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Re: Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls
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ED: Apologies, re-posting this with corrected subject line--SB
JM: The irrevocability of words we've vocalized away is often eased, for me, by Steve Blackwell, always patient when I need to re-call a posting. Nevertheless this time I'll simply resort to a PS.
When I wrote: "It's Humbert who refuses redemption after all ...and VN prefers to kill off most of the characters..." I left out part of the line.
As I see it, VN kills off his creations without bothering to wait for their achieving a "character arc," or some kind of redemption or resolution (I remember he once, or more than once, mentioned his dislike of such "Bildungroman" preoccupations).
A.Stadlen argues against HH's "true repentance" with interesting examples, that include a cruel association to Eliot's poem Ash Wednesday (as cruel as VN's satire of Eliot Four Quartets in PF). He also notes that "Humbert, in gaol, says that he would give himself a long sentence for his crime against Lolita, but would 'dismiss the other charges'. Does anyone suppose that Nabokov endorses this trivialising of murder...?" - a rather important inclusion. After all, Humbert Humbert's mind is, quite literally, very "shifty." HH is trying to mislead the readers into thinking that he's in jail because, among other charges, he is a child-rapist and not - exclusively - because he murdered Quilty! (or mislead us into thinking that he is in jail and not in a mental hospital)
I wonder if, when HH emphasizes "mortality" by the lines "The moral sense in mortals is the duty/We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.," he isn't indicating, by these incongruous lines that juggle "mortal" and "moral" sense, that no human being if fit to become his judge. Since we know that there's no God in HH's heaven, either, he becomes the only one who can judge supreme above everybody else (a Nietzschean touch?).
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JM: The irrevocability of words we've vocalized away is often eased, for me, by Steve Blackwell, always patient when I need to re-call a posting. Nevertheless this time I'll simply resort to a PS.
When I wrote: "It's Humbert who refuses redemption after all ...and VN prefers to kill off most of the characters..." I left out part of the line.
As I see it, VN kills off his creations without bothering to wait for their achieving a "character arc," or some kind of redemption or resolution (I remember he once, or more than once, mentioned his dislike of such "Bildungroman" preoccupations).
A.Stadlen argues against HH's "true repentance" with interesting examples, that include a cruel association to Eliot's poem Ash Wednesday (as cruel as VN's satire of Eliot Four Quartets in PF). He also notes that "Humbert, in gaol, says that he would give himself a long sentence for his crime against Lolita, but would 'dismiss the other charges'. Does anyone suppose that Nabokov endorses this trivialising of murder...?" - a rather important inclusion. After all, Humbert Humbert's mind is, quite literally, very "shifty." HH is trying to mislead the readers into thinking that he's in jail because, among other charges, he is a child-rapist and not - exclusively - because he murdered Quilty! (or mislead us into thinking that he is in jail and not in a mental hospital)
I wonder if, when HH emphasizes "mortality" by the lines "The moral sense in mortals is the duty/We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.," he isn't indicating, by these incongruous lines that juggle "mortal" and "moral" sense, that no human being if fit to become his judge. Since we know that there's no God in HH's heaven, either, he becomes the only one who can judge supreme above everybody else (a Nietzschean touch?).
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/