Subject
Fwd: Re: "I suspect Andrew's line of thought is right" Re HH's
psycho-stays
psycho-stays
From
Date
Body
Jansy and List-
The narrators of both Lolita and Pnin set out to seduce their readers
and, to the extent they succeed, make their readers complicit abusers.
I was admiring Nabokov's skill in bring us up short. In both novels,
Nabokov's narrator provides a still more unpleasant character to
deflect our attention from his [the narrator's] and our own
culpability. The novels succeed only when we loose patience with Mrs.
Haze and her daughter, or laugh at the noble Pnin. We are the jury:
guilty as charged.
-Sandy Drescher
On Tuesday, April 26, 2005, at 07:21 PM, Donald B. Johnson wrote:
> Dear Sandy
>
> We´re discussing now the evil enchanters and their dangers. I agree
> with
> you on the general tendency to explain away evil: " to find that
> psychology
> or history mitigated moral repugnance, as with Bolshevism or
> Psychoanalysis".
> There is something I cannot understand, though, both in your message
> and
> Andrew´s, maybe I missed the point.
> You seemed to be discussing HH´s guilt and moral responsibilty towards
> Lolita. And yet, in the films and in the novel Humbert Humbert is
> behind
> bars because he was a murderer and not a pedophile.
> As a deluded enchanter Humbert Humbert addressed the imaginary members
> of a
> Jury describing his love affair with Lolita to get away with murder, to
> seduce them into believing the beauty and truth about his feelings, to
> garantee an explanation for his actual murder of Quilty.
> In the process of writing down his story with Lolita he entered in a
> special kind of healing process where there was even space for
> remorse (
> quite reduced, though).
> Lolita was HH´s alibi, his love for her his excuse for murder?
> Jansy
>
>
>
>
> -----Mensagem Original-----
> De: "Donald B. Johnson" <chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu>
> Para: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
> Enviada em: Terça-feira, 26 de Abril de 2005 13:04
> Assunto: Fwd: "I suspect Andrew's line of thought is right" Re HH's
> psycho-stays
>
>
>>
>> Don and List-
>> Exactly.
>> It is HH himself who plants all the evidence that he suffers
>> from
> a
>> "malaise".
>> Perhaps in his panoramic view of American, Nabokov was also examining
>> a
>> liberal American tendency to "explain" evil - to find that psychology
>> or history mitigated moral repugnance, as with Bolshevism or
>> Psychoanalysis.
>> Not only on film, but in the text as well, it is important
>> that
> the
>> viewer/reader become at least somewhat seduced by the attractive,
>> urbane European. For when that happens, a degree of complicity can be
>> brought home in the final hill-top scene.
>> Mason was too bland, Irons too creepy. The young Anthony
>> Hopkins
> could have
>> seduced an audience and then brought it up short.
>>
>> -Sandy Drescher
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Monday, April 25, 2005, at 07:00 PM, Donald B. Johnson wrote:
>>
>>> ED NOTE. I suspect Andrew's line of thought is right. It might have
>>> made an
>>> interesting difference if one of the films had included the
>>> institutional
>>> backstory. Nobody (film or lit crit) seem to have taken much interest
>>> in this
>>> angle. Seems important to me.
>>> -------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>> ----- Forwarded message from as-brown@comcast.net -----
>>> Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2005 14:55:47 -0400
>>> From: Andrew Brown <as-brown@comcast.net>
>>> Reply-To: Andrew Brown <as-brown@comcast.net>
>>> Subject: Re: Re: Fw: pedagogia/douglas harper online
>>> dictionary/pederosis
>>> To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum This is an interesting point. The
>>> omission of
>>> HH's spells in sanatoriums does, I think, tend to make him seem more
>>> "normal"
>>> to viewers. The omission of such scenes, though, was probably more in
>>> response
>>> to the limitations on the amount of "backstory" the film medium
>>> allows
>>> its
>>> characters.
>>>
>>> One requirement was to make HH superficially attractive to women,
>>> which James
>>> Mason and Jeremy Irons do well. The second was to show that he is
>>> selfish,
>>> perverted and obsessed. If the filmmaker portrays the dark aspects
>>> too
>>> well, it
>>> makes it very difficult to put across the first. Both films fall
>>> short by
>>> giving almost no indication that what HH has done, and is doing, is a
>>> terrible
>>> crime.
>>>
>>> One could have made a very different, but equally faithful film of
>>> Lolita if one
>>> showed HH's European efforts to obtain child prostitutes; HH's
>>> marriage to
>>> Valeria, and his brutal thoughts toward her; HH writing ads for his
>>> uncle's
>>> perfume business; HH obtaining sleeping pills from doctors; his plans
>>> to drown
>>> Charlotte; the system of threats and bribes by which he forces his
>>> captive to
>>> do his will; and the tears that Lolita sheds every single night. But
>>> all this
>>> would make an almost unbearably dark film.
>>>
>>> As it is, a person unfamiliar with the novel could watch either film
>>> and suspect
>>> -- with the exception of a very few brief scenes in Lyne's
>>> interpretation --
>>> that HH is doing nothing more than taking his legitimate
>>> step-daughter
>>> on a
>>> driving trip across the U.S.
>>>
>>> Since neither director chose the dark path, I think the omissions
>>> they
>>> made were
>>> more about getting an amazingly rich story down to the 90 to 120
>>> minutes of film
>>> time that the commercial movie world allows.
