Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0022514, Wed, 29 Feb 2012 15:23:40 -0300

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Re: Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls ...
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Steve Norquist [ to J.Twiggs: "Our differences are perhaps as much of temperament as of substance. Norquist, like so many others nowadays, seems deeply invested in protecting the purity of VN and the motives (or passions) behind his works" ..."To conclude my response to Norquist, I should point out that I explicitly acknowledged that VN “seems to have been a model of health and good citizenship” in some of the ways that matter to me and that I agreed with Gwynn ..."] "In response I'd like to acknowledge that all of JT's points are well taken...I don't think I'm deeply invested in the purity of VN or his motives; it does bother me that so many seem willing to jump to conclusions about them, though... I do think VN was courageous in illuminating a subject that was not dealt with out in the open much in the 1950s...One may just note the numerous child molestation and child pornography arrests around the world to conclude that a true pedophile probably wouldn't get much out of reading Lolita...Say what you will about MacLean's little blog blurb, but I'm hard-pressed to recall another Nabokov-L post with over 50 responses! ... each reader approaches literature subjectively, and Jansy, one of my favorite members in the short time I have been a member of Nabokov-L, is certainly a "mellow" and prolific voice of reason here."

JM: Modesty almost prevailed by having me omit Steve Norquist's kind words about my participation in the Nabokov-L. After my latest posting when acknowledging Stadlen's remark (I had concluded rather hastily that the "old poet" was Humbert Humbert, Nabokov's character. Anthony Stadlen correctly warned, in not so many words, that Humbert Humbert is quoting Nabokov himself..." etc) Steve Norquist may entertain second thoughts about my "voice of reason."
I took the plunge into metafiction after reaching a conclusion that was "based only in the little twist that moves HH from an incipient moment of sanity into his recurrent madnes" and in another point that "relies on Humbert Humbert referring to himself as "One" ( in "one wanted HH to exist..so as to have him make you live...") .If "One" were Nabokov, and "you"" not Quilty but Humbert then, whereas Humbert is only able to reach art as "a very local palliative" (by his very mortal sense of beauty),"Vladimir Nabokov can claim the ancient aurochs and angels (I am thinking=Nabokov is thinking)* and vindicate immortality and Lolita for himself."

There are lots of other clarifications to present about these wild suppositions. For example, I suddenly became curious about HH's motivation to say good-bye to his automobile, a Melmoth (no time to enter into this here) and the word "moth" that it exhibits, since it carries us over to Bend Sinister's "twang" signalling an authorial intervention, and other equally important entomologic intromissions elsewhere. .

I failed to mention that Humbert Humbert's "Quilty" may be a figment of his imagination, one which he creates to represent in his eyes (as characters are usually able to think, imagine, hallucinate...) his sensation of being chased by "a fiend". Nabokov is not the repulsive Quilty, as I seemed to have implied, but he is certainly HH's fiend (rather unlike the corrupt evil Clare Quilty of HH's hallucinations).

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* - "And do not pity C.Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita"





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