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Following a good hint at the List I decided to read " A Filthy Look at Shakespeare's Lolita", by Eric Naiman ( Comparative Literature,58 n.1, Winter 2006 ).
The author comments that "Lolita has always struck me as a stylistically lewd book", "littered with what might be called schoolboy humor". "Nabokov is, after all, the author of Ada, a novel that pratically wears its salaciousness on its sleeve".
After mentioning Carl Proffer's suggestion "that much of the erotic action in the novel was occurring on the level of word play", Naiman observes that "since then the impression has generally been cultivated in Nabokov scholarship that the lexical sex occurs at a fairly superficial level". He then proposes to "investigate most immodestly the poetics and significance of this substratum; in particular (...), inquire into the extent to which Nabokov's technique of sexual reference is indebted to the tradition of Shakespearean bawdy and scholarship thereof. He added: "In the process, I hope both to revise current understanding of the poetics of Nabokov's novel and to place Lolita within the context of postwar Shakespeare studies as a work of applied scholarship."
Taking Nabokov's aesthetics as "in thrall to the old-fashioned notion of authorial intentionality" Naiman writes that " the explication of a Nabokovian text entails providing readers with a different, but still authorial 'angle of vision' " . He quotes a poem, "An Evening of Russian Poetry", from which I'll copy the last lines: "The other way, the other way. Thank you" - now interpreted as an "invitation to hermeneutic perversion".
Naiman questions: " The notion of authorized perversion is a complex and paradoxical one. Is there a central difference between 'the' other way and 'another' way? How can perversion ever be authorized? Once it is authorized doesn't it cease to be perverse?"
Although Naiman later describes readers that don't adhere to this "authorized perversion" and distinguishes them for other readers who establish a kind of cumplicity with authorial bawdiness, I still think that, even if it were possible, no "authorized perversion" would cease to be perverse.
And yet this is a false problem when we depart from the idea that every reader should be seen as someone who is responsible for his choices either to play or not to play along with this kind of "hermeneutics of perversion" - and - as Naiman notes, " the inclusion of a bawdy, bodily register can imbue high literature with a vital, regenerative, even juvenile force appropriate to the meeting of the Old and New Worlds". An "authorized perversion" may also mean " a perversion that is authored by someone" ( having an "author", not an "authority") and in this sense this perversion would not be inherent to the work itself ( neither would it extend to its readers) but it would only mean something that has been created novelistically by its author.
After includind Nabokov in the tradition of Russian Symbolism when "words ought to be more than enough, since they are magic" Naiman added : " Lolita is an incantation, but its conjuring never moves from word to flesh; the brilliance and tragedy of language is that it it only language and therefore useless". But what does he mean by "language is only language and therefore useless", even if we agree with him that the incantatory power of words should be considered as being restricted to language? Only in certain mental illnessess word and matter may become blended in what was termed " a symbolic equation" ( Hanna Segal) but for those who are not so afflicted language does not " transcend the distinction between word and matter". Why would language then be "useless" or described as " language is only language"?
After stating that in Lolita the hermeneutics of perversion "are finaly configured: a constructive poetic principle is here incarnated in a character ( Humbert) and his double ( Quilty)" , Naiman turned his attention to Ada in what he designated as " A coda". This expression made me chuckle since "coda" means "tail" and "queue", i.e, it reverts to Quilty, to cue and to "Q".
In Portuguese, the word "tail" is sexually suggestive. I don't know if the same applies to English. May I surmise that this then entails that Eric Naiman was playing word-games with his readers?
Jansy
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The author comments that "Lolita has always struck me as a stylistically lewd book", "littered with what might be called schoolboy humor". "Nabokov is, after all, the author of Ada, a novel that pratically wears its salaciousness on its sleeve".
After mentioning Carl Proffer's suggestion "that much of the erotic action in the novel was occurring on the level of word play", Naiman observes that "since then the impression has generally been cultivated in Nabokov scholarship that the lexical sex occurs at a fairly superficial level". He then proposes to "investigate most immodestly the poetics and significance of this substratum; in particular (...), inquire into the extent to which Nabokov's technique of sexual reference is indebted to the tradition of Shakespearean bawdy and scholarship thereof. He added: "In the process, I hope both to revise current understanding of the poetics of Nabokov's novel and to place Lolita within the context of postwar Shakespeare studies as a work of applied scholarship."
Taking Nabokov's aesthetics as "in thrall to the old-fashioned notion of authorial intentionality" Naiman writes that " the explication of a Nabokovian text entails providing readers with a different, but still authorial 'angle of vision' " . He quotes a poem, "An Evening of Russian Poetry", from which I'll copy the last lines: "The other way, the other way. Thank you" - now interpreted as an "invitation to hermeneutic perversion".
Naiman questions: " The notion of authorized perversion is a complex and paradoxical one. Is there a central difference between 'the' other way and 'another' way? How can perversion ever be authorized? Once it is authorized doesn't it cease to be perverse?"
Although Naiman later describes readers that don't adhere to this "authorized perversion" and distinguishes them for other readers who establish a kind of cumplicity with authorial bawdiness, I still think that, even if it were possible, no "authorized perversion" would cease to be perverse.
And yet this is a false problem when we depart from the idea that every reader should be seen as someone who is responsible for his choices either to play or not to play along with this kind of "hermeneutics of perversion" - and - as Naiman notes, " the inclusion of a bawdy, bodily register can imbue high literature with a vital, regenerative, even juvenile force appropriate to the meeting of the Old and New Worlds". An "authorized perversion" may also mean " a perversion that is authored by someone" ( having an "author", not an "authority") and in this sense this perversion would not be inherent to the work itself ( neither would it extend to its readers) but it would only mean something that has been created novelistically by its author.
After includind Nabokov in the tradition of Russian Symbolism when "words ought to be more than enough, since they are magic" Naiman added : " Lolita is an incantation, but its conjuring never moves from word to flesh; the brilliance and tragedy of language is that it it only language and therefore useless". But what does he mean by "language is only language and therefore useless", even if we agree with him that the incantatory power of words should be considered as being restricted to language? Only in certain mental illnessess word and matter may become blended in what was termed " a symbolic equation" ( Hanna Segal) but for those who are not so afflicted language does not " transcend the distinction between word and matter". Why would language then be "useless" or described as " language is only language"?
After stating that in Lolita the hermeneutics of perversion "are finaly configured: a constructive poetic principle is here incarnated in a character ( Humbert) and his double ( Quilty)" , Naiman turned his attention to Ada in what he designated as " A coda". This expression made me chuckle since "coda" means "tail" and "queue", i.e, it reverts to Quilty, to cue and to "Q".
In Portuguese, the word "tail" is sexually suggestive. I don't know if the same applies to English. May I surmise that this then entails that Eric Naiman was playing word-games with his readers?
Jansy
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu,chtodel@cox.net
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm