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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you live from the Stanford campus.
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America is a word that refers to many things.
A continent, a nation, a culture, a mentality, a myth, a destiny.
But let's not imagine that some of these reference are definable.
To define means to draw boundaries, but where are America's boundaries?
Our national borders delineate only a capital,
not the empire of which it is the center of operations.
It's only a matter of time before we find America on either side of all international borders.
For there is no limit it seems to the world's fascination with America.
It's desire to Americanize.
It's urge to imitate and incorporate our pranks, ideologies, neuroses,
idiosyncrasies.
Our every gesture as a culture and a nation.
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Yes, my friends, there is simply no end to America's leadership in the world.
If we're doing it, then everyone must do it. Be it raving, pro-zacking, or drive by shooting.
There are more cowboy boots and paris than in Dallas.
If there is any justice at all, every citizen of the world will eventually
sport at least one pair of blue jeans and a Nike cap.
Our movies, music and maul burrows, our manros, morrisons and madanas are ghosts,
universal likes of which the world has never seen before.
Only ghosts can pass through closed doors without opening them.
And America sends forth such ghosts into the world day after day in full daylight.
No border can resist them for they are called in by desire,
drifting in a fantastic, unpatrolled medium.
This is not interventionism.
This is be witchment.
Where does it come from this world wide appeal of Americanism?
Difficult question, very difficult.
A friend of mine once remarked to me that America is comprehensible from the
perspective of all other cultures, yet from its own perspective all other cultures are
incomprehensible.
How do we make sense of that?
Well, think in terms of projective geometry.
I've used the analogy before on this show.
If you cast a light on a cube and project its shadow against a wall,
you reduce it from a three-dimensional object to a two-dimensional square.
While the square is comprehensible from the perspective of the cube,
the reverse is not true.
The square cannot comprehend the cube's third dimension.
Maybe that's what Americanism is, finally.
A great theater of geometric cultural projection,
in which the whole world now appears to itself in two-dimensional form.
Once a culture enters this space of reduction,
there is no way to get back from the square to the cube.
Eventually, that culture becomes incomprehensible to itself.
Or better, it becomes comprehensible only from an American perspective.
Which is why, in a world that increasingly understands itself projectively,
America eventually appears as the only culture in the world that makes any sense.
You will say that this is only an analogy, and so it is.
Yet think of Americanism's irresistible appeal to the young all over the world.
Think of the way America speaks a universal language of youth.
We're talking about the culture that gave us Coca-Cola, Chooingum, tennis shoes, rock and roll,
hula hoops, slinkies, frisbee, skateboards, video games, star trek, star wars, and pop stars.
It gave us Barbies and intendos, Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, the incredible Hulk,
King Kong, ET, and a host of descendants of these classical progenitors.
That America is comprehensible from the perspective of all other cultures,
while it is the perspective from which no other culture is comprehensible,
would be explained then by the fact that youth, while comprehensible to adults,
does not comprehend adulthood.
Yet every such explanation generates new enigmas.
America may be refashioning human society in this youthful image,
but it simply will not do to say that Lolita, from her juvenile perspective,
cannot comprehend Humbert Humbert, while he, from his, can comprehend her.
On the contrary, Lolita remains from the perspective of those who are older than her,
of those that is, who belong to older cultures and hers,
incomprehensible in her new brand of youth.
Whether or not Humbert's fascination with their symbolizes old Europe's fascination with young America,
Lolita is not just a pew-bessant girl on her way to womanhood.
She is a pew-bessant girl who,
had she been able to live out her life, would have always remained younger in mentality,
lifestyle, and demeanor than the ancestors in her phylogenetic heritage.
As the face of Americanism's new strain of cultural youthfulness,
Lolita personifies the age.
We are her age. She is our age. Her age is our age no matter how old we may be.
Had she not died in the story, and had she not been a character in a book,
Lolita would have been around 70 years old today.
But like gods and goddesses, characters in a book don't age,
at least not in the way the authors who created them do.
It was 50 years ago, smack in the middle of the American 50s,
that a Russian emigre in his mid-50s, Vladimir Nabokov, published the novel Lolita.
The book is half a century old, but 50 years from now,
when the book will be 100 years old,
Lolita the character will not have aged a day.
And it is safe to say that even then, she will continue to embody something essential
about our youthful America.
If there still is an America that is, for let's not forget that Lolita dies in early death,
while giving birth to a stillborn child.
During the next hour, we are going to revisit Lolita as well as the author who wrote it,
and ask what it is about this book that makes it such an American classic.
I have with me in the studio a friend and colleague who teaches seminars on Nabokov here at Stanford,
her name is Monika Greenleaf, from the departments of Slavic's and comparative literature.
