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Fw: [NABOKOV-L] Lolita and the American scene -TNR,Oct. 1958
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Dear List,
Yesterday I sent an abridged version of an October 27, 1958 TNR review with a "highly disapproving editorial....along with three letters that it provoked." mainly discussing Nabokov's addendum that his novel "has no moral in tow." Naiman's "Nabokov, Perversely" dedicates a chapter to "Lolita in the Real World" (chapter 6) which I couldn't fail to bring in at this point, as a very recent critical appraisal of certain aspects of "Lolita."
Naiman begins by considering how often readers are "reminded of the extent to which the novel leaves the character of Lolita a blank page, a screen on which Humbert projects his fantasies and desires" before he passes on to how "the elaboration of any argument about the meaning or even about the poetics of a literary work provides an opportunity for projection, because a scholar inevitably adds something and by necessity subtracts a great deal from the text." One of his examples shows how de la Durantaye achieved "a symptomatic transformation of (Herbold's) Lolita from sassy to trashy" as a "corolary to his reaction to a reading that acknowledges female sexual pleasure."(149).
For Naiman literary "scholarship, whatever new paradigms it invents, in inherently a secondary enterprise [...]Even the simplest of paraphrases offers difficulties. What phrases are to be used to describe what Humbert and Lolita do with each other's verbally constructed bodies." Naiman compares "Kauffman's operative assumption" (Humbert "works by ellipses, leaving out Lolita's experience and suppressing her voice") to Leona Toker's approach related to the expectation of a character's arc ( H's final reformation and transformation) and her misgivings ( "HH would have written the first half of the book differently had he really repented").
It is fascinating to follow how Naiman reproduces the same paragraph, from Lolita, as it's been quoted (with distinct omissions) by different scholars, to compare their ellipses with Nabokov's original text. Naiman notes that how "scholars cite this passage -- what parts of it they retain and what they omit -- can frequently be used as a shorthand gauge of their interpretaiton of the novel's 'message' and of the relative weights of moral and aesthetic factors in their analysis." (151) And I think that here it's Naiman who speaks:"Humbert's masterful command of language ( and Nabokov's near-total control of his text1s every word) leads to a readerly gesture toward the real world that, many critics claim, Nabokov intends to foster." For him, Brian Boyd and Richard Rorty consider that "Lolita does indeed have 'a moral in tow'."(152) For Rorty, the book's message is not so much "an injunction against causing suffering as a warning about insensitivity to the pain of others" concludes Naiman, since Rorty believes that it very often turns out "that people are trying to tell you that they are suffering." For Boyd, Nabokov would be warning the reader "to recognize the power of the mind to rationalize away the harm it can cause"(AY,232) and, for him, Humbert demonstrates "how easy it is to let moral awareness turn into sincere regret after the fact, but how much more difficult to curb the self before it tramples other's underfoot."(AY,254).
Also Toker concludes that Nabokov's "sophisticated patterns of motifs" carries the "implicit ethical function...in the refinement of the careful reader's sensibilities that can later be directed to human relationships"... Adds Naiman:"Even just noticing things in a book will lead us to notice them in the world around us...Rather than being written into the text, readers can export the text into their extratextual lives," before he returns to Kauffman and to "the most impassioned engagement with Lolita from a real-world perspective...provided by Elizabeth Patnoe." ( and, again, Naiman compares, now Patnoe's and Toker's, quotes and ellipses). For Patnoe, says Naiman, "the only way the novel can be read with adequate proximity, with an eye for its "overt, intratextual messages," is to preface that reading with an awareness of the extratextual highly personal dimension of individual readers," in order to defy exclusion by "hegemonic readings of Lolita [and] reclaim the book, and insist upon our experiences with and around it so we can at least begin to counter the Lolita myth distortions, to resist some of the cultural appropriations of female sexuality." (1995) She denounces HH's misoginy and his depravity. For Naiman, Patnoe's comments on Lolita's "hegemonic" danger "begins in a sentimental milieu - similar to Nafisis's - but quickly switches gears." (155) and develops his arguments extensively. He remarks, in the chapter's closing lines: "With his complaint that he has 'only words to play with' Humbert has anticipated...the sort of reading practived by Patnoe. Unable to achieve contact with physical flesh, Humbert beseeches the reader to transcend the realm of the merely verbal for him" but Patnoe "becomes Humbert's pander by reinscribing not only Lolita's body but his." For him, Nabokov's masterful prose "offers the possibility of an aesthetic sublime so pleasurable that it leads some readers to worry whether literature has a point, and then to seek that point in extratextual applications which result in slighting or devaluing the powerful aesthetic that triggered the search for usefulness in the first place."(160). We know, already, what Naiman thinks about the usefulness of art and if literature has a point from his concluding remarks (already quoted in a past posting) in "Hermophobia."
I suppose that Naiman's "intratextual dimension" derives from a reader's limiting himself to examine an author's rapport with his character, in an absolutely neutral and "scientific" way. Nevertheless, his words often seem to deny it. In ch.6 he demonstrates how the readers's response, and their subjective interaction with an author's words, result from their inevitable "projections" (ie, every reading is by necessity "extratextual" and "real").
