Lolita (np) 626 words

[Raphael Saltwood]

 I claim to read for sentens and solas, and Chaucer was right about that as far as it goes, but in fact I also read for vocabulary/usage practice and to learn about experiences that I’m not likely to have.

Lolita is - besides being a wonderful workout for word appreciation - an imaginative excursion, maybe even an immersion, into such an experience.

To read the book and then want to act it out would be unlikely for anyone not already inclined that way.

In fact, the various unpleasant sequelae, detailed with as much talent as everything else in the book, would likely discourage all but the most gnarly, slavering child-molester.

It’s a moral book, in other words. It takes a good bit of obtuseness to miss that, imho.

Here’s metadata by Nabokov:

In response to an American critic who characterized Lolita as the record of Nabokov's "love affair with the romantic novel," Nabokov writes that "the substitution of 'English language' for 'romantic novel' would make this elegant formula more correct."

Nabokov concludes the afterword with a reference to his beloved first language, which he abandoned as a writer once he moved to the United States in 1940: “My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian language for a second-rate brand of English.”

The Russian translation includes a "Postscriptum" ​<https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html/Lolita#cite_note-76>
in which Nabokov reconsiders his relationship with his native language. Referring to the afterword to the English edition, Nabokov states that only “…scientific scrupulousness led me to preserve the last paragraph of the American afterword in the Russian text….” He further explains that the “story of this translation is the story of a disappointment. Alas, that ‘wonderful Russian language’ which, I imagined, still awaits me somewhere, which blooms like a faithful spring behind the locked gate to which I, after so many years, still possess the key, turned out to be non-existent, and there is nothing beyond that gate, except for some burned out stumps and hopeless autumnal emptiness, and the key in my hand looks rather like a lock pick.”


It’s hard to resist extending the comparison.

If the Russian language maps to the original nymphet on the beach, and Humbert Humbert’s later interest in the girl Lolita to Nabokov’s learning to write in English, then his artistic modesty about English being less responsive to him than was Russian expands out into “ou sont les neiges d’antan” regret about living in a world in which young love (and, by extension, the purity of one’s original intellectual capabilities) is frustrated by the pullings-away occasioned by, yes, the nature of life, but also, the social and political upheavals that Nabokov himself, like so many others, experienced.

His “affair with the English language” brought about the book Lolita​_, and (artistic modesty again) it seems as if he’s thinking he could have written a much more wholesome love story - and Humbert could’ve lived a much more wholesome life - given more time with the original object of his affections.

If so, then it’s a quick hop to impute him casting his own entry into English letters as an intrusion, and Humbert’s murder of Clare Quilty as expressing Nabokov’s own conception of his (got to have been) consciously sensationalistic writing as violently overshadowing the conventional novels of such English writers as (he definitely mentions this name in one of his commentaries) Jean Plaidy.

So he’s, like, sounding his barbaric yawp.

“Sorry, not sorry for making waves in the English Lit pool!”

And in the Russian Postscriptum it’s like as if Humbert, still hopelessly gone on Lolita, is saying, “I guess I didn’t really love that girl on the beach after all.”





Get Outlook for iOS<https://aka.ms/o0ukef>