VN-Forum (August 21, 2008) related to HH's
"fancy prose style":
J. Aisenberg: Nabokov[...] was uncomfortable with outright obscenity and had to
come up with a way to mitigate the lewd material, similiar to Anthony Burgess
use of the nadsat slang in A Clockwork Orange[...] so he could allow himself to
penetrate as deeply into the subject as he did. What other reasons can there be
for H.H.'s often untranslated French pornographic poetry, or having Humbert
censor Lolita in their last scene together when she tells him she refused to
"blow" Clare Quilty's "beastly boys"? [...]. H.H. can casually destroy a little
girl's life[...]but he's too prissy to be able to deal with the girl's slangy
sexual vulgarisms [...] Nabokov turned what I think was an aesthetic limitation
into an amazing advantage, a way to dramatize the character's slimy self-serving
dishonesty, which makes H.H. rather like Eichman if you think about
it.
J.Mello: I was trying to follow things effable and ineffable in VN's
style, but your comment brought up a very important point: HH's
prurience in relation to obscene words, not matched by any constraint in
relation to "unsocial" acts.
In the internet, The
Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology holds, for the
obscene:"offensive to the senses, or to taste and refinement," from M.Fr.
obscène, from L. obscenus "offensive," especially to modesty, originally "boding
ill, inauspicious," perhaps from ob "onto" + cænum "filth".
And yet, many Brazilian
scholars describe the obscene as pertaining to what
lies "ouside the scene", perhaps following George Bataille's
definition of "erotism as that which questions humankind's innermost being". In
this case, obscenity implies a break of a social pact in order to
express freedom from specific spaciotemporal moralistic determinants.
Eichmann, The Toad, HH are
"obscene" ( in its most casual "evil" sense), independently
of erotic/pornographic acts or words.
Nabokov, according to you, "turns an aesthetic limitation into an amazing advantage" by
applying it to "dramatize the character´s slimy self-serving
dishonesty." but it also remains possible to create legitimate
erotic/obscene art that lies "outside the scene" of a culture or an epoch -
as, for example, we find in VN's reference to Ben Sirine, "The
Perfumed Garden" and "A Thousand Nights and one Night" (I'm quoting
from memory, only). Nabokov mentions Japanese engravings, Rabelais,
Swift, Sappho ( and its French imitation "Les Chansons de
Bilitys") usually, as in Rabelais and Swift, in association to "filth"
(like the eery scenes of a landlord in KQK, disgustingly similar to
Gradus' in front of a mirror). Kinbote, on the contrary, often enjoys
a margin of freedom of euphemisms when he describes Charles, the Beloved's adventures in
Zembla.
Pretty is as pretty
does? Anyway, the mistery remains: what's in a "fancy prose style"
?