Lolita

Since this thread has gone on and on and on, I thought I'd add a poetic mixture to the fire. It may cause the thread to blaze up; it may even put an end to the fire. Let us see:
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PROVOCATIVE AND INFLAMMATORY

Sappho shows that love poetry is how Western personality defines itself; some loved person exists in this poetry primarily as a focus of the poet's consciousness. This 'love' is essentially: infatuation, fascination, a bittersweet state. It is like a storm, sudden and passing. The imagery is vivid and luminous, sometimes boiling with ecstatic elemental forms. For poets like Yeats "women's haunting beauty is the heart of life's mystery", or, like Roethke, she is an unknowable Muse ruling an oozy sexual matrix. From Sappho to our time there is a tormented history of Western 'love' available for our study. -Ron Price with thanks to Camille Paglia, Vamps and Tramps: New Essays, Viking Press, 1994, pp. 319-326. :cool:


They came at me right from
an early age: the most beautiful
things imaginable, pierced my
brain, penetrated my inmost
being: sultry, smoldering,
caresses on hot summer days,
tortured affairs in my dreams;
I must have been dependent
even then on some force that
threatened to blow me away
with lust and rage and that now
follows me into my old age,
something so utterly provocative,
vibrations and signals, inflammatory. :goof:

Ron Price
20 June 1998 :banana:

As a fiction writer, Russian-born author Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was known for his artistry, word play and descriptive detail. His novels include "Despair," (1937) "Laughter In The Dark" (1938) and "Pale Fire" (1962) but his most famous book was "Lolita" (1955). He also wrote many short stories (best collection "Details Of A Sunset and Other Stories") and poetry.

Excerpt from "Lolita," which depicts a very taboo subject (pederasty) without resorting to obscene language or description. The novel's mixture of tragedy and subtle comic genius have led to it being widely considered one of the best fiction works of the 20th century:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns ...

Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: "honey-colored skin," "thin arms," "brown bobbed hair," "long lashes," "big bright mouth"); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).

Let me therefore primly limit myself, in describing Annabel, to saying she was a lovely child a few months my junior. Her parents were old friends of my aunt's, and as stuffy as she. They had rented a villa not far from Hotel Mirana. Bald brown Mr. Leigh and fat, powdered Mrs. Leigh (born Vanessa van Ness). How I loathed them! At first, Annabel and I talked of peripheral affairs. She kept lifting handfuls of fine sand and letting it pour through her fingers. Our brains were turned the way those of intelligent European preadolescents were in our day and set, and I doubt if much individual genius should be assigned to our interest in the plurality of inhabited worlds, competitive tennis, infinity, solipsism and so on. The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy.

All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other ... Among some treasures I lost during the wanderings of my adult years, there was a snapshot taken by my aunt which showed Annabel, her parents and the staid, elderly, lame gentleman, a Dr. Cooper, who that same summer courted my aunt, grouped around a table in a sidewalk café. Annabel did not come out well, caught as she was in the act of bending over her chocolate glacé and her thin bare shoulders and the parting in her hair were about all that could be identified (as I remember that picture) amid the sunny blur into which her lost loveliness graded; but I, sitting somewhat apart from the rest, came out with a kind of dramatic conspicuousness: a moody, beetle-browed boy in a dark sport shirt and well-tailored white shorts, his legs crossed, sitting in profile, looking away. That photograph was taken on the last day of our fatal summer and just a few minutes before we made our second and final attempt to thwart fate. Under the flimsiest of pretexts (this was our very last chance, and nothing really mattered) we escaped from the cafe to the beach, and found a desolate stretch of sand, and there, in the violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, had a brief session of avid caresses, with somebody's lost pair of sun-glasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.

I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity? When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel.

I also know that the shock of Annabel's death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth. The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you loved me thus!

I have reserved for the conclusion of my "Annabel" phase the account of our unsuccessful first tryst. One night, she managed to deceive the vicious vigilance of her family. In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. Through the darkness and the tender trees we could see the arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive memory, appear to me now like playing cards--presumably because a bridge game was keeping the enemy busy ... I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own ...

I recall the scent of some kind of toilet powder--I believe she stole it from her mother's Spanish maid --a sweetish, lowly, musky perfume. It mingled with her own biscuity odor, and my senses were suddenly filled to the brim; a sudden commotion in a nearby bush prevented them from overflowing--and as we drew away from each other, and with aching veins attended to what was probably a prowling cat, there came from the house her mother's voice calling her, with a rising frantic note--and Dr. Cooper ponderously limped out into the garden. But that mimosa grove--the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since--until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.

Quote:

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Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

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A worthy contender for the title of the best paragraph ever penned in English Literature.

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Originally Posted by EAP

A worthy contender for the title of the best paragraph ever penned in English Literature.

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I agree. Nabokov should be an inspiration for writers whose first language is not English. Although he spoke some English before he left Russia, he didn't begin writing in English until years later.

I've tried to read Lolita twice, and failed both times. I found it too disturbing, to the point of making me feel physically ill every time I picked up the book. Nabakov understood the power of language; sometimes metaphor and insinuation paint more upsetting images than blatant obscenity ever could. Not that he didn't resort to it; my professor provided translations of some of the passages not in English, and they're not pleasant.

