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[NABOKOV-L] Pompons and pumpkins
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Some time in April I started a message which was interrupted and misplaced in my archives. It was related to a review sent to the Nab-List by someone named Farmer (which I couldn't locate), dated from April 13,2010.
I selected the following from it:
Farmer notes that " 'Lolita' is the spiritual ideal of The Nymphet; Dolores Haze is a temporary manifestation. To love the spiritual ideal through Dolores's bodily reality, Humbert must discard Dolores as a real individual."
I tried to compare Farmer's comment with another, from ADA, using Nabokov's words: "the lewd, ludicrous and vulgar mistake of the Signy-Mondieu analysts consists in their regarding a real object, a pompon, say, or a pumpkin as a significant abstraction of the real object," but I got nowhere.
Farmer's comment seems clear enough to me: the girl Dolores was an icon through which Humbert could access the "spiritual ideal of the nymphet." A living fetish.
Nabokov's, on the contrary, remains puzzling, also because VN often returned to these two "real objects" (pompom, pumpkin) in various novels, in a figurative sense (particularly in KQKn) like the red and white camelias in the movie (perhaps also in Dumas' novel).
Could anyone help me to figure out what Nabokov intended as a criticism of "Signy-Mondieu" (Freud, I presume)?
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I selected the following from it:
Farmer notes that " 'Lolita' is the spiritual ideal of The Nymphet; Dolores Haze is a temporary manifestation. To love the spiritual ideal through Dolores's bodily reality, Humbert must discard Dolores as a real individual."
I tried to compare Farmer's comment with another, from ADA, using Nabokov's words: "the lewd, ludicrous and vulgar mistake of the Signy-Mondieu analysts consists in their regarding a real object, a pompon, say, or a pumpkin as a significant abstraction of the real object," but I got nowhere.
Farmer's comment seems clear enough to me: the girl Dolores was an icon through which Humbert could access the "spiritual ideal of the nymphet." A living fetish.
Nabokov's, on the contrary, remains puzzling, also because VN often returned to these two "real objects" (pompom, pumpkin) in various novels, in a figurative sense (particularly in KQKn) like the red and white camelias in the movie (perhaps also in Dumas' novel).
Could anyone help me to figure out what Nabokov intended as a criticism of "Signy-Mondieu" (Freud, I presume)?
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/