Subject
VN abstracts for Priscilla Meyer's March '99 Conference.:Hecht
Date
Body
EDITOR's NOTE. NABOKV-L will run, as received, abstracts for the
Nabokov-related papers to be delivered at the Pushkin/Nabokov Conference.
The full schedule (subject to last-mine changes) may be seen at
http://www.wesleyn.edu/~pmeyer/nabokov/confschedule.html.
------------------------------------------
Josh Hecht
Lolita and Carmen
That Vladimir Nabokov embeds Prosper Merimee's novella
<italic>Carmen</italic> (1845) is indisputable. But what precisely are
<italic>Carmen</italic>'s multiple and various functions both for Humbert
and for Nabokov? For Humbert, the novella is more than just a false clue
to predict his murder of Lolita, more too than merely a parody of popular
and Romantic culture, of the persona of the wronged lover, and ultimately
of himself. Humbert's identification of Lolita with Carmen is a subtle,
but essential, piece of his effort to convince the reader of Humbert's
innocence in his affair. Through the literary device of associating
Lolita with Carmen, Humbert attempts to portray Lolita as an intelligent,
cunning seductress who first seduces her prey and then betrays him.
<italic>Carmen</italic> serves a very different purpose for Nabokov.
More than just a parody of the Romantic genre, for Nabokov,
<italic>Carmen </italic>is precisely the tool whereby he shows
Humbert's ultimate dishonesty as a narrator and lack of moral
conversion. For the <italic>Carmen </italic>literary model for Lolita
remains in place and is actively used by Humbert even after he has
ostensibly come to love Lolita fully and to understand her as a child.
Nabokov systematically undermines Humbert's attempt to identify Lolita
with Carmen and to conflate his life and narrative with the life of
Merimee's protagonist and with Merimee's art.
Yet <italic>Carmen</italic> serves an even deeper purpose for both.
Humbert does not simply use <italic>Carmen</italic> as a subtext in his
narrative; <italic>Carmen</italic> itself, has several sub-subtexts
attached to it which Humbert uses throughout his narrative to refine
and alter its meaning and relation to Lolita. Thus, Humbert ties
<italic>Carmen</italic> to Hillaire Belloc's poem
<italic>Tarantella</italic> to predict Lolita's murder, to Pushkin's
<italic>The Gypsies</italic> and to Perrault's fairy-tale
<italic>Bluebeard</italic> (oddly enough) to continue to villify Lolita
and cast her as a conniving, irrepressible, and self-absorbed
seductress, and with Verlaine's poem <italic>Laeti et
Errabundi</italic> in an attempt to soften the <italic>Carmen</italic>
model at the end and reconcile it with his apparent (though ultimately
false) moral apotheosis.
For Nabokov, Humbert uses <italic>Carmen</italic> in a totally
different and unexpected way. Nabokov hides within the
<italic>Carmen</italic> references an allusion to a doubling: a
French-Russian Russian-French mirror in the history of
<italic>Carmen</italic>'s composition. This mirroring involves the
professional relationship of Merimee and Aleksandr Pushkin in the
latter's commitment to establishing a new tradition of authentically
Russian literature and his incorporation of tales from several European
traditions in his art. Merimee and Pushkin each borrowed story-lines
from each other and used them in the creation of his art, each
transforming the other's work into a new cultural artifact in a
different society. This kind of cultural synthesis has been a central
goal of many of Nabokov's American novels. For Nabokov,
<italic>Carmen</italic> is an example of such a synthesis which
provides a foil to Humbert's practice of using literature as a model
for one's life, and provides his own means of synthesizing Pushkin and
Merimee with American pop culture of the 1950s.
Yury Mann
The Narrative System of "Eugene Onegin"
The poetic principles of Pushkin's novel, with their mobility,
constant mutability and ineffability, find their fullest expression in
the structure of the narrative.
All the basic narrative situations (according to K. Stanzel, the
situation of distancing, the "I-situation" and the "personal
situation") are united in Pushkin's text with remarkable daring and
lack of affectation.
The perfected text and the text in statu nascendi simultaneously unite
and flow into each other--and all this is connected to the
oscillations in the characterology and nature of the genre.
The meaning of the novel is expressed both in the close as well as in
the distant historico-literary perspective. From "Eugene Onegin"
threads extend not only to his closest Russian inheritors, the artists
of the great realist style (e.g. Turgenev), but also to the esthetic
features of the twentieth century (in particular, to the narrative
system of Nabokov and also Kafka).
