Re: a question
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Mon, 18 Jan 1999 16:08:13 +1100
> By a strange coincidence, Nabokov and *Lolita* are being discussed
> currently on two lists I am reading; this one and the Tom Waits list.
Oh my GOD !!! There's a Tom *Waits* list !?! Why doesn't anyone tell me
these wonderful things, I love Tom Waits!
> if, that
> is, one wants to actually read the relevant Freud texts and then make a
> decision about whether, for instance, it would be most useful to approach
> the book via the object-relations route that most people here have been
> going or via a Lacanian one (as I would be more tempted to do, given both
> N.'s playing with the materiality of language and its relationship to the
> unconscious and his continual derision of certain over-institutionalized
> Freudian formulae).
I would certainly be tempted to look upon Nabokov with a postmodern eye, as
looking at Salinger in a similar way has proved very productive for me. The
two men share (amongst very little else) the idea of regarding a text as a
text; a consciously formulated document which does not pretend to be
anything but what it is - which makes the similarities between Charles
Kinbote in `Pale Fire' and Buddy Glass in `S: AI' even more interesting.
I'd say both were heading down a path which later became called
postmodernism. Nabokov is also self-reflexive - namechecking a certain
`Hurricane Lolita' in `Pale Fire' - whereas Salinger goes a step further in
letting his characters be self-reflexive rather than their author.
> She was born a long time ago, it must have been in 1939, in Paris; the
first
> little throb of Lolita went through me in Paris in '39, or perhaps early
in
> '40 , (&c)
Nabokov actually wrote a short story version of the Lolita story at this
time (it was much more simplistic than the original, obviously, and was set
in Paris, but the basic idea - the marriage to the girl's mother and the
doping of the girl were intact) which was considered lost for many years -
but turned up only a year or so ago. It's since been published and although
I haven't read it I'm sure it would make for interesting comparisons with
the full version.
> but he [Humbert]
> never existed. He did exist after I had written the book. While I was
> writing the book, here and there in a newspaper I would read all sorts of
> accounts about elderly gentlemen who pursued little girls: a kind of
> interesting coincidence but that's about all.
An interesting way of putting it ... and it tells us quite a lot about how
Nabokov regards his characters. I also wouldn't say it was a coincidence at
all. I also like his later comment about how:
> I just
> like composing riddles with elegant solutions.
Because it sums up his fiction perfectly (: Thanks John!