Subject
Re: LOlithophanic note
From
Date
Body
JM: Humbert Humbert's contrition concerning the damage he inflicted on Lolita seems to be sincere [...] HH's self-condemnation, though, is not totally unambiguous in his lithophanic sentence.
AS: This is an understatement. Isn't the whole point, the sine qua non, of "Lolita" that the good reader should not -- will not -- be seduced by HH's fake rhetoric? [...] When VN rebukes his interviewer, saying HH is a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear touching, surely that is the moral of the novel[...] VN's judgement is nuanced [...] This is not a moral "in tow"; the book is its own moral.
JM: In my opinion HH sometimes manages to perceive the damage he caused to Lolita. To imagine that VN's characters display sincere contrition is not the same as to be seduced by their fake rethoric, but to react to ambiguities and enjoy the author's style ( VN may mislead some readers when he begins a sentence using a confessional tone and ends it by introducing someone else, as was the case of the "lolithophanic" one).
The novel "Lolita", as a work of art, is open to many valid, even conflicting, interpretations that will grow with the passing years - I hope.
...................................................................................
...................................................................................
Changing the theme, but exploring further VN's background-lighting, here are further quotes and conjectures:
Beside "(Lo)litophanies" and epiphanies, I found that various other references to cosmology & religion were brought up close to a "copulation" ( Bend Sinister, Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada), similarly to James Joyce's choices in "Ulysses"*.
In Bend Sinister we find "transparent cosmogonists" set close to "jerk-jerk flies": cosmogonists with transparent heads keep [... passing through each other's vibrating voids, while, all around, various frames of reference pulsate with Fitz-Gerald contractions[ ...] How many of us have begun building anew - or thought they were building anew! [...] on the bright polished floor where the flies played (I settle and you buzz by; then I buzz up and you settle; then jerk-jerk-jerk; then we both buzz up).
And, also in B.S, "infinite space" points to Blaise Pascal ( here, instead of the two buzzing flies, there is a couple similarly engaged:"He, the tackler, held Laocoon, and a brittle shoulder-blade, and a small rhythmical hip, in his throbbing coils through which glowing globules were travelling in secret, and her eyes were closed", ch.4) when we read: " the swooning galaxies - those mirrors of infinite space qui m'effrayent, Blaise**, as they did you, and where Olga is not, but where mythology stretches strong circus nets, lest thought, in its ill-fitting tights, should break its old neck instead of rebouncing with a hep and a hop..."
In Ada, or Ardor the reference is to a philosopher's "Germanic grace"[ Kant?] and to Van and Ada's "black divan", "Now mentioned for the first time - though both had been tacitly using it as an orientator or as a right hand painted on a transparent signboard that a philosopher's orbitless eye, a peeled hard-boiled egg cruising free, but sensing which of its ends is proximal to an imaginary nose, sees hanging in infinite space; whereupon, with Germanic grace, the free eye sails around the glass sign and sees a left hand shining through - that's the solution!"
Also in Ada, a Lacoon-rythm of throbbing coils and glowing globules, as in BS, joins time and (who knows?) the rythms and concavities of sex : "Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm [...] The regular throb itself merely brings back the miserable idea of measurement, but in between, something like true Time lurks. How can I extract it from its soft hollow? [...] I can listen to Time only between stresses, for a brief concave moment warily and worriedly, with the growing realization that I am listening not to Time itself but to the blood current coursing through my brain, and thence through the veins of the neck heartward, back to the seat of private throes which have no relation to Time.
Returning to the theme, "Lithophanies", there is an additional example, in ADA: [...] our awareness of being is not a dot in eternity, but a slit, a fissure, a chasm running along the entire breadth of metaphysical time, bisecting it and shining [...] between the back panel and fore panel [...] we simply cannot expect a second nothing, a second void, a second blank
The reference in Pale Fire to: 'a faint phosphorescence at first, a pale light in the dimness of bodily life, and a dazzling radiance after it' (Everyman's Library, page 227,note to line 549) calls to my mind Kinbote's words about Shade's poem ( Foreword, page 14): "a small fraction of the composition he saw in a glass, darkly" (St.Paul, Corinthians 1.13).
................
* - Nabokov once wrote that a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords him aesthetic bliss, but he also applied the word "bliss" to erotic ecstasy both in "The Enchanter" and in "Lolita", where the expressions "enchantment" and "magic" are charged with sexual connotations. James Joyce considered "all art as a shadow of the Incarnation" and borrowed from the Catholic religion the term "epiphany", which, in some respects, is strongly reminiscent of VN's experience of "aesthetic bliss". "By an epiphany" Joyce's protagonist Stephen Hero means "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in memorable phrase of the mind itself", and that "it was for the man of letters to record those epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments."
** - Mirrors, lights and shadows called to my mind a Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher, who might have appealed to Nabokov ( he invented a fantastic system to interpret hyerogliphs and even wrote about Oedipous) Cf. The Great Art of Light and Shadow (Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae), first published in 1646, in which Kircher wrote about perspective and "scenographic projection: " if a great light appears from the same place where shadows are depicted, the image offends the eyes, as shadows necessarily exist in opposition to light. Again, if an image is made catoptrically (with mirrors), and set up to be seen from below, it will not exhibit the same charm as when it is observed from above, and likewise what is done optically, if seen from above, will seem less perfect."
