Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov - Thesis Discussion

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Originally Posted by tscherff

"The book is barelly about a murdering pedophile.
interesting.
i agree that nabakov created the image of the pedophile and young victim we see today. that is the problem. the pedophile is not evil. he is simply satisfying a need. the victim is not harmed by humbert, but saved by him.

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HH is clearly evil (if we use evil as immoral) as most of pedophiles if we define evil using superior strength without consideration for the victim. And the idea that Lolita is saved by HH is denied by Nabakov who reaged with hatred when asked about the interpretation that HH could be a hero and he clearly pointed that Lolita is a victim.

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does anyone truly believe that? are the victims unharmed and the perpetrators just fulfilling their needs of the 60's sexual revolution?

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When I said (if you are thinking about this because I said that) about 50 and 60 sexual revolution in america it is not that HH is a member of that revolution. He is not. He is an old fashioned dude. The point is when the book came to life, besides all the scandal, it was a clear take on where the sexual freedom can take someone. Considering that USA - where Nabakov places the story - would start a revolution asking for all freedom, the kind of debate Lolita could raise is very significative.

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is this art? if humbert moved in next to you and you had children, would you think it art for art sake?

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Art is what Nabakov did - writing about a fictional character named HH. A real life HH or pedophile is not doing any art.

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where does art end and immorality begin?
does this book tell us more about our "intellectualism" than we care to know?

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Your questions are rather confuse.

Yesterday, seeing this thread I talked about Lolita with a friend of mine, telling him about OPs thesis. He joked a lot, that only ex-Soviet Union countries could see Lolita as more than pornography.

I even pasted him some of the posts in the forum, trying to prove that you guys could take and understand the idea behind the book. And now, seeing the recent posts...meh

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You should have realized that Nabokov was not completely truthful such comments, I don't know when he started reading Joyce, but he taught Joyce for many years at Ithaca. They also met on a number of occasions and some of the conversations were recorded. I'm not well enough acquainted with Borges to say whether there is any similarity, but Lolita shares many characteristics with Ulysses, including mythical references, symbolism, travel, and internal dialogue.

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Should I? To be honest, if Nabokov claimed that Joyce had no influence on him then I would be inclined to believe him, rather than read into something which doesn't exist.

Their most famous meeting was when Nabokov stepped in for a female Hungarian novelist at a book reading-Joyce attended, along with the Hungarian football team. They may have met on other occasions, I don't know, but Nabokov also met Bunin on several occasions; that don’t mean he was influenced by him.

Nabokov, in his own words, despite various cursory glances in the 30's and 40's, only began to seriously study Ulysses in the early 1950's for his lectures at Cornell.

Yes, Lolita and Ulysses do share many similarities, but you are confusing similarity with influence. Does Ada prove that Nabokov was influenced by Proust because both books share similar central themes? Are The Scarlet Letter and Madame Bovary related because they share similar plots? No. Joyce, after Poe, is the most referred to writer in Lolita, but that doesn't mean he was influenced by Joyce's writings, no more than say Chateaubriand or Rimbaud who are used quite often, referentially, in Ada, Nabokov simply admired those particular writers and enjoyed creating ingenious, intrinsically esoteric literary puzzle-games. Eco does the same thing, especially in his last novel.

Writers are first and foremost individuals; truly great writers are intrinsically individualistic, perspicacious innovators, and their works, despite the possible influences, are the sum total of their own genius. Do Joyce or Hemingway write like Dostoevskii because they revered him? No; they write like Joyce and Hemingway, just as Nabokov was and is a unique writer.

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As Borges, Nabakov greatly admired him to the point he claimed once to share a mental link with Borges. Nabakov certainly knew Borges.

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The 'mental link' was entirely the product of the interviewer’s ingenuity. They were born in the same year, and shared various stylistic similarities. That is all. They are two very different writers-Borges is a short story writer, but unlike say Mansfield or Chekhov, his short stories vary widely in terms of syntax, scope and plot. His mock-academic, pseudo-literary stories, his gaucho 'cowboy' fictions and his idiosyncratic short stories have little in common with Nabokov's longer works, though I have not read his short stories, they may very well share some coincidental stylistic similarities but any such similarities are purely coincidental.

http://www.kulichki.com/moshkow/NABOKOW/Inter06.txt

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With Borges he shared the love for scandinavian literature, the rationalism, the false texts games

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Never knew he admired Scandinavian literature. Who did he admire in particular?

