Response #11 (for 10/24)

I've been assigned "Ode to a Model" for this post, a poem so jam packed with wordplay that it couldn't be anything but Nabokovian. A few phrases stand out in particular, however.

"butterfly eyelash" - Of course Nabokov would mention this passion of his in his poetry. Besides that, the repetition of the "eye" sound and the "L" sound resonated with me, and reminded me a lot of "Guilty of killing Quilty."

"from dead leaf on the sod / to red leaf on the breeze" - Once again, the repetition of sounds here is lovely and oh-so Nabokov. The use of nature imagery to describe and address an attractive woman is also something I think of as characteristic of Nabokov, keeping in mind Charlotte's lilies in the scene in Lolita where the title character is finally introduced.

"Can one -- somebody asked -- / rhyme 'star' and 'disaster?'" - Nabokov has a flair for interjections, and this line is certainly no exception.

In terms of the meaning of the poem as a whole, it's very reminiscent of both the main characters in The Enchanter and Lolita, though I'm assuming the titular model is at least close to a legal age. The speaker of the poem isn't as overtly sexist, but the sexism is still present (a woman isn't "real" if she's a model? Really?), and while I'm not familiar with any Nabokov works besides the ones assigned in class, from what I've gathered of his novels I don't think that this kind of speaker is exactly a rarity in his writing.

Response #10 (for 10/22)

"We are made into Humbert's judge and jury and are accordingly addressed as 'your honor' and as 'ladies and gentlemen of the jury,' for Humbert presents his legal and moral case to us. Beyond that, we are also 'the astute reader' (p. 274) who is called upon to appreciate Humbert's artistry. Although Humbert asks his 'learned readers' (p. 59, p. 135) to view his history with 'impartial sympathy' (p. 59),
he also wants us to recognize how much we have in common with him: 'Reader! Bruder!' (p. 264). Our dilemma is that we simultaneously have to evaluate a man's life and criticize his artistic creation." (Winston 426-427)

Here, Winston has pointed out a number of Humbert's extraneous word choices, more specifically those that attempt to justify his extraneous word choices. He calls us "astute" and "learned" when it would suffice to simply call us readers, and manipulates us into sympathizing with him by speaking to us with pretty adjectives. This is the same thing he does throughout the novel without addressing the reader directly, and the implication is that he wants to make Lolita a work of art for us, and for her, because that's what every party involved deserves. Lolita deserves it because she's the "light of his life, fire of his loins."  Humbert deserves it because he isn't a bad man, just troubled and tortured and in love. And we deserve it because we're so "astute" and "learned" and simple prose wouldn't be good enough for us.

The problem with this method of Humbert's is that it's not hard to see through, and it becomes incredibly easy to see Humbert as a writer of fiction rather than memoir. The rest of his extraneous words start to stand out, as pointed out by Winston's article, and everything becomes unbearably fictional.

Response #9 (for 10/15)

'"You need not roar at me,' he complained in his strange feminine manner..." (296)

This line, the 'he' being Quilty, once again nods toward Humbert's weird feelings toward women. It makes me wonder if "feminine" in this case specifically refers to the femininity of post-pubescent women, since when Lo has complained throughout the book it is always depicted as something that should be expected from such a young girl; an annoyance, sure, but not worth commenting on.

Aiding this little theory is that Quilty, to any outside observer, reacted extremely calmly to Humbert roaring at him. "You need not roar at me" is more level-headed than anything else in this scene. Calling it a complaint is a complete overreaction on its own, but attaching "feminine" as a descriptor calls to mind his complaints about Valeria and Charlotte throughout the book. It's not about Quilty's reaction to the roaring, it's about Quilty speaking at all.

Response #8 (for 10/3)

(As I've said in class, I'm most interested in dissecting certain places in Lolita in which Humbert is using very specific word choices to get the readers on his side.)

One word in particular that stands out to me in the conclusion of Part One is in the very last sentence, "You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go" (142). This sentence without "absolutely" would have made a sufficient enough point. Adverbs generally aren't the meat of a clause to begin with, and since this line closes the first half of the book, it punctuates itself nicely without any "superfluous" words. 

