Humbert Humbert cats

[Dave Monroe]

SERGE'S SONG

What chance has a lonely surfer boy,
For the love of a surfer chick,
With all these Humbert Humbert cats
Coming on so big and sick?
For me, my baby was a woman,
For him she's just another nymphet;
Why did they run around, why did she put me down,
And get me so upset?
Well, as long as she's gone away-yay,
I've had to find somebody new,
And the older generation
Has taught me what to do--
I had a date last night with an eight-year-old,
And she's a swinger just like me,
So you can find us any night up on the football field,
In back of P.S. 33 (oh, yeah),
And it's as groovy as can be.

(Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 147)


"'You're trying to tell me something,' said Oedipa."

(ibid.)


I'm assuming I don't really have to annotate this one,
but ... but cf. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955), do
note that "nymphet" is actually of Nabokov's coinage. 
J. Kerry Grant (Companion, p. 121) ...

"For a long time it was asserted that Pynchon took a
course from Nabokov, with the accompanying suggestion
that he was somehow personally known to the great man.
 Hollander devotes some space to dismissing this
possibility, having determined that Pynchon was not
actually enrolled in Nabokov's class, which he may
simply have audited ([Hollander, p.] 12)"

See ...

Hollander, Charles.  "Pynchon's Politics:
   The Presence of an Absence."  Pynchon Notes
   26-27 (Spring-Fall 1990): 5-59

Note as well here Oedipa's resemblance to that
"representation in painted sheet metal of a nymph
holding a white blossom" at "Echo Courts" (Lot 49, Ch.
2, p. 26), but ... but the recurring theme here does
seem worthy of comment, so ...

"They gave it to her then in prose.  Metzger and
Serge's chick had run off to Nevada, to get married. 
Serge, on close questioning, admitted the bit about
the eight-year-old was so far only imaginary, but that
he was hanging diligently around playgrounds and
should have some news for them any day." (Lot 49, Ch.
6, p. 147)

   "Nefastis had been watching on his TV set a bunch
of kids dancing some kind of a Watusi.  'I like to
watch young stuff,' he explained.  'There's something
about a little chick that age.'
   "'So does my husband,' she said.  'I understand.'"
(Lot 49, Ch. 5, p. 105)

"Would then proceed at a KCUF record hop to look out
again across the gleaming gym floor and there in one
of the giant keyholes inscribed for basketball see,
groping her vertical backstroke a little awkward
opposite any boy heels might make her an inch taller
than, a Sharon, Linda or Michele, seventeen and what
is known as a hip one, whose velveted eyes ultimately,
statistically would meet Mucho's and respond, and the
thing would develop then groovy as it could when you
found you couldn't get statutory rape out of the back
of your law-abiding head." (Lot 49, Ch. 3, pp. 45-46)

... so, well, any comments?  And cf. also Hedwig
Vogelsang, et al., in V.; Bianca in Gravity's Rainbow;
the Vroom daughters (the Vroomettes?) in Mason &
Dixon; though I don't think Fina in V. and Prairie in
Vineland are quite "nymphets" in the same way ...





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