StillILearn said:
Peder wrote
Amis wrote
Peder, after some ponderation, the way I am understanding Amis's statement is like this: As horrible as it must have been to be the victim of HH's abuse, how much worse is it to actually be the perpetrator, the "moral heap" and the causation of all this grief and horror. It is in this way that I understand VN to have been crueler to HH than he was to Lolita. Wouldn't we all rather be Lo than the despicable Hummy?
The word finesse seems to have been well-chosen in this case, too.
Still, Hi,
I have reread the Amis article (or excerpt) and thought about excerpting it here more extensively. Instead I'll sketch in its outline using thoughts from key sentences from Amis.
He begins by observing that 'death trickles through Lolita,' and goes on to prove his point by ennumerating and commenting on all the deaths that occur, of major and minor characters.
He then asks rhetorically how VN could accommodate such a story to the funny, inspired and racy novel (his words) that Lolita turned out to be. I take him to be in the process of answering that question when he asserts
But this is not a straightforward matter. Lolita is a cruel book about cruelty.
and he buttresses that assertion by discussing just how cruel Nabokov's characters can be to each other, even in other novels beside
Lolita.
Then he makes what I take to be his key point, both in answering his own original question, (how did Nabokov do it, i.e create such a funny, inspired, racy novel from such materials?)) as well as also being a key point for our discussion here
Morally the novel is all ricochet and rebound. However cruel Humbert was to Lolita, Nabokov was crueller to Humbert -- finessingly cruel.
In context I now take that to be an explannation of Nabokov's technique, that even as Humbert's cruelties to Lolita are described front and center, Nabokov's description is such as to simultaneously cause us the readers to see how despicable Humbert is. And he uses extreme finesses in being able to describe the situation and evoke that desired response in us, cruelly displaying Humbert as the vile person he is. Amis says we begin with a smirk as we read of Humbert's plan to bribe Lolita for her favors, but our features congeal as we realize just how unforgivable Humbert is. Amis wraps up that paragraph with the explanation that
It is complicated and unreassuring. Even so, that is how it works.
where I take the "it" to refer to Nabokov's technique of ricochet and rebound, i.e. causing us to loathe Humbert as he is telling us the story of the cruelty he inflicts on Lolita., and as Nabokov also causes our reactions to oscillate from amused to loathsome during that telling.
Without going further into our different reactions to Amis's discussion, I hope, at least so far, that my summary of
Amis's discussion sounds reasonable to you
But mostly I hope that Amis does not succeed in driving a wedge into our friendly discussions even if we might eventually see his same remarks differently.
Sincerely,
Peder
OOPS, Submitted, instead of Previewing. Please overlook surviving typos
