So since I am on here I thought I would write about a couple of the numerous paper topics that have been floating around in my head. This first has to do with the idea of Humbert and Quilty and their roles of being doppelgangers to each other. Each is the extreme of the other and I have always thought this as I read. But really only gave it a lot of thought when Dr. Sexson brought it up in class. I am not sure where I want to go with it, but I am still marinating the idea around while I work on other things.
The other idea I had, and the one I am leaning towards, is much more specific in a way. It has to do with the meaning of Lolita's name, Dolores=Sorrows. This is one of my favorite aspects of the novel, that this is the name Nabokov picked for his nymphet. Because while the sorrows often applies to the person with the name in particular, in this work it seems to effect all those she encounters.
So those are the ideas for now and they are continually changing, but I am really interested in Lolita's name and all that it encompasses.
Tuesday, 29 September 2009
Humbert and Reader Share Some Revelations
Since I am home sick and I completely forgot that we were to present our discoveries in Lolita today I thought I would at least post them. I have two discoveries, more like things that intrigued me as I read though, because they come from two of my favorite quotes in Lolita. The first is on page 140 and comes from the following quote:
"More and more uncomfortable did Humbert feel. It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed."
I love this quote for the fact that it is an early realization by Humbert about what has occurred between him and Lolita. This is the scene in the car right after the morning that he was "seduced" by Lolita. He realizes that he finally obtained the thing/person he always wanted but now she is no longer that person. From this moment on their relationship is completely different. The nymphet he longed for is no longer there and she will never been the innocent, fragile creature he so craved before. This is both the readers and Humbert's realization/discovery in this quote.
The other discovery is from the quote that begins on page 277 with "She closed..." and ends on page 279 with "Tell me only this."
This long and detailed quote is not so much a realization for Humbert in the book, but one especially for the reader. Throughout this work the reader encounters this man that they view as a monster and pedophile. This is where we get to see that he is a human too, and that he does love her in all her forms. As he says he loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted. Nabokov creates a villain that we can all sympathize with in the end, and that is what makes him someone we can all identify with. As human beings we fall in love and we try not to cross that line from it being love and passion, to an obsession that consumes us. We all want that kind of love that consumes us, but Humbert is a man that takes it too far. This is what Nabokov writes about in his works, the extremes of human emotion and life.
This is why even though we love to hate Humbert he is still one of my favorite literary characters!
"More and more uncomfortable did Humbert feel. It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed."
I love this quote for the fact that it is an early realization by Humbert about what has occurred between him and Lolita. This is the scene in the car right after the morning that he was "seduced" by Lolita. He realizes that he finally obtained the thing/person he always wanted but now she is no longer that person. From this moment on their relationship is completely different. The nymphet he longed for is no longer there and she will never been the innocent, fragile creature he so craved before. This is both the readers and Humbert's realization/discovery in this quote.
The other discovery is from the quote that begins on page 277 with "She closed..." and ends on page 279 with "Tell me only this."
This long and detailed quote is not so much a realization for Humbert in the book, but one especially for the reader. Throughout this work the reader encounters this man that they view as a monster and pedophile. This is where we get to see that he is a human too, and that he does love her in all her forms. As he says he loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted. Nabokov creates a villain that we can all sympathize with in the end, and that is what makes him someone we can all identify with. As human beings we fall in love and we try not to cross that line from it being love and passion, to an obsession that consumes us. We all want that kind of love that consumes us, but Humbert is a man that takes it too far. This is what Nabokov writes about in his works, the extremes of human emotion and life.
This is why even though we love to hate Humbert he is still one of my favorite literary characters!
Sunday, 27 September 2009
A Film Not Wanting to Be Like Lolita!?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYkLgaQ27L8
The above link is to the trailer to the new Peter Sarsgaard film, An Education. Although he is quoted as saying that he did not want the film to be like Lolita, and I must say the preview looks nothing like it. I was just intrigued by the mention of Lolita and film while reading the London Observer a couple days ago.
The last time a film was made about Lolita it wasn't even released in theaters in the US. I must say though that I am really excited for this film, even if it doesn't come to Bozeman. Another connection with Lolita and our present surrounding of everyday!
Lolita vs. The Enchanter
Every time I read Nabokov's Lolita I always must first read his novella, The Enchanter. Although this work was published after Lolita Nabokov had written it long before he ever imagined Lolita. It was only with his sons discovery of the manuscript that the public was able to read this masterpiece.
What intrigues me is that this work is so similar to Lolita is so many ways. we are never given any names of the characters involved but if you read Lolita we know them all already. This tale takes place in a bigger city, and the protagonist becomes infatuated with a particular girl in the park and weasels his way into her mother's and her life. But the scenes in the park with the nymphets playing around him are just like Humbert. The mother dies just like Charlotte and he takes the girl away to the Enchanted Hunters Hotel. Nabokov must have had these ideas drifting through his head for many years.
