(What was the service puffing Jones rendered to Van? I cannot remember this part nor this butlerian name. The repetition ("puffing") and long-winded phrase about Jones' procedures astonishes me. There are tons of mosquitoes in Ada, but I haven't tried to spot them, yet...)
.
The "remnant-residues" image must be a strong one, or very familiar to English ears. While I was perusing "Lolita", searching for midges, I found another sample:
... save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her [ HH's mother] subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
Slanting rays of sun and midges are associated to a golden dust of the past that lingers on.
There are myriads of ways to read "Lolita", of course, but two trends seem to predominate. They depart from different "feelings" or "fictional levels": The first one brings us Lolita as a flesh-and-blood, normal pre-adolescent seduced by a pervert, who displays trendy, rather vulgar, tastes. A young girl, robbed of her inheritance, home and history who never questioned her rights to these and who marvelled at her step-father's generosity when he bribed her with four-hundred bucks ( I hope I got the facts straight). Here is the place for expanding moral indignation, examples of sexy fashions, porn sites, publicity.
The second is born through HH's style when he describes his thralldom by nymphets and all those recurrent golden midgets.
HH's repentance ( unless it is proven to me...then life is a
joke) carried me back to the first level, the "real" Lolita, without
effacing HH'sds perplexity in relation to this other
emotional reality, one that is associated to a refusal do accept
any kind of loss ( there is no "the past is past"). HH's incapacity to
accept religious comfort as proffered by a merciful god
is mingled with attempts to achieve an impossible atonement.
His words sound, to my ears, as a new kind of theological quandary. It is as if Humbert Humbert exclaimed: I'll only believe that God doesn't exist if He tells it to me in person...
....