Nabokov

1
Nabokov

• Moved to US 1940, trilingual since childhood
  Serious Lepidopterist (butterflies)
• Lecturer in Comparative Literature Wellesley
  1941-48, Cornell 1948-58
• Translator Editor of Pushkin

2
Publication History

• Olympia Press, Maurice Girodias, Sept 1955 N53,
  his 14th novel, written over 5 years
• 1956 praised by Graham Greene in UK
• 1957, Anchor Review, Nabokov, On a Book Entitled
  Lolita
• Published in America, Putnams, 1958
• NYTimes, dull, dull, dull repulsive

3
Lolita as Recursive Metafiction

• John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. as fictional editor of
  fictional author
• Humbert Humberts autobiographical narrative
  embedded within Rays edition
• Humberts diary c embedded in his confession
• Nabokovs Afterword, an impersonation of
  Vladimir Nabokov talking about his own book.
  (311)

4
Metatextuality thematised

• Our destination was, let me remind my patient
  readersomewhere near a hypothetical hospital.
  That destination was in itself a perfectly
  arbitrary oneI shook in my shoes as I wondered
  how to keep the whole arrangement plausible, and
  what other plausible objectives to invent after
  we had taken in all the movies in Lepingville.
  (139, ch 32)

5
Space Scale

• Involution Convolution Allusion
• Diversion, digression, detour, dilation,
  (fore)play, delayed gratification, repetition
• Solipsism Tautology- Doubling
• Humbert Humbert Humbert/Quilty Lolita/Annabelle
  Lee Nabokov/Humbert/Poe

6
aesthetic bliss (314) versus topical trash

• Autoerotic pleasure of writing reading
• my love affair with the English language
• writer as reader
• My private tragedyis that I had to abandon my
  natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and
  infinitely docile Russian tongue for a
  second-rate brand of English (316-7)

7
Lolita versus Lolita

• there are certain points, byroads, favourite
  hollows that one evokes more eagerly and enjoys
  more tenderly than the rest of ones book
  (315-6)

8
Unexpurgated purgation

• I happen to be the kind of author who in starting
  to work on a book has no other purpose than to
  get rid of that book. (311)
• Writing eroticised as death drive moving from
  the first little throb of Lolitawhen I was laid
  up with a severe attack of intercostal neuralgia
  (311)
• the first, short version in Russian destroyed
  the second written energetically in longhand
  during butterfly expeditions

9
fancy prose style

• Exquisite /or murderous?
• Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My
  sin, my soul.
• Dimpled dimness 131

10
America as literary cinematic pastiche

• Lake Climax 137
• Lo deep in a lurid movie magazine 138
• Roadside America émigré travelogue
• scholarly exertions excursions
• Carnal intermingling of high and low, adult and
  child, refinement vulgarity,
• beauty the beast which is which, criss-cross

11
Consumption, Deception, Fantasy

• to take in
• to be taken in by
• to be deep in a magazine, a book
• up to the hilt into his youthful bride ch31
• I leaf again and again through these miserable
  memorieswhich fork and re-fork without end
  (13, ch4)

12
Genre Kind

• Aesthetic, Sexual Taxonomy
• Licit/illicit legal/illegal
• Novel as fictional confession embedded in
  fictional case study

13
Crimes of writing

• Normal/abnormal writing reading
• Cause and Effect Effect and Affect
• Representation as fixing, deathly but books also
  alive
• reanimated posthumous
• I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic
  fictionLolita has no moral in tow (314)

14
Humberts Confession

• Jean Jacques Rousseau, Confessions
• I, Jean-Jacques Humbert (124, 28)
• I (King Sigmund the Second) (125, 28)
• Foucault sexuality and confession,
• putting into discourse, speakers benefit,
• secret truth my accursed nature (257

15
Nymphet as Polymorphously Perverse, Evil

• Sapphic diversion, camp threesomes
• Sexual play/curiosity turned to boredom
  repulsion, disassociation repression
• Lolita/Lolita consumable and consuming
• Time running out
• Hourglass Lake/Our Glass Lake (homonym)

16
Metathesis and Metalepsis

• Metathesis substitution or reversal of letters
• Metalepsis substitution or reversal of words
• Punning Double meaning -
• Interlingual and Intertextual

17

• 2 sexes, both female
• as different as mist and mast (18)
• Swoon/swine
• a wary, albeit weary, nymphet (128, ch29)
• to borrow and to borrow and to borrow (301) -
• Corruption of Macbeth, tomorrow and tomorrow
• Fiend/friend (269)

18
Neologism/coinage

• madamic, swooners
• Logodaedalus capricious coinage
• Logomancy Humberts neologism
• Autotelic, autonomous minting its own vocabulary

19
Bookkeeping

• Lolita as daughter/prostitute base salary of
  1.05 pocketmoney, her duty
• Duty as tax
• Accounting and narrative
• Restricted economy internal circulation
• umber and black Humberland (166)

20
Borderline

• The nymphet as borderline, transient
• Humbert as lodger, born in a hotel
• homeless émigré, transient predator
• freelance connoisseur, scholar, teacher, old
  man

21
Boundary Violations Reversals

• Every limit presupposes something beyond it
  (283) - the sublime, the tropological, bliss
  (166)
• Pederastyincest intergenerational taboo
• Book as posthumous

22

• Surface and depth
• Inside and outside
• Anal/genital
• ch 33 push the magazine into the butt
• Lolitas insides/ her interiority

23
Mix match

• Queer as signifier of rhetoricity, duplicity,
  instability, reversability
• Queering aesthetic and sexual taxonomy
• I always say nature is stunned by the sights she
  sees (221)

24
Part One

• Seduction, Enchantment, Delay
• The Pervert as Connoisseur, we nympholepts
  (ch5)
• Perseveration, a creature of infinite
  melancholya super-voluptuous flame permanently
  aglow in your subtle spine

25
Part Two

• Proustianized and Procrusteanized 264
• Procrustean violently forced into conformity,
  to fit the mould
• Functional Motel and Disfunctional Plot
• Stasis and movement repetition of the same so
  many scenic routes

26
The Enchanted Hunt

• Romance narrative, an exceptionally handsome
  male (25)
• prophylactic routine (24)
• Chiasmus, inversion
• the reader who knows the ropes (23)
• this wrought-iron world of criss-cross cause and
  effect

27
Misprision, echo-effects

• Quilty Humbert mimed and mocked 249
• 127 their dialogue in the Enchanted Hunters
• Reprised in their final contest

28
ch33

• In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four
  books of comics, a box of candy, a box of
  sanitary pads, two cokes, a manicure set, a
  travel clock with a luminous dial, a ring with a
  real topaz, a tennis racket, roller skates with
  white high shoes, field glasses, a portable radio
  set, chewing gum, a transparent raincoat,
  sunglasses, some more garments swooners,
  shorts, all kinds of summer frocks. At the hotel
  we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the
  night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it
  up very gently. You see, she had absolutely
  nowhere else to go.

29
Apostrophe

• Oh, you dirty, dirty old man. (32)