Some time in April I started a message which was interrupted and
misplaced in my archives. It was related to a review sent to the
Nab-List by someone named Farmer (which I couldn't locate), dated from
April 13,2010.
I selected the following from it:
Farmer notes that " 'Lolita' is the spiritual ideal of The Nymphet;
Dolores Haze is a temporary manifestation. To love the spiritual ideal through
Dolores's bodily reality, Humbert must discard Dolores as a real individual."
I tried to compare Farmer's comment with another, from ADA, using
Nabokov's words: "the lewd, ludicrous and vulgar mistake
of the Signy-Mondieu analysts consists in their regarding a real object,
a pompon, say, or a pumpkin as a significant abstraction of the real
object," but I got nowhere.
Farmer's comment seems clear enough to me: the girl Dolores was an icon
through which Humbert could access the "spiritual ideal of the nymphet." A
living fetish.
Nabokov's, on the contrary, remains puzzling, also
because VN often returned to these two "real objects" (pompom, pumpkin) in
various novels, in a figurative sense (particularly in KQKn) like the red
and white camelias in the movie (perhaps also in Dumas'
novel).
Could anyone help me to figure out what Nabokov
intended as a criticism of "Signy-Mondieu" (Freud, I presume)?
All private
editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.