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Pale fire for example, a history about a fake author giving the narrative that include the analyses of a lost epic that Nabakov created himself for the work

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I don't really understand your summation of Pale Fire. Kinbote is not an author, he is a professor, the actual poem 'Pale Fire' is not a "lost epic"-it was found and 'stolen', by Kinbote, after the death of John Shade, and published under his editorial guidance. Kinbote, most problably insane, then concuts a fantasy in which the poem is in fact full of hidden references to the story about Kinbote being the exiled king of a pseudo-European state, another fantasy. I can see how the novel shares some similarities of plot with some of Borges's works but in most ways the two are completely different.

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You said influence, I said he is a bit of Joyce with a bit of Borges, which means sharing traits. Which is rather obvious that is not just influence since they wrote at sometime (in borges and Nabakov case). Joyce is a problem that all romance writers had to deal in the XX century, so he is an influence. Borges is mostly likely a case of similar "breading".

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I apologise for my misreading. :)

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i agree that nabakov created the image of the pedophile and young victim we see today. that is the problem. the pedophile is not evil. he is simply satisfying a need. the victim is not harmed by humbert, but saved by him.

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So, according to your logic, any character who does something bad should be drawn up as an evil character, entirely unhuman and totally lacking in any redemptive qualities? Lolita represents nothing in terms of 'real life'-fiction is fiction and reality is reality-you should not confuse the two, just as paedophiles are paedophiles, their acts may be what you consider as being 'evil' but that does not make them intrinsically evil, two dimensional characters, and besides each act of paedophilia is inherently individual. Nabokov created nothing, and if people choose to use a literary work to justify their actions of their views on things then they need to engage their brains a little more.

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does anyone truly believe that? are the victims unharmed and the perpetrators just fulfilling their needs of the 60's sexual revolution?

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The 60's sexual revolution was not some kind of mass rape-it was merely American society freeing itself from the Christian sexual repression which had dominated American society since its conception.

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Originally Posted by Inderjit Sanghe

Should I? To be honest, if Nabokov claimed that Joyce had no influence on him then I would be inclined to believe him, rather than read into something which doesn't exist.

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I am sure that we can trust Nabakov a little, yes. But the big problem is that you said that Nabakov said he had no literary influences. You know that any writer claiming such thing (much less a writer like Nabakov) should be seem with a bit of suspicion.

I think the part of the interview is this one:

My first real contact with Ulysses, after a leering
glimpse in the early twenties, was in the thirties at a time
when I was definitely formed as a writer and immune to any
literary influence. I studied Ulysses seriously only
much later, m the fifties, when preparing my Cornell courses.
That was the best part of the education I received at Cornell.
Ulysses towers over the rest of Joyce's writings, and in
comparison to its noble originality and unique lucidity of
thought and style the unfortunate Finnegans Wake is
nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold
pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room, most
aggravating to the insomniac! I am. Moreover, I always detested
regional literature full of quaint old-timers and imitated
pronunciation. Finnegans Wake's facade disguises a very
conventional and drab tenement house, and only the infrequent
snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter
insipidity. I know I am going to be excommunicated for this
pronouncement.

Of course he means and you probally that he was already a formed writer when he read Ulisses (Although I found another interview where he lists Joyce was one of his favorite writers in the 20's and of course, this does not means Joyce would not have influence afterwards, but that we can leave latter)

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Yes, Lolita and Ulysses do share many similarities, but you are confusing similarity with influence.

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To tell the truth...
I said Nabakov is a bit of Borges-Joyce. You said Influence. Peter didn't used the word.

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Does Ada prove that Nabokov was influenced by Proust because both books share similar central themes? Are The Scarlet Letter and Madame Bovary related because they share similar plots? No. Joyce, after Poe, is the most referred to writer in Lolita, but that doesn't mean he was influenced by Joyce's writings, no more than say Chateaubriand or Rimbaud who are used quite often, referentially, in Ada, Nabokov simply admired those particular writers and enjoyed creating ingenious, intrinsically esoteric literary puzzle-games. Eco does the same thing, especially in his last novel.

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And Eco is clearly influenced by Joyce and Borges. Anyways, I think we should work with the word influence now,
Influence may be the writers that inspired you to be a writer, meaning you try to domain their style and like to use their plots of language figures.
Influence may be the writers that formed you as reader (Since we may acknowledge that turning in a reader is where starts the future writers)
And Influence maybe in the Harold Bloom kind of reasoning, the author that domain an style, a form, a period in such way that all others, with a minimal of aesthetical ambition are aware of him and have to deal with their shadow to build their own originality.

