented by Kurt Eissler and Anna Freud. (This is the case referred to by Ms. Efremov.) Even so, I don’t think Masson is the right person to be lecturing us about Nabokov. In her book In the Freud Archives, Janet Malcolm reveals, or rather lets Masson reveal in his own words, that he is (or at least was) a less than trustworthy person much given to simplistic black-and-white thinking. As Anthony Stadlen says, Masson’s own book on Freud, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory is both wrongheaded and superficial. He might have added that the book’s main effect was to help fuel the fire of the false-memory and satanic-panic uproars that wrecked the lives of many innocent Americans for the better part of twenty years. More to the point, perhaps, is the fact that incest is a pervasive theme in world literature and also (as Jansy points out) in the general folk-wisdom of parents everywhere and everywhen. VN would hardly have needed to go to Freud for inspiration. Furthermore, if VN had been writing as a straight moralist--as John Ray, Jr., for example, or Jeffrey Masson--he would surely not have ended Lolita as he did, with Dolores as the “normal” one of the two, quietly and gracefully giving the boot to the monster who had raped and tormented her for so long. We should also note that during the seduction-theory period, the traumas that Freud considered important in the formation of neuroses occurred much earlier in life than the abuse Humbert inflicted on Dolores, who showed no signs of neurosis at the time Humbert appeared in her life. She was too much the average twelve-year-old to have needed the attention of a psychiatrist or analyst. In short, I suspect that Lolita is far too complex a novel for Masson to enlighten us about. Anyhow, if VN’s purpose in writing was to put a stop to a widespread social evil, then the book would have to be deemed a colossal failure. To see what I mean, one has only to Google the word “Lolita” or to be otherwise aware of the significance of the word all over the planet.
In a charming essay from Salon, published in 1998, Justine Brown describes her first reading of Lolita when she was herself twelve years old. The book was given to her by an older woman friend, as a warning about the dangers of child molestation. Other friends were more direct: “Now everyone will want to screw you,” one of them told her. These warnings were in vain. During this first reading, Brown’s sympathies were all with Humbert. After rereading the book in later years, with a more sophisticated understanding of it, she reflects that Lolita “didn’t shield me from the perverts, but neither did it send me leaping into their cars. It had little effect on my relationship with men. Instead, it transformed my relationship with literature. I fell in love with books.” That, in my opinion, is a thought worth endorsing. For anyone interested in reading Brown’s essay, here’s the link:
http://www1.salon.com/mwt/feature/1998/07/31feature.html
I should add that I agree entirely with Sam Gwynn about the supposed sighting of VN at the Sun Valley Lodge.
Finally, I wish to thank Ms. Efremov for bringing MacLean’s essay to our attention. Despite her own misgivings, and although I think she’s wrong about VN being ahead of his time vis-à-vis Freud, I believe (obviously) that MacLean opens up several interesting questions about major themes in VN’s work--questions that are considered at greater length by Amis, Banville, and Maar.
Jim Twiggs
P.S. I apologize for not mentioning by name all who have commented on the subject of MacLean. I especially apologize if I’ve failed to give proper credit on one point or another. If I’ve committed errors of fact, I trust I’ll be duly corrected.Date: Friday, February 10, 2012, 8:30 AM
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/