Abstracts for MLA Session
788: Nabokov’s Obsessions
1. “Vivian Darkbloom: Floral Border or Moral Order?” Lisa
Sternlieb,
sternlib@princeton.edu
The subject of my paper
will be Vivian Darkbloom and the ways in which I use her name and character to
teach Lolita to students. As an
anagram for Vladimir Nabokov, Vivian points us to the novel’s obsessions with
orthography, names, metamorphosis, doubles, solipsism, hidden and
co-authorship. She reminds us of
how words engender other words, how names engender other names. Within her name Nabokov gestures to his
place in modern literature. For if
Bloom points us to Ulysses and her heart of darkness to Conrad, her first name
is The Enchanter, the Ur-Lolita.
Bloom also reminds us of the attention to gardens, both Miltonic and
suburban. Her darkness suggests her
connection to Humbert (Umber) and both must be seen in contrast to Clare
(Clair). Her last name explains her
appropriateness for Quilty by evoking female genitalia as well as a
photographer’s darkroom and a cinema.
Her biography of Quilty points us to the cues and clues with which the
novel’s master plotter establishes his superiority over the novel’s
conscientious recorder. Vivian’s writing also reminds us that we should not
trust art to lead us to moral transcendence; sometimes kitsch provides the only
hope of redemption.
After outlining the dozens
of directions in which Vivian’s name can take us, I will focus on her moral
significance to the novel. If the
anagram requires us to read both forward and backward, so, of course, does
Lolita itself. While Humbert’s use
of retrospection is primarily clever or humorous, it is sometimes
devastating. For example, the
“epiphany” on the mountaintop, which takes place in 1949, is strategically
placed after the reunion with Lolita and the murder of Quilty which occur in 1952. As a name Vivian
Darkbloom is not simply the funny or clever rearrangement of letters; it is the
figure for the moral manipulation allowed by ordering and reordering. We first discover Vivian’s name in Ray’s
appalling misreading of Humbert’s manuscript, in which the fate of Mrs. Richard
F. Schiller follows Mona Dahl’s and Louise’s and is wedged in between that of
Rita and Vivian Darkbloom. Nabokov
may mock the social scientist’s need to prioritize and categorize, yet his novel
insists on the moral implications of order, chronology, and arrangement. If we want to train our students to be
better readers than John Ray, if we want them to reject his easy sociological
reading, then we should help them see that the placement of Vivian’s name here
indicates both Ray’s obtuseness and unwitting brilliance, both Nabokov’s
devilish sense of humor and pervasive sense of tragedy. My paper will argue that we must not
rank the many meanings embedded within Nabokov’s great anagram. These meanings are entangled with and
inseparable from each other. Rather
than imposing order upon the text, Vivian Darkbloom points out the dangers and
impossibilities of valuing art more than kitsch, the grand passion of a poet
more than the panting lust of a frustrated housewife.
2. “Lolita as a Deviant
Narrative,” Eric Goldman,
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
shocked and appalled its American audience upon its publication in 1955. In its
questions about what constitutes “normal” sexual behavior and what separates it
from sexual perversion, Lolita touched, and still touches, a peculiarly American
nerve. Another work that examined the boundary between abnormal and normal
sexual activity was Alfred Kinsey’s controversial scientific surveys of sexual
behavior among men and women in 1948 and 1953. These studies, the so-called
“Kinsey” reports, also raised a furor in 1950s
Although in Nabakov’s Lolita, Lolita is presented through the eyes of a
pedophile who sees her as an American Eve, the novel appropriates the language
and “scientific” perspective of the Kinsey reports to undercut this mythological
view of her. While Humbert presents Lolita’s sexuality as deviant or precocious,
Nabokov invokes stastistical, “scientific” studies of female sexuality like the
Kinsey reports to suggest that Lolita’s sexuality is in fact “normal.” Failing
to recognize this “scientific” view of Lolita, clearly represented in the novel,
critics have tended to see Lolita, like Humbert, as an archetypal temptress, a
modern-day femme fatale. But Nabokov utilizes the sexology so controversial in
the 1950s to suggest an alternative interpretation of Lolita, one which views
her not as a special, nymph-like girl already perverted before Humbert exploits
her, but as an ordinary, juvenile girl whose “normal” sexual development is
warped by a maniacal, myth-making pedophile. Critics have tended to confuse
Humbert’s view of Lolita, which involves transforming a normal girl into a
mythological femme fatale comparable to Eve, with Nabokov’s.
In the course of the
narrative, Nabokov raises the question of the solidity of cultural conceptions
of deviancy by illustrating how Humbert struggles to make his deviant behavior
normal while, conversely, he makes Lolita's behavior, which the Kinsey report
had suggested was normal, deviant. Nevertheless, most critics have concurred in
the opinion that Lolita is a novel narrated by a deviant about a deviant. In
fact, a statistical study conducted by sociologists showed that in reviews and
criticism of Lolita shortly after its 1955 publication, the majority of critics
shared Humbert Humbert’s perspective of Lolita. Contemporary critics, too, have
overlooked the novel's inquisition of the objectivity of “deviancy.”
Few have recognized that
Lolita, as a "deviant" narrative, a story largely about sexual "deviants," does
not in fact reinforce the binary of deviancy and normalcy. The narrative itself
"deviates" from the traditional notions of deviancy and normalcy tacitly
accepted by 1950s American society. It does so by challenging readers to
interrogate Humbert's "deviant" reading of Lolita by juxtaposing it with a
scientific perspective that sees her behavior, the same behavior that Humbert
uses to justify his perversion of Lolita, as normal. As Humbert's near
mythological narrative of Lolita's supposed "deviance" is challenged by other
narratives of her normality told by characters as diverse as Lolita's school
teacher, Clare Quilty, and John Ray Jr., the categorical walls of "deviance" and
"normality" crumble.
3. “Why Nabokov Had It In
for Freud, Marx, and Einstein—and Balzac, Faulkner, Camus, Lorca, and Hundreds
of Others,” Gene Harold Bell-Villada,
In his later years, Nabokov achieved a certain notoriety for his public
dislike of certain thinkers--notably but not exclusively Freud--and for his
dismissing countless respected, canonical authors as second-rate or worse. This
paper attempts to account for Nabokov's strangely obsessive hatreds. Concerning
thinkers, there is a strong possibility that Nabokov was only minimally
acquainted with their actual writings. Moreover Nabokov, with his strong
empirical bent, seemed to suffer from a concomitant inability to deal with and
produce abstract thought. As regards literary authors, Nabokov's harsh judgments
seem largely motivated by his posture of absolute aestheticism and by his own
dogmas of artistic perfection. He therefore has no use for novelists who deal
with ideas (Mann, Camus), or whose focus is largely "social" (Balzac, Faulkner,
Conrad), or whose form and style might be imperfect but whose works nonetheless
can convey and inspire "human interest" (Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Céline).
Finally, Bell-Villada, the author of this paper, frankly admits to being a
"lapsed Nabokovophile" who, in his student days, greatly admired the novelist's
greatest works, but who in time ended up terribly disillusioned by the Nabokov
of the interviews (in STRONG OPINIONS) and of the English prefaces to the
reissued Russian novels. He continued to admire the artist Nabokov, though
no longer the man.