My muddled, not-yet-totally-developed instinct is that "absolutely" is meant to trick us into believing that he genuinely thought of alternatives. It's an extremely bad trick if you've been paying attention at all, but I can't think of another reason for that word to be included. Just one, final attempt of Humbert's at convincing the reader that Lolita belongs with him.

Response #7 (for 9/26)

I tend to get a little caught up in nature symbolism when I read fiction, and Lolita so far has been no exception. I've done a little thinking and research on some of the "natural" things Humbert mentions on pages 39 and 40, when he sees Dolores Haze for the first time.

"...a fruit vase in the middle, containing nothing but the still glistening stone of one plum."

The first thing any good writing major will think of upon seeing the word "plum" is "This is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams, a little poem about less-than-strong feelings of guilt. I can't imagine how Nabokov would have felt about WCW, and it's doubtful that he would be referencing poetry at all in this sentence, but it makes for an interesting interpretation, I think.

Popular dream interpretation website DreamMoods.com offers a much more plausible reading, saying that dreaming of plums is symbolic of youth and vitality. Since Humbert is seeing the stone, or pit, of a plum and not the plum itself, I think it's safe to assume that this particular mention of the fruit is meant to foreshadow Lo's loss of youth and vitality.

"'That was my Lo,' she said, 'and these are my lilies.'"

I knew before going into this that lilies are often associated with death, specifically how a soul can regain its innocence after a body dies. Further searching taught me that lilies represented motherhood in Greek mythology, and that lilies hold masculine qualities in a handful of old wive's tales about predicting the gender of an unborn baby. I might be pulling from too many different places here, but it seems to me that the lilies in the garden are symbolic not only of Lo's childlike innocence, but Humbert's "mommy issues" that were sarcastically thrown into the earlier part of the novel.

Response #6 (for 9/24)

The long chunk of text on page 17 has stuck out to me since the first time I read Lolita several years ago. In an attempt to understand it a little better, I'm going to pick apart these couple of sentences as thoroughly as I can.

"A normal man given a group photograph of school girls or Girl Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine..."

• Humbert is literally scouting for girls and Nabokov brought up the Girl Scouts. Is this a great joke or a terrible metaphor? 
• Word choices that indicate Humbert wants us to feel bad for him: normal man, madman, infinite melancholy, poison loins.
• Word choices that indicate Humbert is kind of proud of himself: normal man, artist, super-voluptuous flame (keeping in mind that a "flame" is generally indicative of passion in a positive way).
• Normal seems like way too vague a word for Humbert, especially considering the rest of this page.
• What does "subtle spine" mean? Subtle has a few definitions, and even if Humbert is using the most common one, I'm having a hard time figuring out how "spine" relates there. Spine as in the metaphorical backbone? Totally, completely lost on this one.
• The first sentence implies that there is always one nymphet in a group of girls, so is Humbert really as picky he's describing? My guess is a resounding NO.
• "Poison" and "loin" have a bit of a rhyme going on, which makes me feel like Humbert wants us to appreciate that little chunk of sentence as poetically pleasant, even though he's down talking his fetish.

Response #5 (for 9/19)

"My mother's elder sister, Sybil, who a cousin of my father's had married and then neglected, served in my immediate family as a kind of unpaid governess and housekeeper. Somebody told me later that she had been in love with my father, and that he had lightheartedly taken advantage of it one rainy day and forgotten it by the time the weather cleared" (Nabokov 10).

I find it fascinating that the second sentence of this passage is treated in such an offhand manner by Humbert; he goes on to describe Sybil more rather than dwell on this disgusting thing his father has done. My memory of our protagonist's marriage to Charlotte Haze is a little fuzzy for me, but if the marriage in The Enchanter is anything to go by, this feels like foreshadowing. Humbert has inherited this disrespect for female emotion from his father, both in terms of how he treated his wife and his attraction to such young girls.

This might be reading too much into things, but I wonder if it's important that Sybil is his mother's "elder" sister, rather than a younger sister, or even just a sister without an adjective. She seems to be the first of many "elder" women that are treated poorly by men in this novel.