Yesterday I sent an abridged version of an
October 27, 1958 TNR review with
a "highly disapproving editorial....along with three letters that it
provoked." mainly discussing Nabokov's addendum that his novel "has no
moral in tow." Naiman's "Nabokov,
Perversely" dedicates a chapter to "Lolita in the Real World" (chapter
6) which I couldn't fail to bring in at this point, as a very recent critical
appraisal of certain aspects of "Lolita."
Naiman begins by considering how often readers
are "reminded of the extent to which the novel leaves the character of
Lolita a blank page, a screen on which Humbert projects his fantasies and
desires" before he passes on to how "the elaboration of any argument
about the meaning or even about the poetics of a literary work provides an
opportunity for projection, because a scholar inevitably adds something and by
necessity subtracts a great deal from the text." One of his examples shows
how de la Durantaye achieved "a symptomatic transformation of (Herbold's)
Lolita from sassy to trashy" as a "corolary to his reaction to a
reading that acknowledges female sexual pleasure."(149).
For Naiman literary "scholarship, whatever
new paradigms it invents, in inherently a secondary enterprise [...]Even the
simplest of paraphrases offers difficulties. What phrases are to be used to
describe what Humbert and Lolita do with each other's verbally constructed
bodies." Naiman compares "Kauffman's operative assumption"
(Humbert "works by ellipses, leaving out Lolita's experience and suppressing
her voice") to Leona Toker's approach related to the expectation of a
character's arc ( H's final reformation and transformation) and her misgivings (
"HH would have written the first half of the book differently had he really
repented").
It is fascinating to follow how Naiman
reproduces the same paragraph, from Lolita, as it's been quoted
(with distinct omissions) by different scholars, to compare their ellipses with
Nabokov's original text. Naiman notes that how "scholars cite this passage
-- what parts of it they retain and what they omit -- can frequently be used as
a shorthand gauge of their interpretaiton of the novel's 'message' and of the
relative weights of moral and aesthetic factors in their
analysis." (151) And I think that
here it's Naiman who speaks:"Humbert's masterful command of language ( and
Nabokov's near-total control of his text1s every word) leads to a readerly
gesture toward the real world that, many critics claim, Nabokov intends to
foster." For him, Brian Boyd and Richard Rorty consider that
"Lolita does indeed have 'a moral in tow'."(152) For
Rorty, the book's message is not so much "an injunction against
causing suffering as a warning about insensitivity to the pain of others"
concludes Naiman, since Rorty believes that it very often turns out "that people
are trying to tell you that they are suffering." For Boyd, Nabokov would be
warning the reader "to recognize the power of the mind to rationalize away the
harm it can cause"(AY,232) and, for him, Humbert demonstrates "how easy it is to
let moral awareness turn into sincere regret after the fact, but how much more
difficult to curb the self before it tramples other's underfoot."(AY,254).
Also Toker concludes that Nabokov's
"sophisticated patterns of motifs" carries the "implicit ethical function...in
the refinement of the careful reader's sensibilities that can later be directed
to human relationships"... Adds Naiman:"Even just noticing things in a book
will lead us to notice them in the world around us...Rather than being written
into the text, readers can export the text into their extratextual lives,"
before he returns to Kauffman and to "the most impassioned engagement
with Lolita from a real-world perspective...provided by Elizabeth
Patnoe." ( and, again, Naiman compares, now Patnoe's and Toker's,
quotes and ellipses). For Patnoe, says Naiman, "the only way the novel
can be read with adequate proximity, with an eye for its "overt, intratextual
messages," is to preface that reading with an awareness of the extratextual
highly personal dimension of individual readers," in order to defy
exclusion by "hegemonic readings of Lolita [and] reclaim the book,
and insist upon our experiences with and around it so we can at least begin to
counter the Lolita myth distortions, to resist some of the cultural
appropriations of female sexuality." (1995) She denounces HH's misoginy and his
depravity. For Naiman, Patnoe's comments on Lolita's
"hegemonic" danger "begins in a sentimental milieu - similar to
Nafisis's - but quickly switches gears." (155) and develops his arguments
extensively. He remarks, in the
chapter's closing lines: "With his complaint that he has 'only words to
play with' Humbert has anticipated...the sort of reading practived by
Patnoe. Unable to achieve contact with physical flesh, Humbert beseeches the
reader to transcend the realm of the merely verbal for him" but Patnoe
"becomes Humbert's pander by reinscribing not only Lolita's body but
his." For him, Nabokov's masterful prose "offers the
possibility of an aesthetic sublime so pleasurable that it leads some readers to
worry whether literature has a point, and then to seek that point in
extratextual applications which result in slighting or devaluing the powerful
aesthetic that triggered the search for usefulness in the first
place."(160). We know, already, what Naiman thinks about the usefulness of
art and if literature has a point from his concluding remarks (already quoted in
a past posting) in "Hermophobia."
I suppose that Naiman's "intratextual
dimension" derives from a reader's limiting himself to examine an author's
rapport with his character, in an absolutely neutral and "scientific" way.
Nevertheless, his words often seem to deny it. In ch.6 he demonstrates
how the readers's response, and their subjective interaction with
an author's words, result from their inevitable "projections" (ie,
every reading is by necessity "extratextual" and "real").