I do not think Borges fits in any of those definitions (thinking about Nabakov) although they have similarities. But Joyce do. In the second and third one.

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Writers are first and foremost individuals; truly great writers are intrinsically individualistic, perspicacious innovators, and their works, despite the possible influences, are the sum total of their own genius. Do Joyce or Hemingway write like Dostoevskii because they revered him? No; they write like Joyce and Hemingway, just as Nabokov was and is a unique writer.

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That is true, yet you know that is structures, languages, etc that are part of the creative process, you know what influence is. Nabakov is a genius because he is an part of a cultural process and yet an unique individual.

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The 'mental link' was entirely the product of the interviewer’s ingenuity. They were born in the same year, and shared various stylistic similarities. That is all. They are two very different writers-Borges is a short story writer, but unlike say Mansfield or Chekhov, his short stories vary widely in terms of syntax, scope and plot. His mock-academic, pseudo-literary stories, his gaucho 'cowboy' fictions and his idiosyncratic short stories have little in common with Nabokov's longer works, though I have not read his short stories, they may very well share some coincidental stylistic similarities but any such similarities are purely coincidental.

http://www.kulichki.com/moshkow/NABOKOW/Inter06.txt

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Yes, I agree with this, I never said Nabakov read Borges and wrote that way because of that, I said he was a bit of Joyce-Borges. I think they have a smilar inbreeding. For example, I would say that Pessoa and Borges also have similarities and of course, Pessoa had no idea who Borges was, they just had similar indreeding and reading.

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Never knew he admired Scandinavian literature. Who did he admire in particular?

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Perhaps I didn't expressed myself well, I didn't meant moderm Scandinavian Literature, but medieval/old literature/language from german, scandinavian or norse that he played with in Pale Fire. He said that he found the ideas ingenuous and they inspired him to play with it and build the poem in one of the prefaces. Perhaps his admiration was rather ephemeral however :D

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I don't really understand your summation of Pale Fire. Kinbote is not an author, he is a professor, the actual poem 'Pale Fire' is not a "lost epic"-it was found and 'stolen', by Kinbote, after the death of John Shade, and published under his editorial guidance. Kinbote, most problably insane, then concuts a fantasy in which the poem is in fact full of hidden references to the story about Kinbote being the exiled king of a pseudo-European state, another fantasy. I can see how the novel shares some similarities of plot with some of Borges's works but in most ways the two are completely different.

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I called lost because it was found and "stolen", and really, epic was for my account... Perhaps I was trusting Kinbote a little too much :p But as I meant, the idea is too borgesian but of course, only because Borges popularized the idea about the fiction of fictional writer.

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I apologise for my misreading. :)

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No worries, I think in end everyone see a Humpty Dumpty in everyone else :D
Anyways, much better than the religious conversations that pop around like crazy, no ? :thumbs_up

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I am sure that we can trust Nabakov a little, yes. But the big problem is that you said that Nabakov said he had no literary influences. You know that any writer claiming such thing (much less a writer like Nabakov) should be seem with a bit of suspicion.

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I am unsure about this-Nabokov did claim influences, Bely was one of them, and Pushkin may have been another, as he says in that interview, and as you have been pointing out in this thread sometimes writers are influenced by a wide culture as Russian literature was influenced by Pushkin until Soviet times. (And Gogol, as Dostoevskii claimed, we all fell out of Gogol's overcoat, a pretty image.) But Nabokov also states, as you have already quoted, that by the time he actually began writing seriously he was too old for influences-Joyce included.

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That is true, yet you know that is structures, languages, etc that are part of the creative process, you know what influence is. Nabakov is a genius because he is an part of a cultural process and yet an unique individual.

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Perhaps what you say is true for many writers, though Nabokov is and was unique in that he travelled and lived in a variety of countries, so 'culture' doesn't really come into it. He was panned by Russian and Soviet critics for his lack of a "social theme", he was panned by American and English critics and writers (Edmund Wilson, Kingsley Amis and other mediocrities) because they felt his books were overly-complicated, obscene and too unique; his books were not well received, or culturally acceptable in either America or England, though the same thing happened to Joyce. He had not cultural purpose, and in terms of wide literary culture many of his works were unique-just like Joyce.

I think, however, that we are going around in circles and I am being a bit tendentious.

What I am really worried about is how somebody is writing a thesis and still needs help on what to write about. :D

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Anyways, much better than the religious conversations that pop around like crazy, no ?