Monika, welcome to the entitled opinions.
Thank you for inviting me.
Monika, I think it is fair to say that Nabokov had an unusual and very remarkable literary career.
Why don't we start by reviewing briefly some of the most important aspects of his biography?
Okay, I think for the Stanford audience and people in this area, perhaps the most interesting detail is that Stanford University's
Dave Nabokov.
In 1941, Henry Lance, the chair of the Chinese Stanford Slavic Department, asked him to come and teach summer school.
Nabokov and his wife had been desperately trying to escape Nazi and festive Europe.
They had failed to land a job in England.
And so this was, in fact, a life saver Nabokov arrived and he taught a course in modern literature and another course in drama.
He had four students and two students respectively in those courses, and he lived on 231 Sequoia Avenue, which I've always promised my students.
I would take them to see.
This was about the midpoint of Nabokov's career, his life.
He was born in 1899, April 23rd, in fact, which for him were very significant days, Shakespeare's birthday on the one hand and pushkins 100 years from Pushkins birthday in 1799.
Shakespeare being the head of English American Literature and Pushkin being the great poet of Russian literature.
So from the very beginning, Nabokov always thought that, typically, he was destined to unite these two lines of culture and linguistic virtuosity.
His life can be divided into four quadrants.
The first 1899 to 1919 was the period of his childhood and youth in an exceptionally wealthy and cultured family.
His father actually was the sion of a very older aristocratic family, but was a lawyer, professor of law and worked assiduously for the rather left-wing constitutional democratic party, hoping to create a transition to more liberal
government, a constitutional government in Russia.
For his pains, he was assassinated in 1822 in Berlin by a fanatic.
And the next quadrant of Nabokov's life was 1819 until 1941, where he spent his time in Cambridge University in England in Prague in Berlin.
He was actually quite a long time in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s and finally in Paris.
After that, he came to the United States. His first work, Ben Sinister, and actually a very extraordinary novel that I enjoy teaching, presents World War II totalitarianism from a completely grotesque point of view, incorporating Shakespeare and Joyce into the mix.
What's the first novel in the English?
It's his first novel in America, written in English. His very first novel written in English is the real life of Sebastian Knight, which takes place in England and was calculated to get him a job in England.
Following that, of course, Nabokov wrote. He wrote incredibly fast and many works at once. He was very, very hardworking. He wrote his go-go book very quickly.
He wrote "Speak Memory," first as conclusive evidence and in a Russian version, through Gia Biri Gah.
He wrote Pale Fire, Lolita, eventually Ada. Ada, however, marks a different phase of his life. The one that began in 1962 and ended in 1977.
His sojourn in the palace Grand Palace Hotel in Montréal, where he ended his life as an expatriate, not only Russian, but American.
Yeah, he moved to Montréal, I think, in '61, '62? Yes, yeah.
And it's, of course, financed by Lolita, who he said was a very difficult birth, but a grateful daughter since she supported him in style for the rest of his life.
I would like to say one other thing about Nabokov's biography that's significant. Of course, he taught. He had to support himself by teaching everything you could say that Detroit is a visceristic, had a gut-breaking, which included tennis lessons in Berlin and so on.
In the United States, he taught Russian literature to undergraduates at Cornell at Wellesley. He also read articles at Women's Clubs and all of the things essentially that later on, he let us know that he loved he had to do for many years.
He also worked at Harvard in the Entomology Department. The part of Nabokov's life that he claimed he was most proud of was his discovery of a certain genus, I believe, or species of blue butterflies in the United States. He was an insidious leopard afterst.
And I'd like to say a couple of words about this. My students never understand this. They say, "What's up with the butterflies?" which appear in every single book. Nabokov's every single story, like in Insigniana painting.
Nabokov was fascinated by butterflies as a lot of young people his generation were naturalism being very important, but for him they were important because they represent metamorphosis rather than procreation.
Nabokov loaves blind or automatic repetition of any kind he can't stand at the repetition of generations one looking like the other. The butterfly and creatures like it of course is characterized by the phases that turn a caterpillar into an amazing creature of butterfly.
And secondly, he observed them with fanatical meticulousness and he loved to array them in their complete series, observing the tiny, tiny variations that distinguish them for him.
This led to or was a demonstration of a metaphysics that is that the world is beautiful, complex, unrepeatable in every detail and that only an incredibly artistic and observant mind is capable of even comprehending it, of observing it as it deserves to be observed.
So he had some quarrels with Darwinism as a result of this admiration and veneration for the natural world, believing that such a crude explanatory theory such as Darwin could never account for this excessive richness that you find in the natural world, things like butterflies.
