Posted by Steven
on 17/4/2009, 9:42:53, in reply to "Re: Lolita and what I'm reading now"
76.187.98.74
I agree that the lectures on Lolita weren't as illuminating as they could have been. Hungerford likes to pick a text apart and focus on details, while I would rather have a broader view. The best lectures so far have been the ones on Wise Blood, which makes sense since this was, per her explanation, a novel written by an academic for academics.
This was my second reading of Lolita. When I read it first it was nine years ago, only two months after I first began reading literary fiction. I had almost nothing to compare it with, and was thrilled just with the use of language. I saw it as being chiefly satirical, and didn't focus on the relationships between Humbert and Lolita or between Humbert and the reader.
Reading it again, with hundreds of literary works under my belt in the meantime, I didn't find the language quite so spectacular. I did see much of what Hungerford emphasizes: the manipulation the reader's sentiments, the sense of cruelty, the wordplay. As you say, there are many different ways to read Lolita, none of which is necessarily the right or definitive way. That's what makes it a literary landmark.
You mentioned the question of why Humbert tells the story of Lolita at all, since it is a confession to a hitherto unknown crime. Everything he says is encompassed in a haze of uncertainty he's in a mental facility to begin with (and admits to periodic treatments before and after Lolita), and, on top of that, Humbert hints that he has changed more than the names. There is no "reality" to cling to in the novel, which makes it resemble Robbe-Grillet more than at first glance.
Back for a moment to the Hungerford lectures: I've decided not to re-read On the Road just yet (there are higher priorities for re-reading), but I have started listening to the lectures. I'll follow through the course, reading those novels I haven't already read, but not doing any re-reading just for the sake of the lectures unless she inspires me to do so.
--Previous Message--
:
: I watched the three Lolita lectures again; it had been
: so long since I first watched. I begin to regret
: sharing them. They annoy me, and I'm no longer sure
: I'll watch them all. Such things as the
: characteristics of modernism are reasonably
: interesting, but I don't think either lecturer said
: anything at all about the novel that interested me. I
: found it amusing that Hungerford thought her students
: so dumb they'd have to pay special attention to figure
: out who Mrs. Richard Schiller was. And then she
: immediately said that Vivian Darkbloom was
: palindromic. Moolbkrad Naiviv? Oh well, on to the
: book.
:
: I wonder if we normally fail to ask an important
: question about Lolita, or if we perhaps ask the
: question but miss something important about it. Why is
: Humbert telling the story he tells? He is charged,
: presumably, with the murder of Quilty. I don't really
: see how the court would know about Lolita. Being a
: child molestor doesn't seem such a good mitigating
: circumstance for murder.
:
: The more I read Lolita (this was the fourth time),
: the less sure I feel about my impressions of the
: story. I guess this is what usually happens with a
: novel that seems more or less clear on the first
: reading. And with Nabokov, I think that there is some
: proper reading. He said he liked composing problems
: with elegant solutions. Hungerford suggests that the
: problem is how to make people like a pedaphile. If
: that were the case, the book would be the solution,
: not the problem. Nabokov might actually have said
: riddle, I'm not sure. It's interesting that Nabokov
: liked Robbe-Grillet. I do not think RG's works have
: solutions. I think uncertainty was, for lack of a
: better word, the point or part of it.
:
: Back to the lecture for a moment, Goldstone refers to
: Petersburg as obscure. It's in Bloom's Western Canon
: and Burt's Novel 100 . It doesn't seem that obscure.
: And yet it's certainly the most obscure of Nabokov's
: four. I wonder why it is that Pevear and Volokhonsky
: haven't translated Petersburg . I think there are two
: translations of it. One incomplete, and the other done
: to no great acclaim by a couple of professors. I read
: the second and enjoyed it well enough.
:
: Yeah, there are a lot of short story anthologies.
: There is even one called 50 Great Short Stories . But
: the contents didn't appeal to me much. I'll try to
: look for Francis Macomber online.
:
: I too enjoyed your little poem.
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