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Indeed it is; fighting, or discussing, religion is like fighting over who has the best imaginary friend. :)

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Originally Posted by Inderjit Sanghe

I am unsure about this-Nabokov did claim influences, Bely was one of them, and Pushkin may have been another, as he says in that interview, and as you have been pointing out in this thread sometimes writers are influenced by a wide culture as Russian literature was influenced by Pushkin until Soviet times. (And Gogol, as Dostoevskii claimed, we all fell out of Gogol's overcoat, a pretty image.) But Nabokov also states, as you have already quoted, that by the time he actually began writing seriously he was too old for influences-Joyce included.

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Yes, but I think Nabakov may be pointing that with such age he had already his aesthetic style defined and his later readings didn't changed it.
Also, I think Nabakov was probally annoyed with the critics being clueless and always reducing him and others to one writers (As Joyce) as If Joyce invetend the moderrn narrative devices and not other authors from where (For example, It is most likely that Nabakov "Learn" the psychological building of a character and the devices for such narratives from russian literature, after all, russian literature developed it before the modernists). Most of questions to him are trying to make him say "Yes, I wrote it because of Ulisses", which is rather dumb as sometimes I think Nabakov english is more like Virginia Woolf's Orlando (clear, linear with precise narrative) than Joycean. But then, one could point a hundred XIX century writers that could have this same trait.

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Perhaps what you say is true for many writers, though Nabokov is and was unique in that he travelled and lived in a variety of countries, so 'culture' doesn't really come into it. He was panned by Russian and Soviet critics for his lack of a "social theme", he was panned by American and English critics and writers (Edmund Wilson, Kingsley Amis and other mediocrities) because they felt his books were overly-complicated, obscene and too unique; his books were not well received, or culturally acceptable in either America or England, though the same thing happened to Joyce. He had not cultural purpose, and in terms of wide literary culture many of his works were unique-just like Joyce.

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Yes, yes. Of course also, a writer that is a bit Joyce-Borges is unique too :D
Anyways, I consider Lolita wonderful exactly because after Joyce's the duty to create a great novel without the modernist textual destruction was hard because the traditional narratives are somehow fullfiled. Nabakov just managed to do it.
But he does belong to a culture, for example, his attacks against Dostoievisky are for many reasons (Dostoievisky never having really the great style of writing of Tolstoy) but it was also a bit of "Leaving Russia behind". Also, he had Authors like Conrad who had a similar multi-cultural background. Among the modernists that wasn't unusual (Borges and Pessoa too for example). And that of course, gave Nabakov a sense of world view and capacity to see beyond his land. And the intelectual games, difficulty of his books are of course typical of his generation.

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I think, however, that we are going around in circles and I am being a bit tendentious.

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Everyone is tendencious, we just cann't help it :D

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What I am really worried about is how somebody is writing a thesis and still needs help on what to write about. :D

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I just hope they do not use it, I mean, the worst place in the world to seek reliable sources for a good thesis is an internet forum ^^

[QUOTE][think Nabakov english is more like Virginia Woolf's Orlando (clear, linear with precise narrative) than Joycean. But then, one could point a hundred XIX century writers that could have this same trait. /QUOTE]

! Do not insult the great master by comparing him to that mediocrity! :D I could never see much in Orlando, :D yes it was an original concept and like many of Woolf's novels has a interesting sounding plot, but in terms of language it has neither the flair or grace of any of Nabokov's English novels. I understand that the language used in Orlando was intentional on Woolf's part, it being a mock historical biography, but the point still stands.

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But he does belong to a culture, for example, his attacks against Dostoievisky are for many reasons (Dostoevskii never having really the great style of writing of Tolstoy) but it was also a bit of "Leaving Russia behind".

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I think his criticsms of Dostosvskii were more or less aesthetic. Nabokov also found the personal and political viewpoints of Gogol and Tolstoy glib and tedentious, but that did not subtract from the brilliance of their works.

Nabokov's criticisms of Dostoevskii are by and large true though. His characterisations were poor, his plots banal and repetitive and his philosophy (which, unlike say Gogol or Tolsoi, dominated his books) was facile. Nabokov detested novels of "great ideas" (Mann, Faulkner, Dostoevskii), novels which were poorly written (Hemingway, Dostoevskii), whose plots were unoriginal or repititive (Dostoevskii), whose characters were static and didn't change at all in the novel (Dostoevskii), he detested books which propagated a certain socio-political message (Dostoevskii) and books which contained little or no description of characters of the scenery, or metaphors and similies; Dostoevskii was more than anything a gallimaufy of everything Nabokov destested in literature-even his best novel (according to Nabokov), The Double was a shallow replication of Gogol.