Yes, you're exactly right, in fact, as he was writing Lolita, Nabokov was also planning a work that was going to be entitled mimicry and it was going to be an anti-Darwinian, the ultimate study of mimicry in all its shapes and gazes in the natural world and by extension in the world of human art.
Now, Nabokov loved nothing so much as camouflage, he despised what he called sincerity, authenticity, every form had to be a tone play, a deception of the eye, one surface conceals and other surface.
You never look at anything the same twice, if always reveal something else.
So the point is that essentially he could say he's a creationist, he believes in intelligent design, a creator created this world for a Nabokovian eye, no other will do, they are perfectly attuned to each other.
It's fair to say that when he has an artist, or as a writer, that he tries to take over that role of creator in the book study that he meticulously fabricates and give those books the same meticulous sort of resolution that you find in the natural world, same sort of aesthetic resolution, density and mimicry, camouflaging and so forth, that he really wanted his novels to participate in.
This law of natural bounty.
Yes, definitely.
I think when you step into Nabokov novel, you're often blinded by the plethora of details, proper names, dates.
They seem to be too busy and in the beginning you're overwhelmed by the detail and it's very hard to know what to do with it.
If you're a literature professor, you have to interpret it somehow and it turns out to be uninterpretable and that is one of the things that Nabokov wants to do.
He wants to create a world that's imminent and mysterious, but that you can't just interpret in the form of ideas and proposition.
Maybe you can interpret it, but all these Nabokov admirers spend their lives, if not interpreting, at least trying to decode the sequences in his books and find out exactly how they hold together.
It's the opposite, though, of what formulation is ideas. He doesn't want it to be paraphrased. He wants it to be decoded to be assembled, reassembled.
I think there's a very important line, I think on page 269 in my edition of Lolita, Humbert says Humbert Humbert says, it's interesting how you open a play like King Lear, you open a novel like Madam Boverie, and you will always find the characters there doing the same things that they always do.
They always remain in character, they begin the same way, they end the same way, you can open it ten years later and they're doing the same thing. So they're very stable.
Nabokov aims to create a book where you open it again and everything has moved. You cannot read it twice and see the same things.
I have to tell you before we proceed, we're going to talk about Lolita and others. I love Lolita as a book, but I'm not a big Nabokov fan.
Maybe for this very reason that...
It sounds like a true confess.
No, it's true. You cannot.
I love everyone. I can say it's true.
That this dazzling style and way of writing that he has, he's a bit too much of a peacock for me.
I find that he's a preening himself on every other page and as an artist and lording his sort of superior cleverness in a way that I don't know.
It gets a little bit tiresome. It might have something to do with the fact that my allegiance goes out very deeply to someone like Joseph Conrad.
That's an interesting comparison by the way because Nabokov being a Russian emigre comes to the United States.
He writes English as well as anyone has ever written in the English language. Maybe with the exception of Conrad who was a poll and learned English...
At age 18.
Later than that later.
And then writes a literature which it must have...
I know that it drove Nabokov crazy that he was preceded by this guy Conrad who in so many ways was antithetical to him.
You talked about Nabokov's loading of sincerity and if ever there was a writer who turns sincerity into an aesthetic principle, it was Joseph Conrad.
And if there's one foreigner who made himself at home in the English language even more than Nabokov had some very nasty things to say about.
I mean how can the guy go on saying that Conrad was a writer of boys books, you know, adventure stories and he had...
Anyway.
Is there something else you want to add about the...
Well I'd like to say something about Conrad.
Why Nabokov disliked him apart from siddling rivalry and things like that and not wanting to belong to any group at all.
He wanted to personify a single entity.
I think it's partly the rule of the unconscious in Conrad.
Nabokov disliked very much theories of the unconscious that he felt to be deterministic and universalizing.
He couldn't stand the thought that there was this sub-terranean world that connected psyche to psyche, reflex to reflex that there were principles in childhood that extended through everybody's childhood and so on.
He didn't want to be linked to anybody in the human race.
And he didn't like the dusty-esque aspects of Conrad, the idea that there are these worlds upon worlds.
That there are one of Conrad's favorite motifs being as in does they ask you the devil?
This particularly kind of Germanic motif from German romanticism that migrated throughout Slavic literature throughout European literature.
Yeah, you have...
And this doesn't mean that Nabokov doesn't use doubles all the time, but they're always heavily parodic and self-distracting.
Well, there you go. That's the word parody.
Nabokov said that he didn't like satire because satire was teaching a lesson, whereas parody was a game, and he wanted to be known as a paratus.