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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
AS: This is an understatement. Isn't the whole point, the sine qua non, of "Lolita" that the good reader should not -- will not -- be seduced by HH's fake rhetoric? [...] When VN rebukes his interviewer, saying HH is a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear touching, surely that is the moral of the novel[...] VN's judgement is nuanced [...] This is not a moral "in tow"; the book is its own moral.
JM: In my opinion HH sometimes manages to perceive the damage he caused to Lolita. To imagine that VN's characters display sincere contrition is not the same as to be seduced by their fake rethoric, but to react to ambiguities and enjoy the author's style ( VN may mislead some readers when he begins a sentence using a confessional tone and ends it by introducing someone else, as was the case of the "lolithophanic" one).
The novel "Lolita", as a work of art, is open to many valid, even conflicting, interpretations that will grow with the passing years - I hope.
...................................................................................
...................................................................................
Changing the theme, but exploring further VN's background-lighting, here are further quotes and conjectures:
Beside "(Lo)litophanies" and epiphanies, I found that various other references to cosmology & religion were brought up close to a "copulation" ( Bend Sinister, Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada), similarly to James Joyce's choices in "Ulysses"*.
In Bend Sinister we find "transparent cosmogonists" set close to "jerk-jerk flies": cosmogonists with transparent heads keep [... passing through each other's vibrating voids, while, all around, various frames of reference pulsate with Fitz-Gerald contractions[ ...] How many of us have begun building anew - or thought they were building anew! [...] on the bright polished floor where the flies played (I settle and you buzz by; then I buzz up and you settle; then jerk-jerk-jerk; then we both buzz up).
And, also in B.S, "infinite space" points to Blaise Pascal ( here, instead of the two buzzing flies, there is a couple similarly engaged:"He, the tackler, held Laocoon, and a brittle shoulder-blade, and a small rhythmical hip, in his throbbing coils through which glowing globules were travelling in secret, and her eyes were closed", ch.4) when we read: " the swooning galaxies - those mirrors of infinite space qui m'effrayent, Blaise**, as they did you, and where Olga is not, but where mythology stretches strong circus nets, lest thought, in its ill-fitting tights, should break its old neck instead of rebouncing with a hep and a hop..."
In Ada, or Ardor the reference is to a philosopher's "Germanic grace"[ Kant?] and to Van and Ada's "black divan", "Now mentioned for the first time - though both had been tacitly using it as an orientator or as a right hand painted on a transparent signboard that a philosopher's orbitless eye, a peeled hard-boiled egg cruising free, but sensing which of its ends is proximal to an imaginary nose, sees hanging in infinite space; whereupon, with Germanic grace, the free eye sails around the glass sign and sees a left hand shining through - that's the solution!"
Also in Ada, a Lacoon-rythm of throbbing coils and glowing globules, as in BS, joins time and (who knows?) the rythms and concavities of sex : "Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm [...] The regular throb itself merely brings back the miserable idea of measurement, but in between, something like true Time lurks. How can I extract it from its soft hollow? [...] I can listen to Time only between stresses, for a brief concave moment warily and worriedly, with the growing realization that I am listening not to Time itself but to the blood current coursing through my brain, and thence through the veins of the neck heartward, back to the seat of private throes which have no relation to Time.
Returning to the theme, "Lithophanies", there is an additional example, in ADA: [...] our awareness of being is not a dot in eternity, but a slit, a fissure, a chasm running along the entire breadth of metaphysical time, bisecting it and shining [...] between the back panel and fore panel [...] we simply cannot expect a second nothing, a second void, a second blank
The reference in Pale Fire to: 'a faint phosphorescence at first, a pale light in the dimness of bodily life, and a dazzling radiance after it' (Everyman's Library, page 227,note to line 549) calls to my mind Kinbote's words about Shade's poem ( Foreword, page 14): "a small fraction of the composition he saw in a glass, darkly" (St.Paul, Corinthians 1.13).
................
* - Nabokov once wrote that a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords him aesthetic bliss, but he also applied the word "bliss" to erotic ecstasy both in "The Enchanter" and in "Lolita", where the expressions "enchantment" and "magic" are charged with sexual connotations. James Joyce considered "all art as a shadow of the Incarnation" and borrowed from the Catholic religion the term "epiphany", which, in some respects, is strongly reminiscent of VN's experience of "aesthetic bliss". "By an epiphany" Joyce's protagonist Stephen Hero means "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in memorable phrase of the mind itself", and that "it was for the man of letters to record those epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments."
** - Mirrors, lights and shadows called to my mind a Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher, who might have appealed to Nabokov ( he invented a fantastic system to interpret hyerogliphs and even wrote about Oedipous) Cf. The Great Art of Light and Shadow (Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae), first published in 1646, in which Kircher wrote about perspective and "scenographic projection: " if a great light appears from the same place where shadows are depicted, the image offends the eyes, as shadows necessarily exist in opposition to light. Again, if an image is made catoptrically (with mirrors), and set up to be seen from below, it will not exhibit the same charm as when it is observed from above, and likewise what is done optically, if seen from above, will seem less perfect."
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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