The main difference though is what makes this work so memorable. He is caught and dies in the end before anything really happens. She is asleep and as he looms above her she wakes up and begins to scream. The people in the room next to them hear and they chase him out into the streets where he is hit by a car. I must say that it is one of the most beautifully written death scenes ever, and here it is!
"He rushed past them. Farther down came a specter in tan shoes, farther still the old man climbed bow-legged, followed by the avid gendarme. Past them. Leaving behind a multitude of synchronized arms extended over the banister in a splashlike gesture of invitation, he pirouetted into the street, for all was over, and it was imperative, by any stratagem, by any spasm, to get rid of the no-longer needed, already-looked-at, idiotic world, on whose final page stood a lonely streetlamp with a shaded out cat at its base. already interpreting his sensation of barefootedness as a plunge into another element, he rushed off along the ashen sidewalk, pursued by the pounding footfalls of his already outdistanced heart. His desperate need for a torrent, a precipice, a railroad track-no matter what, but instantly-made him appeal for the very last time to the topography of his past. And when, in front of him, a grinding whine came from behind the hump of the side street, swelling to full growth when it had overcome the grade, distending the night, already illuminating the descent with two ovals of yellowish light, about to hurtle downward-then, as if it were a dance, as if the ripple of that dance had carried him to stage center, under this growing, grinning, megathundering mass, his partner in a crashing cracovienne, this thundering iron thing, this instantaneous cinema of dismemberment-that's it, drag me under, tear at my frailty-I'm traveling flattened, on my smacked-down face-hey, you're spinning me, don't rip me to pieces-you're shredding me, I've had enough...Zigzag gymnastics of lightning, spectrogram of a thunderbolt's split seconds-and the film of life had burst."
It is a wonderful short work by Nabokov and if I have interested you in the least be sure to read this masterpiece.
Tuesday, 22 September 2009
Favorite Quote from Lolita
So since we are now reading the masterpiece that is Lolita I thought I would post my favorite quote. There is another blog I did about other quotes but this is wonderful. It has that wonderful ability that Nabokov has of combining sound and sight in many of his scenes. It is best if read out loud but I have discovered that about many of Nabokov's works. To bring them to life through the human voice makes them so much better. Try it you will be amazed at the clarity that comes through the joining of his words and your voice.
"After coughing myself inside out, I rested a while on a boulder, and then, thinking the sweet air might do me good, walked a little way toward a low stone parapet on the precipice side of the highway. Small grasshoppers spurted out of the withered roadside weeds. A very light cloud was opening its arms and moving toward a slightly more substantial one belonging to another, more sluggish, heavenlogged system. As I approached the friendly abyss, I grew aware of a melodious unity of sounds rising like vapor from a small mining town that lay at my feet, in a fold of the valley. One could make out the geometry of the streets between blocks of red and gray roofs, and green puffs of trees, and a serpentine stream, and the rich, ore-like glitter of the city dump, and beyond the town, roads crisscrossing the crazy quilt of dark and pale fields, and behind it all, great timbered mountains. But even brighter then those quietly rejoicing colors-for there are colors and shades that seem to enjoy themselves in good company-both brighter and dreamier to the ear than they were to the eye, was that vapory vibration of accumulated sounds that never ceased for a moment, as it rose to the lip of granite where I stood wiping my foul mouth. And soon I realized that all these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but these came from the streets of the transparent town, with the women at home and the men away. Reader! What I heard was but the melody o children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote an magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic-one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord."
MAGNIFICENT! This is the moment when I feel in love with literature and Nabokov!
"After coughing myself inside out, I rested a while on a boulder, and then, thinking the sweet air might do me good, walked a little way toward a low stone parapet on the precipice side of the highway. Small grasshoppers spurted out of the withered roadside weeds. A very light cloud was opening its arms and moving toward a slightly more substantial one belonging to another, more sluggish, heavenlogged system. As I approached the friendly abyss, I grew aware of a melodious unity of sounds rising like vapor from a small mining town that lay at my feet, in a fold of the valley. One could make out the geometry of the streets between blocks of red and gray roofs, and green puffs of trees, and a serpentine stream, and the rich, ore-like glitter of the city dump, and beyond the town, roads crisscrossing the crazy quilt of dark and pale fields, and behind it all, great timbered mountains. But even brighter then those quietly rejoicing colors-for there are colors and shades that seem to enjoy themselves in good company-both brighter and dreamier to the ear than they were to the eye, was that vapory vibration of accumulated sounds that never ceased for a moment, as it rose to the lip of granite where I stood wiping my foul mouth. And soon I realized that all these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but these came from the streets of the transparent town, with the women at home and the men away. Reader! What I heard was but the melody o children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote an magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic-one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord."
MAGNIFICENT! This is the moment when I feel in love with literature and Nabokov!
Tuesday, 15 September 2009
A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words
So this photo of me is when I was about six and my Mother had taken me to Leavenworth, Washington for my birthday. I grew up in Seattle so this was just a short, scenic trip into the mountains of Washington. Leavenworth is a strange town because it is mostly made up of German immigrants or descendants. As you drive into town you feel as if you have entered another world. Most of the store names, restaurant menus and hotels are all in German. I remember feeling as if I had left the country with out even leaving my state.