And if there was anyone who was not a paratus, it was also Conrad.
He took things deadly seriously, and I don't think Conrad was Freudian.
It's Freudian voodooism, I think Nabokov called it.
The Viennese witch-dogger.
The Viennese quack.
Yes, and that's a typical kind of Nabokov tactic to attach a single epithet Viennese quack Viennese witch-dogger to Freud so that...
And it's literally like bombarding you with propaganda. You never get any other formulation.
And in that way, he's trying to reduce him to this single two-word or three-word phrase.
Yeah.
Well, it is the 50th anniversary of Lolita Monika.
So we wanted to vote most of our show to that book.
You mentioned that it was published in 1955, and it was first published in Paris.
It didn't come out in the United States until a couple of years, two or three years later.
Yeah.
And he published it with Olympia Press, which was basically a pornography press.
He claimed he didn't know that it was publishing Erotica.
So what was the...what were the problems in America or even in England for that matter about it's being published at the time?
What was the moral objection?
Well, I think it's probably pretty clear.
I mean, it was not only the story of the abduction and sexual molestation of a very young girl,
but it was from the point of view of a consummate stylist, a writer, somebody who thinks of himself as a poet, an East East, very superior.
And it seemed to make a mockery of America as well.
I think that if anybody had read it astutely at the time, they also would have been offended in the 1950s right after World War II at this constant mockery of American popular culture.
He denied that it was a mockery.
Yeah.
He denied a lot of things.
Well, we're not having read "Pruced" before he wrote his great "Pruced" in novel "The Gift."
Yeah.
Yeah, that sounds like a novel.
Well, we want to talk about the role that America plays in the book and the Americanization of his own writing.
I did want to say, mention one thing that Noveauk have worked for a long time on Lolita with great difficulty.
And at one point he almost threw it in the incinerator.
He actually did throw it in and his wife pulled it out.
It's amazing because it repeats a scene in "Dostoyevsky's the idiot."
Where Nostoyevsky is if you leave it in the "Pruse the bundle of bank notes that with her own hands."
And Italian, they say, "Senone vero, it been through that."
Yeah, that's it.
I'm not sure I believe that.
It's just inscribed into Lolita as well.
But it is a kind of the image of a phoenix that can't be killed.
But I suppose when I asked you the question, what was it about the paradox being that it wasn't published in America and England until after it came out in Paris or in France?
For Zoom, presumably because of its moral outrage story.
And yet as soon as it gets published, it becomes a runaway bestseller.
I mean, what's going on?
When Humbert Humbert calls his reader, Montfret, my brother, you know, alluding to Bodle et tum, speaks about my hypocritical reader, my brother.
What kind of hypocrisy is this?
That America is not ready for a story about this kind of child abduction and child rape.
And yet we know that it was a bestseller not because of it's literary merit, but really because of the purr and interest in the story.
Well, I don't think success on that.
It was invented with Lolita.
I think that kind of advanced press throughout the ages has helped things.
So the same thing happened to Flaubert, the same thing happened to Joyce.
In this case, or you think about any time when America, one part of America tries to crack down on the rest of America,
for example, the 1920s prohibition.
Of course, everybody immediately goes and does the opposite.
And then it's often said that when these people cracked open Lolita, they soon found themselves in the world of big huge words and the pornography supposedly stops very quickly.
I beg to differ.
I think there's still quite a lot going on.
Do you think it's still today it has a power to shock the way it might have 50 years ago?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I think it just mounts and mounts.
I think that Nabokov was reacting to something that was happening in America.
It was not only that it was after World War II, that sort of big spirit of idealism,
and then the 1950s, this sudden consumer culture that takes over the building of the American highways that put the whole country into motion, everybody in cars, the
adulation of the car in Siomnuwah, as this kind of fatal enclosure that contains its own destiny.
There's so many Siomnuwah effects in Lolita.
And also, I think the idea that our own film industry was to a great extent created by Eastern European emigrate, who saw it through this dimmong, the dark white, light through the Venetian blinds, the stripey kind of lighting, the high melodrama.
The idea that America for all its seeming innocence actually is a world of dark shadows and very egregious sinners.
And what about pedophilia?
And the other strain of that also in Hollywood of the Times?
Yes.
That has been studied particularly by feminist critics throughout all you have to do is think about Shirley Temple's memoirs of what was really going on when she sat on producers' labs and things like that.
A whole stream of films that, in the 1950s, that sexualized very young children and not just pubeasant girls like Zulian.
Also, Alexander Delin and recently published an article, he discovered that there was a case I forgot in the name, Jack Somebody, a man who abducted a young wholesome, very plain girl, and traveled all over.