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Yesterday I sent an abridged version of an October 27, 1958 TNR review with a "highly disapproving editorial....along with three letters that it provoked." mainly discussing Nabokov's addendum that his novel "has no moral in tow." Naiman's "Nabokov, Perversely" dedicates a chapter to "Lolita in the Real World" (chapter 6) which I couldn't fail to bring in at this point, as a very recent critical appraisal of certain aspects of "Lolita."
Naiman begins by considering how often readers are "reminded of the extent to which the novel leaves the character of Lolita a blank page, a screen on which Humbert projects his fantasies and desires" before he passes on to how "the elaboration of any argument about the meaning or even about the poetics of a literary work provides an opportunity for projection, because a scholar inevitably adds something and by necessity subtracts a great deal from the text." One of his examples shows how de la Durantaye achieved "a symptomatic transformation of (Herbold's) Lolita from sassy to trashy" as a "corolary to his reaction to a reading that acknowledges female sexual pleasure."(149).
For Naiman literary "scholarship, whatever new paradigms it invents, in inherently a secondary enterprise [...]Even the simplest of paraphrases offers difficulties. What phrases are to be used to describe what Humbert and Lolita do with each other's verbally constructed bodies." Naiman compares "Kauffman's operative assumption" (Humbert "works by ellipses, leaving out Lolita's experience and suppressing her voice") to Leona Toker's approach related to the expectation of a character's arc ( H's final reformation and transformation) and her misgivings ( "HH would have written the first half of the book differently had he really repented").
It is fascinating to follow how Naiman reproduces the same paragraph, from Lolita, as it's been quoted (with distinct omissions) by different scholars, to compare their ellipses with Nabokov's original text. Naiman notes that how "scholars cite this passage -- what parts of it they retain and what they omit -- can frequently be used as a shorthand gauge of their interpretaiton of the novel's 'message' and of the relative weights of moral and aesthetic factors in their analysis." (151) And I think that here it's Naiman who speaks:"Humbert's masterful command of language ( and Nabokov's near-total control of his text1s every word) leads to a readerly gesture toward the real world that, many critics claim, Nabokov intends to foster." For him, Brian Boyd and Richard Rorty consider that "Lolita does indeed have 'a moral in tow'."(152) For Rorty, the book's message is not so much "an injunction against causing suffering as a warning about insensitivity to the pain of others" concludes Naiman, since Rorty believes that it very often turns out "that people are trying to tell you that they are suffering." For Boyd, Nabokov would be warning the reader "to recognize the power of the mind to rationalize away the harm it can cause"(AY,232) and, for him, Humbert demonstrates "how easy it is to let moral awareness turn into sincere regret after the fact, but how much more difficult to curb the self before it tramples other's underfoot."(AY,254).
Also Toker concludes that Nabokov's "sophisticated patterns of motifs" carries the "implicit ethical function...in the refinement of the careful reader's sensibilities that can later be directed to human relationships"... Adds Naiman:"Even just noticing things in a book will lead us to notice them in the world around us...Rather than being written into the text, readers can export the text into their extratextual lives," before he returns to Kauffman and to "the most impassioned engagement with Lolita from a real-world perspective...provided by Elizabeth Patnoe." ( and, again, Naiman compares, now Patnoe's and Toker's, quotes and ellipses). For Patnoe, says Naiman, "the only way the novel can be read with adequate proximity, with an eye for its "overt, intratextual messages," is to preface that reading with an awareness of the extratextual highly personal dimension of individual readers," in order to defy exclusion by "hegemonic readings of Lolita [and] reclaim the book, and insist upon our experiences with and around it so we can at least begin to counter the Lolita myth distortions, to resist some of the cultural appropriations of female sexuality." (1995) She denounces HH's misoginy and his depravity. For Naiman, Patnoe's comments on Lolita's "hegemonic" danger "begins in a sentimental milieu - similar to Nafisis's - but quickly switches gears." (155) and develops his arguments extensively. He remarks, in the chapter's closing lines: "With his complaint that he has 'only words to play with' Humbert has anticipated...the sort of reading practived by Patnoe. Unable to achieve contact with physical flesh, Humbert beseeches the reader to transcend the realm of the merely verbal for him" but Patnoe "becomes Humbert's pander by reinscribing not only Lolita's body but his." For him, Nabokov's masterful prose "offers the possibility of an aesthetic sublime so pleasurable that it leads some readers to worry whether literature has a point, and then to seek that point in extratextual applications which result in slighting or devaluing the powerful aesthetic that triggered the search for usefulness in the first place."(160). We know, already, what Naiman thinks about the usefulness of art and if literature has a point from his concluding remarks (already quoted in a past posting) in "Hermophobia."
I suppose that Naiman's "intratextual dimension" derives from a reader's limiting himself to examine an author's rapport with his character, in an absolutely neutral and "scientific" way. Nevertheless, his words often seem to deny it. In ch.6 he demonstrates how the readers's response, and their subjective interaction with an author's words, result from their inevitable "projections" (ie, every reading is by necessity "extratextual" and "real").
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/