I've read a couple of Nabakov's short stories, in addition, and I agree that he is one of the most impressive writers I have ever had the displeasure of reading. His grasp of language is uncanny, even before you take into account that English was his third (after Russian and French). Still, I always got the creeping feeling that he was a sociopath; anti-social. I can accept the assertion that he was not a pedaphile, but only by believing that he was so removed from human emotion as to not be disturbed by the things he was writing. I wrote something about it for class, with citations that I can't recall. But I do recall having the distinct impression that his way of addressing emotions was more in the manner of objective, clinical observation than that of someone who had experienced them. Certainly, a good writer can remove himself from the scene to paint it objectively, but he also immerses himself in the characters' emotion so that he might write from their point of view. Nabakov's removal seems so total as to almost seem like mimickry; he describes people in misery with an almost quizzical-dog expression. He knows people act this way, but his manner suggests no empathy with the emotion behind the action.

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Originally Posted by emily655321

Nabokov understood the power of language; sometimes metaphor and insinuation paint more upsetting images than blatant obscenity ever could. Not that he didn't resort to it; my professor provided translations of some of the passages not in English, and they're not pleasant.

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Just when I thought you had a head on your shoulders ... Believe it or not Emily, you will encounter some things in life that are not very pleasant. It's unavoidable, so you might as well get used to the idea.

As to the professor translating passages to titillate his class with prurient content, I think you should worry more about his motives than Nabokov's.

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Originally Posted by starrwriter

Just when I thought you had a head on your shoulders ... Believe it or not Emily, you will encounter some things in life that are not very pleasant. It's unavoidable, so you might as well get used to the idea.

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What's your point?

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Originally Posted by starrwriter

As to the professor translating passages to titillate his class with prurient content, I think you should worry more about his motives than Nabokov's.

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Umm... yeah. 'Kay. Sometimes understanding a book and academic discussion come before titilation, Starr. It was a course on the history of literary censorship, and the point was to illustrate how Nabokov circumvented the censors by putting the "worst stuff" in another language. Nabakov's is a good study in just how un-titilating sexual content can be.

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Originally Posted by starrwriter

I agree. Nabokov should be an inspiration for writers whose first language is not English. Although he spoke some English before he left Russia, he didn't begin writing in English until years later.

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English was Nabokov's first language. He didn't start to learn Russian until he was eight. French was his second language.

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Originally Posted by PeterL

English was Nabokov's first language. He didn't start to learn Russian until he was eight. French was his second language.

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Really? Wow, I did not know that. The facts must have gotten very mixed up in my head.

How old were Humbert Humbert and his little girlfriend at the beach? I know that Lolita is 12 when he meets her, but I dont think he says how old he and the girl were. If they were 8 or 9, it might be a little more disturbing than if they were 13 and 14, or even 12 and 13 is not so bad. As for the entire story being disturbing...I found The Lovely Bones to be alot worse.

I remember they were very young. Definitely pre-pubescent.

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Originally Posted by PeterL

English was Nabokov's first language. He didn't start to learn Russian until he was eight. French was his second language.

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I stand corrected. How odd that a Russian boy wouldn't be taught Russian as his first language. His parents must have been Anglophiles.

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Originally Posted by emily655321

Still, I always got the creeping feeling that he was a sociopath; anti-social. I can accept the assertion that he was not a pedaphile, but only by believing that he was so removed from human emotion as to not be disturbed by the things he was writing. I wrote something about it for class, with citations that I can't recall. But I do recall having the distinct impression that his way of addressing emotions was more in the manner of objective, clinical observation than that of someone who had experienced them. Certainly, a good writer can remove himself from the scene to paint it objectively, but he also immerses himself in the characters' emotion so that he might write from their point of view. Nabakov's removal seems so total as to almost seem like mimickry; he describes people in misery with an almost quizzical-dog expression. He knows people act this way, but his manner suggests no empathy with the emotion behind the action.

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This is an interesting viewpoint. When I read Lolita I was aware of a sense of detachment but put this down to style rather than a lack of empathy on Nabokov's part. The book shows a deep understanding of Humbert Humbert's feelings and emotions. An understanding that I suggest could only have come from someone with a highly developed empathic sense. I took his detachment to be a deliberate ploy in tackling such controversial subject matter; an attempt to remove any hint of sensationalism or titillation.

Not having read any other works by the author (Pale Fire has been recommended to me recently and is on my 'to read' list) I can't comment on whether this is Nabokov's usual tone or merely one adopted for the book. I would be interested in hearing other reader's viewpoints on this.

I also didn't know that english was his first language - Thanks for that PeterL.

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Originally Posted by starrwriter

I stand corrected. How odd that a Russian boy wouldn't be taught Russian as his first language. His parents must have been Anglophiles.

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As I understand it, in his later years Nabokov also found it odd. His parents were aristocrats, so anything non-Russian was better.

I read it when I was 16 and I found it weird...really slow (which is respected in the movies...) and heavy in the language (I learnt more than a few very high Italian words that I have never heard/seen after that) but it was a translation...the quick read I gave to the passage above seems definitely more fascinating.

I'm kinda disappointed at the news of him being taught English as a first language, and I will try to find out if it's true... cos it was some kind of example to me in mastery of a foreign language... Incidentally, my teachers of Russian also mentioned him as a native Russian speaker... maybe that fact that PeterL quoted is kinda unknown... It somehow makes sense, though it was one century later than the French-mania and English was a kinda odd choice, but as starr said, maybe his parents were anglo-maniacs...