The United States crossing all kinds of state boundaries, abusing her sexually two years later, she finally escaped.
And her story, the details of it were noted down by Nabokov and he plants a few details from that case in Lolita.
So if it did refer to, you could say, something that was always going on in the United States.
Another thing that Nabokov plants in Lolita is a literary tradition, Poe, of course, who fell in love with his 13-year-old, Math, to T, and married her, and always wrote about Virginia.
Yes, right.
Yes, passion for little girls, obsessive passion for little girls.
Hawthorne has Pearl, of course, in the Scarlet Letter, but he has several stories that involve an obsessively desired child.
Read, there are a number of references also to the old world tradition of Dante's love for Beatrice, where Beatrice was nine years old when he fell in love with her.
Pet charts loud, I was a young girl, there's Romeo and Juliet, they were in their teens.
Controllers, but the incongruity there is that Dante and Beatrice were the same age.
Loud and Pet
So obviously there's a colonial aspect to this imaginary situation.
So it's imaginary in Hollywood, it's imaginary in American literature, but it's also very much of a reality still to their social reality in America.
More and more so.
And there's a child worship, the child worship culture that we live in, to say nothing of other cultures around the world where the prized virgins and these kind of infant brides that are presented to these old men.
So the story of Humbert Humbert in his 30s, basically abducting and raping repeatedly for years, a 12 and then 13 and finally 14 year old girl, is not a fiction that is so easy to put in brackets and say, well, it's a work of genius as a novel.
And let's just concentrate on the aesthetic brilliance of the book.
So when you teach it, for example, what has been your experience with undergraduates?
I've taught it for a number of years and it's always changing.
I think all professors know that the flavor of undergraduates changes every few years and you have to figure out a whole new way to talk to them.
I actually have read of other female professors teaching the book and finding actually having girls come up to them after class, maybe even after the teaching was over to say how upset they were because they had actually experienced what Lolita went through in their own lives.
And we're very upset that the whole thing was treated as an aesthetic problem, sometimes even as a joke that it was completely not done to speak about it in any except an intellectual and distanced way.
And they felt that they had essentially been de-voiced in the classroom.
That hasn't happened to me, maybe you could never-
They were not de-voiced by you.
They weren't de-voiced.
This didn't happen to me. And this hasn't happened to me. It's Stanford because I think Stanford students are too intense on being cool altogether to ever say something like that.
I, although occasionally you have a kind of a feminist reading of Lolita.
But it is, I think, in a book that has written the novel in such a way that Lolita does come through, even though Humbert has written the novel and you'd say that every single word is his, he's put the words in her mouth and so on.
Nevertheless, you start to see the quote, "real Lolita flickering there" as if she's a butterfly-codden-and-net.
And one of the things, one of- this book actually has relatively few only 11 illusions to butterflies, but the one people always remember is the butterfly at the camp camp queue pinned to the wall still alive.
And that is, of course, the kind of obvious metaphor.
So in your experience, you've not had much discomfort when you're teaching the book in the class.
I did. I think it was more, I had it where the students had less, and I found myself particularly when I started teaching it when I was a young mother.
And having actual feelings of horrible nausea as I read it and wondering how on earth I was going to teach this in a simply intellectual, refined, sophisticated way.
Do you raise the issue of Peter Fida head-on?
Oh, yes. Yes, I think you have to. And I think that now, a book that has written the book in such a way that Humbert's voice is aesthetic, it's charismatic, he's very clever.
He's kind of like the smartest, most precocious kid in the class who always manages to make everyone else feel stupid.
And he's constantly dividing his audience, he tends to say, "Gentlemen of the jury whom he addresses in a reasonable way."
He says, "Fridged gentle women of the jury and makes mockery of them so that already he segregated his class into two parties."
And this over and over, I think, now, book of readers find themselves striving so hard to be the "good reader" that he always encyclers in his text.
And fearing that they're going to be the knuckle-headed obvious reader who reads for plot or sympathy, empathy, and so on.
And who sees a real story here. I used to do things like I'd read aloud the passage, the lap dance, the passage of Lolita on Humbert's lap, and challenged at the end of it, look at their faces, and everybody would be blushing.
And I challenged them to say that that wasn't a rousing.
And so he wants to catch his readers in the act of participating in the seduction, the constant, you know, the peach apricot skin, the microscopic delectation of Lolita begins on page one where he puts the word "low-lita" into our mouths, into his mouth, and it's like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or passing, you know, a piece of candy back and forth.
We share her, we taste her, the way he describes the phonemes the exact way where you should put your tongue when you say Lolita so that it's the Spanish sound and not the American sound.