The building behind me in the picture is our bed and breakfast. One of those horrifying buildings trying to look like a German ski chalet. With the bright white siding and brown trim that in places on the eaves looks like a kind of demented lace. All around the building were these gardens lined with hard, brown dirt and an overwhelming amount of rose bushes. Roses of every color, shape and size. As I lay in bed that night I fell asleep to the wafting smell of roses meandering through our windows.
Encompassing the roses were stone walls. Looking as if they were unstable and about to topple at any moment. which meant of course I had to sit on them and have my picture taken. When I was little I enjoyed having my picture taken for anything, but then that has all changed. In the picture I have my favorite outfit on. It was a tank and shorts covered in red polka dots and my fashionable, Spanish sandals that my Mother got me on a business trip to Paris. Looking as if I belonged in this sunny, hamlet in Germany and not in a small town in the mountains of Washington.
Tuesday, 8 September 2009
A Mother's Influence
I am well into Speak, Memory and I am loving every line. Each sentence brings me closer to understanding the man who writes these magnificent prose. In Chapter Two though in which Nabokov writes about his Mother and their relationship. I was struck by how he talks about her influence on his senses and personality. Which heavily influences his writing style in that he writes about every minute detail of his characters and their surroundings. That is what ultimately makes his writing so verbose and wonderful. As the reader, each paragraph that you encounter is like a little scene all its own. All this attention to detail in every moment in life is what his Mother gave him in their time spent together.
Nabokov writes, "My mother did everything to encourage the general sensitiveness I had to visual stimulation. How many were the aquarelles she painted for me; what a revelation it was when she showed me the lilac tree that grows out of mixed blue and red!" He goes on to write about how he entertained himself with her jewels she left for him and the many colored facets they provided for his enjoyment.
This stimulation and her tendency to focus on the little things shine through his writing. Both having the predilection to see the details that make every moment important and special. In his writing he goes into great detail describing sounds and the details of a scene as if it were a photograph set before you he was talking about. My favorite though is his writing about sounds as if they are colors that he is seeing and describing. One such example of this is in the closing chapter of Lolita when he writes, as I horribly misquote, that there are sounds and colors that do enjoy each others company. It is one of the more beautiful page and a half in Lolita that I will quote much later. Another example is in his work Transparent Things, which we will not read, that is as follows, "Hugh, a sentimental simpleton, and somehow not a very good Person (good ones are above that, he was merely a rather dear one), was sorry that no music accompanied the scene, no Rumanian fiddler dipped heartward for two monogram-entangled sakes. There was not even a mechanical rendition of 'Fascination' (a waltz) by the cafe's loudplayer. Still there did exist a kind of supporting rhythm formed by the voices of foot passengers, the clink of crockery, the mountain wind in the venerable mass of the corner chestnut."
Nabokov is a master of prose and this is shown through is attention to every detail of a scene. This gift that he shares with the world can be traced back to his Mother and their way of living in the moment and not seeing what is ahead. She was the formative figure that made him the way he is and made his writing what it is. This is the power that parents have on their children. No wonder Nabokov writes of her throughout his work Speak, Memory. His Mother was the one who helped him to become the writer we have come to know and love to this day!
Nabokov writes, "My mother did everything to encourage the general sensitiveness I had to visual stimulation. How many were the aquarelles she painted for me; what a revelation it was when she showed me the lilac tree that grows out of mixed blue and red!" He goes on to write about how he entertained himself with her jewels she left for him and the many colored facets they provided for his enjoyment.
This stimulation and her tendency to focus on the little things shine through his writing. Both having the predilection to see the details that make every moment important and special. In his writing he goes into great detail describing sounds and the details of a scene as if it were a photograph set before you he was talking about. My favorite though is his writing about sounds as if they are colors that he is seeing and describing. One such example of this is in the closing chapter of Lolita when he writes, as I horribly misquote, that there are sounds and colors that do enjoy each others company. It is one of the more beautiful page and a half in Lolita that I will quote much later. Another example is in his work Transparent Things, which we will not read, that is as follows, "Hugh, a sentimental simpleton, and somehow not a very good Person (good ones are above that, he was merely a rather dear one), was sorry that no music accompanied the scene, no Rumanian fiddler dipped heartward for two monogram-entangled sakes. There was not even a mechanical rendition of 'Fascination' (a waltz) by the cafe's loudplayer. Still there did exist a kind of supporting rhythm formed by the voices of foot passengers, the clink of crockery, the mountain wind in the venerable mass of the corner chestnut."
Nabokov is a master of prose and this is shown through is attention to every detail of a scene. This gift that he shares with the world can be traced back to his Mother and their way of living in the moment and not seeing what is ahead. She was the formative figure that made him the way he is and made his writing what it is. This is the power that parents have on their children. No wonder Nabokov writes of her throughout his work Speak, Memory. His Mother was the one who helped him to become the writer we have come to know and love to this day!
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