I guess it all comes down to a story which Borges wrote himself-about a novelist re-writing Don Quixote in the 20th century and writing a completely different novel. (Interestingly enough Don Quixote was the original book-within-a-book novel.)

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Originally Posted by JCamilo

I just hope they do not use it, I mean, the worst place in the world to seek reliable sources for a good thesis is an internet forum ^^

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That depends on what one is writing about. If one is writing about the characters that inhabit such a place, then online forums are excellent sources. If you want opinions that are as plentiful as pores, then there are no better places.

It think it is ok to glean useful information from internet forums. Forums are good. They give you information and keep you in the right state of mind. Never underestimate the power of collective human intelligence. A discerning member would be able to tell useful information from not so useful knowledge. I think it is better than sitting in your supervisor's office for this purpose having a one-to-one. I never saw any of my supervisors for advice on my theses. After the topic was approved and synopsis submitted, I would submerge in my primary source, read it again and again, then start with the secondary material, read as much as I could and write the damned thing at the last minute and be done with it. My last research supervisor is a scholar of international renown but I didn't trouble him at all, never saw him or even sent an email. He wasn't happy about it but then I am good at severing useful connections:

http://www.rhul.ac.uk/English/about-...us-Gibson.html

[QUOTE=Inderjit Sanghe;563191]

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! Do not insult the great master by comparing him to that mediocrity! :D I could never see much in Orlando, :D yes it was an original concept and like many of Woolf's novels has a interesting sounding plot, but in terms of language it has neither the flair or grace of any of Nabokov's English novels. I understand that the language used in Orlando was intentional on Woolf's part, it being a mock historical biography, but the point still stands.

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Heh, I am very fascinated by Orlando. I think Virginia is the kind of cerebral builder like Nabakov and she didn't had Joyce's proposital dirtiness. That kind of planning when language is both a character of the history and just a toy is what makes in my opinion the XX century writers a "one of kind" (Which is by the way, a silly notion, because even Cervantes was like that)

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I think his criticsms of Dostosvskii were more or less aesthetic. Nabokov also found the personal and political viewpoints of Gogol and Tolstoy glib and tedentious, but that did not subtract from the brilliance of their works.

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I very much agree with Nabakov critics too. There is a Diary by Gorki where Tolstoi complains about Dostoievisky in a similar way (something like, He have a great insight, but how lazy he is to finish his books, how someone can use that language). I would say that if we are living the Classics vs. Romantics the "classic" Nabakov was keen to point the problems that the romantic Dostoievisky could not solve. As if there is such thing as classic and romantics.
Anyways, the great problem is that despite that Dostoievisky was a master of Romance and Nabakov critics seems to be a bit exagerated (Because Nabakov not just disliked him, but depreciated him in every possible way.) And that is what I mean, the Russia of Early XX was dominated by Dostoievisky and Tolstoi but they are clearly some short of old Russian thing. A writer seeking individuality would certainly move from them and that very much resembles the weastern europe that was moving from them also as we have for example E.M.Foster claiming that English literature was unable to produce anything with the perfection of Karamazov or War and Peace and he was in the end of the 20's. They are a bit of anti-models (which are models of course).

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it all comes down to a story which Borges wrote himself-about a novelist re-writing Don Quixote in the 20th century and writing a completely different novel. (Interestingly enough Don Quixote was the original book-within-a-book novel.)

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Yes, Pierre Menard. Talking about Borges he was brillant in transform writers in something special that he had a few vindications that are special. Like Voltaire's pessimism : A World that gave us Voltaire cann't be the worst possible world to live. And Nabakov (who is also a reason that I think sometimes Nabakov is a bit ironic in his interviews like him claiming Borges could not even know him at all), when Nabakov organized a collection of Russian literature and claimed that he didn't found a single text from Dostoievisky worth to be included: Nabakov just want to tell us that Dostoievisky's work can only be seen as a whole and never as pieces to be included in any antology. That was not what Nabakov meant at all, but certainly give him a nicer image, no ? :D

As internet, sure, if your subject of study are groups of the internet you must use the internet. But just use this conversation as reference - We barelly give sources from our claims, many stuff we wrote are opinions and we do not go in such deep analyse. The best you can get here is one or two ideas and go for a bigger research in the libraries.