And even that, in a way, making sure you recognize that she's Spanish, that she's part of the, say, the subordinate or sub-altern culture.
So, all along we are forced to enjoy our senses whenever Lolita's around.
And I have to say that the boys in the class really were. They curiously found nothing wrong with looking with overt sexuality at a 14-year-old.
They thought the girls their own age were too old for them.
So, you know, the world act.
That's an American problem, to say, and the titillation of Lolita.
Well, I won't go into it.
But rereading, I rereaded this year because of the 50th anniversary.
And you get drawn into this, he lulls you, Humbert Humbert, the narrator.
And in a perverse way, even tries to get you to identify with him, see things the way he sings very selective memory, always filtered.
But then every now and then you get these singers.
Like, one was just shocking when they're in the motel.
And he says, "How sweet it was to bring that coffee to her."
And then denied until she had done her morning duty.
And then there's another, well, we don't want to go into the play-vincing.
So we both agree that there's a real phenomenon at work here, which is pedophilia that doesn't belong to the world of fiction.
It's alive and well in our own culture as well as others.
That American imaginary is saturated with this sort of fascination with the young girl, especially.
What I'd like to say about that, it's true that actually not book of has numerous works where there's this kind of love going on.
But he is representing it as an aesthetic object.
He's, to some extent, putting up a mirror to American culture, to its consumerist culture.
The things that sort of exploded out of America after World War II when it was the most prosperous country in the world.
And that everything, absolutely, everything is to be advertised and everything is to be described, dismembered, you know, and sold.
So that also when Humber describes himself as a slot machine, you know, ready to distort discord coins for Lolita to pick up.
But she's manipulating. He's really creating an image of the American reader or audience who also has been automated to that extent.
Now, Book of, I would have to say one thing that Russian culture was always in love with childhood or at least certainly from Tolstoy on.
And it had a different notion of childhood, which was a much more resource one that the child is closest to the artist and is closest to the perfect observer of nature.
A child is brought up in love and is therefore closest to God. And all of these things, it's childhood as the most harmonious, the wisest time of life.
And when Nabokah for Rise in the United States with his young son, Dimitri, the apple of his and his wife's eye, I think that to a great extent they were somewhat, bemused or even, you know, non-plussed or horrified by what had become of childhood.
Namely, it's not just that Lolita is abducted by Humbert. American children have had their childhood abducted because they have been put on the fast track to consumption being consumers as well as being.
Let me talk about that. Lolita herself is sometimes she's compared to the angelic Beatrice, you know, the medieval girl women idealized girl women, but at the same time there's this other aspect to her which is her vulgarity.
So, and in fact, I think the novel is full of incongruities. In fact, it works on a principle of incongruity. The age differences, the most obvious one, you have old, Europe, new America.
But even in the figure of Lolita, would you agree that the incongruity is that on the one hand she has that angelic innocence that you evoked speaking of the Russian idea of childhood.
But then she has this other American strain in her that has something to do with precocious sexual maturity, seductiveness, a consumerist, a crass, materialist, consumerist mentality, you know.
That makes her quintessential, quintessentially American.
Yes, I think that there are a couple of things to say about that. One is that vulgarity becomes absolutely wonderful artistic material.
Now, book it's done a lot of pristine kinds of short stories, novels in his Russian phase.
And he had done everything he could in that vein of the aesthetic, beautiful childhood memory as a sort of source that you always go back to. What he was interested in, and I wanted to mention an important thing.
Ben Sinister, his first American novel, was also the first one to be written on note cards out of chronological order. He never again wrote straight ahead in chronological order.
He assembled his books. They became spatial. They became, you know, mosaics. Joseph Frank talks about modernity's spatialization as opposed to temporalization of experience.
And I think this is very important that they're assembled like puzzles, like Poe. He knows the end, and he construct, he composes it backwards from that end.
But also vulgarity becomes this wonderful material surface that he can play with, the way that Google used, Porsche list, the material surfaces for his absurd works in the 19th century.
And Lolita, I think, actually, when you look at her more and more closely, you see that her vulgarity is actually an art form, that she's assembled the materials of her culture in a rather creative way.
And she also escapes into vulgarity to get away from him. When they're doing their car trip, and he's saying, "Look Lolita, look at the beautiful Claude-like landscapes," and so on. All children hate to be told how beautiful the landscape is.
She escapes into the crisis, vulgarity, and imposes her culture on him, so that one of the great things about the book when you reread it enough times, you see that Lolita is Americanizing him, as much as he's trying to lure a Beatrice, you know,
I couldn't agree more. It's just her into his mythical system.