</fontfamily></bigger></bigger>
Priscilla Meyer
Russian department
Wesleyan University
Middletown CT 06459
(860) 685-3127
http://www.wesleyan.edu/~pmeyer/index.html
Nabokov-related papers to be delivered at the Pushkin/Nabokov Conference.
The full schedule (subject to last-mine changes) may be seen at
http://www.wesleyn.edu/~pmeyer/nabokov/confschedule.html.
------------------------------------------
Josh Hecht
Lolita and Carmen
That Vladimir Nabokov embeds Prosper Merimee's novella
<italic>Carmen</italic> (1845) is indisputable. But what precisely are
<italic>Carmen</italic>'s multiple and various functions both for Humbert
and for Nabokov? For Humbert, the novella is more than just a false clue
to predict his murder of Lolita, more too than merely a parody of popular
and Romantic culture, of the persona of the wronged lover, and ultimately
of himself. Humbert's identification of Lolita with Carmen is a subtle,
but essential, piece of his effort to convince the reader of Humbert's
innocence in his affair. Through the literary device of associating
Lolita with Carmen, Humbert attempts to portray Lolita as an intelligent,
cunning seductress who first seduces her prey and then betrays him.
<italic>Carmen</italic> serves a very different purpose for Nabokov.
More than just a parody of the Romantic genre, for Nabokov,
<italic>Carmen </italic>is precisely the tool whereby he shows
Humbert's ultimate dishonesty as a narrator and lack of moral
conversion. For the <italic>Carmen </italic>literary model for Lolita
remains in place and is actively used by Humbert even after he has
ostensibly come to love Lolita fully and to understand her as a child.
Nabokov systematically undermines Humbert's attempt to identify Lolita
with Carmen and to conflate his life and narrative with the life of
Merimee's protagonist and with Merimee's art.
Yet <italic>Carmen</italic> serves an even deeper purpose for both.
Humbert does not simply use <italic>Carmen</italic> as a subtext in his
narrative; <italic>Carmen</italic> itself, has several sub-subtexts
attached to it which Humbert uses throughout his narrative to refine
and alter its meaning and relation to Lolita. Thus, Humbert ties
<italic>Carmen</italic> to Hillaire Belloc's poem
<italic>Tarantella</italic> to predict Lolita's murder, to Pushkin's
<italic>The Gypsies</italic> and to Perrault's fairy-tale
<italic>Bluebeard</italic> (oddly enough) to continue to villify Lolita
and cast her as a conniving, irrepressible, and self-absorbed
seductress, and with Verlaine's poem <italic>Laeti et
Errabundi</italic> in an attempt to soften the <italic>Carmen</italic>
model at the end and reconcile it with his apparent (though ultimately
false) moral apotheosis.
For Nabokov, Humbert uses <italic>Carmen</italic> in a totally
different and unexpected way. Nabokov hides within the
<italic>Carmen</italic> references an allusion to a doubling: a
French-Russian Russian-French mirror in the history of
<italic>Carmen</italic>'s composition. This mirroring involves the
professional relationship of Merimee and Aleksandr Pushkin in the
latter's commitment to establishing a new tradition of authentically
Russian literature and his incorporation of tales from several European
traditions in his art. Merimee and Pushkin each borrowed story-lines
from each other and used them in the creation of his art, each
transforming the other's work into a new cultural artifact in a
different society. This kind of cultural synthesis has been a central
goal of many of Nabokov's American novels. For Nabokov,
<italic>Carmen</italic> is an example of such a synthesis which
provides a foil to Humbert's practice of using literature as a model
for one's life, and provides his own means of synthesizing Pushkin and
Merimee with American pop culture of the 1950s.
Yury Mann
The Narrative System of "Eugene Onegin"
The poetic principles of Pushkin's novel, with their mobility,
constant mutability and ineffability, find their fullest expression in
the structure of the narrative.
All the basic narrative situations (according to K. Stanzel, the
situation of distancing, the "I-situation" and the "personal
situation") are united in Pushkin's text with remarkable daring and
lack of affectation.
The perfected text and the text in statu nascendi simultaneously unite
and flow into each other--and all this is connected to the
oscillations in the characterology and nature of the genre.
The meaning of the novel is expressed both in the close as well as in
the distant historico-literary perspective. From "Eugene Onegin"
threads extend not only to his closest Russian inheritors, the artists
of the great realist style (e.g. Turgenev), but also to the esthetic
features of the twentieth century (in particular, to the narrative
system of Nabokov and also Kafka).
</fontfamily></bigger></bigger>
Priscilla Meyer
Russian department
Wesleyan University
Middletown CT 06459
(860) 685-3127
http://www.wesleyan.edu/~pmeyer/index.html