Seriously, TGIF. I got my first paycheck today from the ARC today, spent a tiny chunk of it at Whole Foods, and am looking forward to a Ghost Tour of Old Town Alexandria with some classmates from the dept tonight. It feels so good to be done with work/classes for the weekend, to put my PJs on in the middle of the afternoon, and watch some American Justice. Thanks for completely wrecking my ambition, A&E.
Soo, the weather has been off-and-on, lots of (unsafe?) construction happening in my hood, and my acid reflux is back with a vengeance, but let’s talk about the positive. For Thursday’s class we got knee-deep in Nabokov’s Lolita, one of the greatest books the English language can lay claim to. Its been about 5 years since I read it first, and the re-read is very welcome. This time, I’m using the annotated copy that has a smashing introduction by Alfred Appel which, IMO, really enriches the experience. So I thought I’d share some blurbs here.
The first thing I’ve got to say is that I remember the poetic beauty of Nabokov’s language so vividly, and I thought it would be challenging the novel in the post-modernist mind frame. You can read it at surface level, of course, and its still a good (and controversial) read, but (now) I do think that its important not just to appreciate it, but to “get” it. Let’s be honest — most of us pick it up expecting an erotic (perhaps titillating-in-a-guilty-way) read, and whether its due to our expectations, our notions of what is erotic, or simply the cultural changes brought about by the half-century or so that’s passed since its publication. And lovely and yearning as the prose is, it never turns out the way we first expected — this is not pornography. One challenge that we discussed in class is, while reading, actually maintaining an idea of what a 12-year-old girl is — HH attributes so much character, so much sly knowledge, to Lolita that we easily transform her in our minds into a girl of 16 or so. But how young, how innocent, 12 really is.
As promised, then: Nabokov, I learned from the mass amount of criticism I had to read over the past week, is every bit as intriguing a character as the ones he’s created: a Russian emigre, thematically obsessed with butterflies (lepidoptery), with a strong antipathy towards Freud and clinical psychology/studies — he declined every request for a face-to-face interview with him, demanding instead that the questions be sent to him, and he would send back typed responses. This is just one way in which he created and manipulated the public’s (and history’s) image of him, yet, despite such planning, many critics (whom he apparently despised) have read his works as clues to his own personality — suggesting that Lolita is the manifestation of his own obsession with little girls — a notion he’s ridiculed.
Appel notes that the novel contains, among other things, “emotional and spiritual exiles” (xxii), and that it “records a constant process of becoming — the evolution of the artist’s self through artistic creation” (xxiii) — and its here that I would think the novel can become tricky for the “lay reader,” one who pays attention only to plot and theme, not to the levels of narration. That’s because Lolita is one of those books (but aren’t they all, in some sense?) about creation, about itself. Where does Nabokov end, and HH begin? How reliable of a narrator is HH — and if he isn’t reliable, which parts are outright fabrications, and which are only unconscious lies that he earnestly believes? Appelsums it up: There are “at least two ‘plots’ in all of Nabokov’s fiction: the characters in the book, and the consciousness of the creator above it” (xxvi). It doesn’t really get easier from here, because there is constant character doubling — most noticeable: who is Clare Quilty? HH’s shadow, his double, his dark side, Fate…
Another thing to note is the presence of parody in Lolita — Nabokov denies any use of satire, but called parody “a game,” and goes about it as such. He’s probably the last guy you’d call a prude, but in addition to parodying Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground and the reader’s own assumptions, he uses the novel to comment upon vapid American consumerism / materialism, the American landscape (motels, summer camps, etc) and Dream, as well as “the Good-Housekeeping Syndrome” and teenage behavior: “those various travesties of behavior which too many Americans recognize as tenable examples of reality” (xlviii). Charlotte’s home is filled with Mexican junk that passes as art in the suburbs; for all her allure, Lolita is no better — she is a teeny-bopper consumer of cokes, sundaes, bubble gum, comic books, and pop culture. What I love most, though, is Nabokov’s label of poshlust: “not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive” (Gogol 70). Let that word — poshlust — roll around in your mouth for a minute. How satisfying…especially for someone who’s been gravitating towards simple living.
There’s so many themes and ideas and allusions (especially to Edgar Allan Poe!!) intertwining in Lolita — its really like a “readable” Ulysses — that its almost impossible to keep track of them all. However, I loved reading about Nabokov himself and am going to turn back to him for now. On why he never owned a home, but moved every year:
“The main reason [for never settling anywhere permanently], the background reason, is, I suppose, that nothing short of a replica of my childhood surroundings would have satisfied me. I would never manage to match my memories correctly — so why trouble with hopeless approximations? … The few times I said to myself anywhere: ‘Now that’s a nice spot for a permanent home,’ I would immediately hear in my mind the thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places which I would destroy by the very act of settling in one particular nook of the earth. And finally, I don’t care much for furniture, for tables and chairs and lamps and rugs and things — perhaps because in my opulent childhood I was taught to regard with amused contempt any too-earnest attachment to material wealth, which is why I felt no regret and no bitterness when the Revolution abolished that wealth.” (Playboy interview)
Nabokov speaks honestly about that nostalgia we all feel somewhere within us, and which manifests itself so powerfully in HH’s character. Finally (I know this was a super-long entry, and you’re a sicko if you’ve read this far!), Nabokov’s comments on Kubrick’s film adaptation of Lolita (the screenplay for which he also wrote):
Although there are just enough borrowings from my version to justify my legal position as author of the script, the final product is only a blurred skimpy glimpse of the marvelous picture I imagined… I do not wish to imply that Kubrick’s film is mediocre; in its own right, it is first-rate, but it is not what I wrote. A tinge of poshlust is often given by the cinema to the novel it distorts and coarsens in its crooked glass. Kubrick, I think, avoided this fault in his version, but I shall never understand why he did not follow my directions and dreams.” (Paris Review interview 1967)
Don’t worry; more on Lolita to come.