Yeah, in that regard, it's America, the fascination of America, and it's all its kitsch, and it's kind of todry advertising culture, and it's a childish fascination with glitter and...
It also, like humor, the humor for sure.
The rock is voice, the sort of pricking of porpoise, Lolita is actually very good at that.
Let's read...let me read the passage that a lot of people refer to about Lolita being both the subject and object of this commercialized fantasy of America.
Humbert says she believed with a kind of celestial trust, any advertisement or advice that appeared in Movie Land or Screen Land. Star-a-cil-starves pimples, or you better watch out if you re wearing your shirt tails outside your jeans gals, because Jill says you shouldn't.
If a road sign said, "visit our gift shop," we had to visit it, had to buy its Indian curios, dolls, copper jewelry cactus candy.
The words "novelties" and "sooveneer" simply in "transter" by their "trokeic lilt."
If some cafe sign proclaimed ice cold drinks, she was automatically stirred, although all drinks everywhere were ice cold.
She, it was, to whom ads were dedicated. The ideal consumer, the subject and object of every fond poster.
And yet, Humbert, presumes to have this old world contempt for this kid's America.
And yet, if you look at the way in which he, as you were saying earlier, is not only drawn into the American, but he is also a consumer and cannibal when it comes to Lolita herself.
He has demands instant gratification. He has to have her, as it were. He's always engaging in commercial transactions.
He's giving her money, or candies, or other things for erotic favors.
So, you say, "Well, where is this presumption?"
He belonged to a more noble culture that holds American kitchen in contempt.
What's going on in his psyche, in that regard?
So, I agree with you that there's a real Americanization that's taken place in Humbert's case.
Do you, would you say that Americanization is something that also takes place on the level of Nabokov's prose and storytelling in this story?
Yes. It's hard to disentangle, of course, because I'm not sure that American literature was like
Nabokov's, before Lolita, but it certainly became Nabokov afterwards.
So, there might be some retrospective wishing there.
Although I'd say that Melville was along the lines of Nabokov a long time ago, in creating these mosaics out of swatches of speech and many levels.
One of, I'd say, for example, Benita Sereno has exactly the same structure as Lolita in that.
It is narrated by one character, and you read it, and then it is also narrated implicitly by the author.
So, Melville, on the one hand, Nabokov on the other.
And it's very, how do you tell witches which is just Humbert's narrative and witches Nabokov's narrative, trumping Humbert's narrative.
One of the things that you realize when you read it a second time is that there start to be flickers of Nabokov's revenge on Humbert throughout.
A lot of them involve quilty, but there's many different signals, little games that are played that Humbert doesn't recognize being played within his text.
So, that you have...
Who is, who is, quilty?
Quilty is the movie director, actually director of plays.
He's quite famous, he's in the Encyclopedia that Humbert consults at the beginning.
And eventually becomes a pervert producer of porn films.
Lolita actually notices him quite early in the novel and continues to maintain a secret relationship with him.
And with him eventually he rescues her from Humbert.
And Humbert becomes more and more aware that there is a kind of a demonic double who's pursuing him, who is in every way you could say the famous author, the artist in control of his world in the way that Humbert isn't quite.
There are doubles in many ways, and Quilty has all the airy addition that Humbert has, and he's leaving all these clues at the motels and mocking him.
And I've always read Quilty as a stand-in for Nabokov himself. See if you can figure me out. See how clever I am. See if you can follow my trail.
But that's either here or there perhaps.
Also, however, if Humbert is the one who's creating a mosaic out of patches of American vulgarity, Quilty is doing the same thing, but in cinematic terms.
He goes one step further in moving out a verbal art, plays and theater into cinematic art.
And at the end, the duel between Humbert and Quilty, whether it happens or not, whether it's a figment of his imagination or not, is staged really as a pastiche of cowboy film duels, all kinds of patches of recognizable slapstick, Laurel and Hardy and so on.
Again, in the mode of parody. In the mode of parody and with the mixture of poetry making fun of T.S. Eliot, it becomes a real sort of ground green gignon.
I don't know. I think I'd like to say one thing about the narrative structure of Lolita. Students love redemptive stories, and the American tradition really doesn't think a novel's a novel, unless there's a redemption of the hero just as American movies believe in that kind of an ending.
So the question has always been is Humbert redeemed at the end, because he fights this duel with Quilty over Lolita, kills him, kills this evil monster, then goes and visits Lolita, actually offers her money so that she can live a better life with her present young husband and then goes, goes off to meet his own destiny.
