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.

Response #4 (for 9/17)

I get the sense that the forward and first chapter of Lolita exist largely to set up Humbert Humbert as an extremely unreliable narrator. We find out immediately that Humbert was imprisoned, so we know to expect the usual charms one gets from an "intelligent criminal." This comes through later in the forward too, when John Ray Jr. comments on the text's lack of profanities and "how magically [Humbert's] singing violin can conjure up a tendresse." In these moments, it becomes very clear how Humbert is going to portray himself to us: guilty but not too guilty, and linguistically smooth even when describing his inner turmoil.

Humbert wastes no time painting this picture for us himself. After poetically and passionately describing his obsession with Lolita, he addresses his audience as "ladies and gentlemen of the jury" and refers to the story to come as a "tangle of thorns." Humbert knows very well that he's about to be judged, so he must be quick to get us at least partially on his side. He wants us to see Lolita as an enchantress and the situation as complicated.

Response #3 (for 9/12)

Our discussion on the relevance of The Enchanter as a title made me see the scene I referenced in my last blog post in yet another light. To quote a different part of the moment:

"'Be quiet, it's nothing bad, it's just a kind of game, it happens sometimes, just be quiet,' he implored, middle-aged and sweaty, covering himself with a raincoat he had glimpsed in passing, shuddering, missing the armhole."

It isn't difficult to see how this is an extremely disenchanting moment, even before the sentence is picked apart at all. The protagonist is frantic and commanding, not to mention "sweaty," and impressing his conquest, in this moment, could not be farther from his mind. His self-believed position of Enchanter is no longer secure in any way.

This is emphasized by his use of the raincoat. Raincoats are protective devices by nature, as is the "enchanting" personality this man has used throughout the novel to hide his intentions from others and hold on to the young girl. In this scene, the raincoat isn't quite working with him, and he's struggling into it. In every sense of the word, the protagonist is no longer protected.

Response #2 (for 9/10)

Like many other people, I'm sure, I've noticed that Nabokov has an incredible ability for saying a lot with very few words. An example that sticks out occurs during the sex scene in The Enchanter (on my page 74).

"...[S]he shielded herself with her sharp little elbow, tearing from his grasp and still yelling senselessly, and somebody was pounding on the wall, demanding inconceivable silence."

It took me a while to wrap my head around the idea of "inconceivable silence." Those words together reveal so much about both the frame of mind of each character in that moment. He is wrapped up in the "noise" of being caught, and she is wrapped up in the "noise" of the shock of the situation, and all of this is soundtracked by her shrieking and his desperate attempts to quiet her. Of course silence would be the furthest thing from either of their minds, and we get a sense of that in only two words.

Also striking about "inconceivable silence" is how it fits into the "poetry" of that sentence. The whole bit's repetition of S sounds makes it stand out against the rest of the scene. It evokes something of a "hissing" in the mind's ear, fitting for the fallout of such a devious moment in time, particularly one so heavily influenced by a snakelike part of the male anatomy.