>>>
>>> Andrew Brown
>>
>> ----- End forwarded message -----
>>
>>
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>
----- End forwarded message -----
The narrators of both Lolita and Pnin set out to seduce their readers
and, to the extent they succeed, make their readers complicit abusers.
I was admiring Nabokov's skill in bring us up short. In both novels,
Nabokov's narrator provides a still more unpleasant character to
deflect our attention from his [the narrator's] and our own
culpability. The novels succeed only when we loose patience with Mrs.
Haze and her daughter, or laugh at the noble Pnin. We are the jury:
guilty as charged.
-Sandy Drescher
On Tuesday, April 26, 2005, at 07:21 PM, Donald B. Johnson wrote:
> Dear Sandy
>
> We´re discussing now the evil enchanters and their dangers. I agree
> with
> you on the general tendency to explain away evil: " to find that
> psychology
> or history mitigated moral repugnance, as with Bolshevism or
> Psychoanalysis".
> There is something I cannot understand, though, both in your message
> and
> Andrew´s, maybe I missed the point.
> You seemed to be discussing HH´s guilt and moral responsibilty towards
> Lolita. And yet, in the films and in the novel Humbert Humbert is
> behind
> bars because he was a murderer and not a pedophile.
> As a deluded enchanter Humbert Humbert addressed the imaginary members
> of a
> Jury describing his love affair with Lolita to get away with murder, to
> seduce them into believing the beauty and truth about his feelings, to
> garantee an explanation for his actual murder of Quilty.
> In the process of writing down his story with Lolita he entered in a
> special kind of healing process where there was even space for
> remorse (
> quite reduced, though).
> Lolita was HH´s alibi, his love for her his excuse for murder?
> Jansy
>
>
>
>
> -----Mensagem Original-----
> De: "Donald B. Johnson" <chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu>
> Para: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
> Enviada em: Terça-feira, 26 de Abril de 2005 13:04
> Assunto: Fwd: "I suspect Andrew's line of thought is right" Re HH's
> psycho-stays
>
>
>>
>> Don and List-
>> Exactly.
>> It is HH himself who plants all the evidence that he suffers
>> from
> a
>> "malaise".
>> Perhaps in his panoramic view of American, Nabokov was also examining
>> a
>> liberal American tendency to "explain" evil - to find that psychology
>> or history mitigated moral repugnance, as with Bolshevism or
>> Psychoanalysis.
>> Not only on film, but in the text as well, it is important
>> that
> the
>> viewer/reader become at least somewhat seduced by the attractive,
>> urbane European. For when that happens, a degree of complicity can be
>> brought home in the final hill-top scene.
>> Mason was too bland, Irons too creepy. The young Anthony
>> Hopkins
> could have
>> seduced an audience and then brought it up short.
>>
>> -Sandy Drescher
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Monday, April 25, 2005, at 07:00 PM, Donald B. Johnson wrote:
>>
>>> ED NOTE. I suspect Andrew's line of thought is right. It might have
>>> made an
>>> interesting difference if one of the films had included the
>>> institutional
>>> backstory. Nobody (film or lit crit) seem to have taken much interest
>>> in this
>>> angle. Seems important to me.
>>> -------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>> ----- Forwarded message from as-brown@comcast.net -----
>>> Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2005 14:55:47 -0400
>>> From: Andrew Brown <as-brown@comcast.net>
>>> Reply-To: Andrew Brown <as-brown@comcast.net>
>>> Subject: Re: Re: Fw: pedagogia/douglas harper online
>>> dictionary/pederosis
>>> To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum This is an interesting point. The
>>> omission of
>>> HH's spells in sanatoriums does, I think, tend to make him seem more
>>> "normal"
>>> to viewers. The omission of such scenes, though, was probably more in
>>> response
>>> to the limitations on the amount of "backstory" the film medium
>>> allows
>>> its
>>> characters.
>>>
>>> One requirement was to make HH superficially attractive to women,
>>> which James
>>> Mason and Jeremy Irons do well. The second was to show that he is
>>> selfish,
>>> perverted and obsessed. If the filmmaker portrays the dark aspects
>>> too
>>> well, it
>>> makes it very difficult to put across the first. Both films fall
>>> short by
>>> giving almost no indication that what HH has done, and is doing, is a
>>> terrible
>>> crime.
>>>
>>> One could have made a very different, but equally faithful film of
>>> Lolita if one
>>> showed HH's European efforts to obtain child prostitutes; HH's
>>> marriage to
>>> Valeria, and his brutal thoughts toward her; HH writing ads for his
>>> uncle's
>>> perfume business; HH obtaining sleeping pills from doctors; his plans
>>> to drown
>>> Charlotte; the system of threats and bribes by which he forces his
>>> captive to
>>> do his will; and the tears that Lolita sheds every single night. But
>>> all this
>>> would make an almost unbearably dark film.
>>>
>>> As it is, a person unfamiliar with the novel could watch either film
>>> and suspect
>>> -- with the exception of a very few brief scenes in Lyne's
>>> interpretation --
>>> that HH is doing nothing more than taking his legitimate
>>> step-daughter
>>> on a
>>> driving trip across the U.S.
>>>
>>> Since neither director chose the dark path, I think the omissions
>>> they
>>> made were
>>> more about getting an amazingly rich story down to the 90 to 120
>>> minutes of film
>>> time that the commercial movie world allows.
>>>
>>> Andrew Brown
>>
>> ----- End forwarded message -----
>>
>>
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>
----- End forwarded message -----