And at one point stands over a valley and has a redemptive scene where he hears the voices of the children rising from the valley and realizes that her voice Lolita's childlike voice is absent from their concord.
He realizes that his great sin was to have stolen her childhood away from her, and that can never be returned.
So he ends with an appreciation of himself as a sinner, but also making the manifesto that the only immortality that there is is for him and his Lolita within the work of art that he has created. So an aesthetic redemption as well.
Critics now have discovered by looking at the details of the plot that actually it's possible to read that entire ending as a figment of Humbert's imagination written in prison.
It seems that the clues suggest and they are particularly emphasized in the Russian translation where a book of makes it definite that he started.
He says that he started writing the book on September 22nd and on September 23rd he supposedly went to Colmont.
So those two things conflict. She lived 5,300 something days if you count that up it means that she died July 15th in the hospital.
So she already was dead and all the rest of the novel has been created by Humbert to justify himself.
But you could say that he's redeemed because he's capable of writing this kind of an ending for the story that his imagination has created a different ending.
I don't buy it for a minute. I mean I don't buy that there's any redemption of the character that Humbert he does realize that her voice is absent from that concord of children's voices.
But all along he's been aware of what he's doing and yet seems to assume that that's the price that has to be paid.
And he's a very timely Lolita has to pay that price for an experience of paradise.
And he says there is nothing more joyous and desirable than to have an impact in your arms and anything is worth any kind of sacrifices worth that.
And he also says that Lolita was essentially would have been left no mark aesthetically or in this life.
And so he's essentially elevated her from nothingness to aesthetic presence and that's the other service that he's performed.
Yes indeed. I don't buy the redemption at all but it's very difficult to teach the book because the students fight you.
For what they think is a proper American ending and I do think Nabokov always gives alternative endings and whoever you are as a reader you find the ending that aesthetically suits what you've been collecting from the novel.
Well one of my favorite passages is the description of Lolita playing tennis where she plays in a way that reveals a really delightful character and temperament.
She plays a game very well. He says Humber had something in her not been broken by me. She would have become a girl champion.
And although she has these beautiful strokes and volleys and serve, she's so good natured that she never plays the game in a way to win.
And much inferior players to her can always beat her simply because she has a kind of joyous positive presence there on the court that is not out really just for winning.
And there again is another instance of Humber realizing that he had broken something in her not regard.
But we only have a few minutes left. I warned you before we came on air that time goes very quickly. These conversations.
If some of our listeners say well it's the 50th anniversary I want to re-read Lolita.
What would you recommend to them to keep their eyes out for in reading or re-reading the book?
I would recommend them to pay attention of course to the fact that Humber is trying to persuade an audience.
And he pictures that audience alternatively as a jury. He pictures it as a kind of a public a gog at his artistry.
He's constantly framing the reader and thereby attempting to influence the way that he's going to be read.
I think that you should pay attention to who is John Ray Jr. the psychiatrist who actually has the manuscript.
At a certain point in the middle of the novel you discovered that the novel is in the possession of John Jay Jr. and Chote, a lawyer, and that they have total possession of it.
And there are signals that in fact it has been manipulated by them.
One of the eerie aspects of the novel is you're never sure who the text belongs to whose hands are mingled in it.
And in fact, the book of loves this image of two hands, criss-crossed each of them writing on the same manuscript.
There are always multiple hands producing the text.
So in that sense it becomes a very postmodern work that the text is a surface for which various authors struggle attempting to make it their own.
And I think that that also creates a multiple audience.
Each audience member tries to struggle to create the Lolita that he wants it to be.
And the book of his given clues of all kinds that can be strung up along different pieces of jewelry.
In a way they are a Baroque text.
It's been said that the book of the Baroque stylist, if you think about the Baroque kind of painting where when the light hits it from one angle it is two men.
And it hits it from another angle there's a death's head and you see that.
That's essentially how a notebook of novel is always constructed. It won't lie so that you move your own perspective and the whole meaning shifts.
I have to say even though I'm not a big notebook of fan or those kind of devices don't necessarily always turn me on rereading the book I realize that it's really a masterpiece of storytelling as well as prose writing.
Well the question we asked was does aesthetic perception being able to be a very acute reader have any ethical bearing?
And that's I think still an open question.
Definitely an open question.
Well, Lolita will continue this on another show I hope.
Have you back? Thanks a lot for the discussion.
And I want to remind our listeners that we have a web page for entitled opinions.
Just go to the home page of the Stanford French and Italian department click on entitled opinions and you can download all the previous shows.
Leave your comments etc. I want to thank David Lumus, our assistant producer, production manager for all his technical help.
And tune in next time. Thank you.
Thank you.
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