Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita

[pontalba]

Uh-oh. Stand back, folks. pontalba's got a photobucket and she knows how to use it!

Yes. I do. Be afraid. Be very afraid.



Now where on earth did you find that bucket!!?? LOL

 

[Peder]

Peder, I just know you have electricity. You have made mention of having to wait for daylight to do something or other before this. Now I'm curious.

Maybe you just mean that it's just late and you're tired? Well, nighty night. CU in the AM 2.

Hi SIL,
I just don't care to turn the light on after my wife is asleep here, even though I'm in another room, although it would be possible. But I was very tired also and dead at the keyboard here. Just woke up again but morning will be better,
Peder

 

[Peder]

Afghterthought

But Doug,
PS. I really was dull not to think of the obvious!
There were the annual butterfly-hunting trips from Ithaca westward that served as the model for the two road trips in Lolita. Nabokov used to exhibit matchbooks from the motels in his class lectures as part of naking the point for careful observation and detailed authenticity in writing. Just as he also showed actual height, age and weight charts to explain their use as the detailed source of Lolita's 12-year-old stature and dimensions. A fascinating guy all around.
Peder

 

[Shade]

Peder is right re the notion that Lolita was in part lifted from Patricia Highsmith's Carol. The books have nothing in common. Highsmith, while an excellent suspense writer (try the 'Ripleiad' or The Cry of the Owl), wrote Carol - or The Price of Salt as it was originally titles - in an almost therapeutic way after an encounter with a beautiful woman in a department store, similar to that which opens the novel. Nabokov is a linguistic master, as different from Highsmith as you could get: her plots and characterisation are supported by basic prose, where with Nabokov the prose is the main event, to which all else is secondary.

Picaresque novels, as Peder pointed out, have been around for a long time and the idea that both Carol and Therese, and Humbert and Lo, are 'sexual outlaws' just isn't enough to bring them together. Add to that the fact that Highsmith's novel was published in 1952 and Nabokov began writing Lolita in 1949, and the theory seems less and less plausible. Indeed I can't imagine anyone reading both novels and seeing any connection between them at all ... unless they had some space to fill with a half-baked theory in Slate magazine.

Nonetheless, the US edition of Carol/The Price of Salt seems to have taken this comparison on board. The front cover reads "Now a masterwork, the novel that inspired Nabokov's Lolita." Which makes me think two things: 1. No it didn't (see above). 2. "Now a masterwork"? You mean it wasn't before? How does that happen??

 

[Peder]

"Now a masterwork, the novel that inspired Nabokov's Lolita." Which makes me think two things: 1. No it didn't (see above). 2. "Now a masterwork"? You mean it wasn't before? How does that happen??

Shade, (It's hard to resist calling you John),
Thanks so much for your post and your fine sense of humor.
"Inspired Nabokov's Lolita"?! There's an aaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggghhhhhhhhh for you!
And your reaction to "Now a masterwork" is worthy of the master himself.
It is a pleasure to see you here in the Nabokov corner and I hope it happens more often. In the event we ever get brave enough here to tackle Pale Fire then I really hope you will chime in with your insights.
In the meantime,
It is nice even to know that you are lurking,
Peder

 

[pontalba]

"Now a masterwork, the novel that inspired Nabokov's Lolita."

If that isn't enough to puke a buzzard, I don't know what would qualify.
Double aaaaaarrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhhhh!

Oh, and Hi Shade. It is nice to see ya in these parts.

 

[steffee]

I'm inclined more to believe that one is seeing the fact that there are only a certain number of set pieces to organize a story around, and one of them is a road trip. Think of Don Quixote for example, but I don't see any suggestion that Highsmith stole her idea from Cervantes. Going further there is the idea that there is only one story at the root of all stories, the story of how a person meets the challenges of life and copes with them, if I paraphrase that correctly.

Please don't make me search through 150 pages of posts to find the exact author and statement you are referring to here, Peder. It was very interesting, and we had a lengthy discussion on the actual terms the author used, but I can't recall either.

Oh, I'm going to, aren't I?

Lately I've been reading Nabokov's version of a detective story -- The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Guess what! The detective goes through the story interviewing one potential witness after another until he can finally solve the mystery. Sound familiar? Name any half dozen authors!

But I'm very glad you keep us in mind. We find Nabokov fascinating and all is definitely grist for the mill here. And come to think of it, it has been a long while since SFG has injected one of his mind-bending posts into the discussion. Are you perhaps thinkiing of joining us?. I am sure we all hope so and would find that very enjoyable. Come on over.

Yes, do join in, Doug.

Among other reasons, Nabokov is fun to read and talk about, and we still have a long way to go.

How very well put, Peder.

 

[Gem]

Avatars with either blue or green.....or blue/green and trees.

Yay! I fit in with the colour scheme. Speaking of Avatars, Steffee; I was lurking around here yesterday and my 9 year old nephew came in and spotted your avatar (the family is over for the long weekend). He now refuses to drink water. He stopped my sister form drinking some last night, and when she asked why, he replied "cos gemmies computer says fish have the sex in it". So everyone now thinks i spend my time online looking at fish porn

"Inspired Nabokov's Lolita"?! There's an aaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggghhhhhhhhh for you!

I see i'm going to have to tread carefully around here, Pontalba has a mean aim with that stick

 

[pontalba]

Yay! I fit in with the colour scheme. Speaking of Avatars, Steffee; I was lurking around here yesterday and my 9 year old nephew came in and spotted your avatar (the family is over for the long weekend). He now refuses to drink water. He stopped my sister form drinking some last night, and when she asked why, he replied "cos gemmies computer says fish have the sex in it". So everyone now thinks i spend my time online looking at fish porn



I see i'm going to have to tread carefully around here, Pontalba has a mean aim with that stick

ROTFALOL!! Fish Porn! Oy!

The more I thought about the color scheme, I remembered that raffalelabella has brown in hers.....we just have to make an exception for her.

My 'stick' is only brought out in a true emergency.

 

[pontalba]

Oh, Steffee wasn't the "One Story" bit brought out in "Everything Nabokov"? I tried searching, with too much luck.
I'll look around here.

 

[StillILearn]

I'm kind of taken with the notion that at any given moment the person you are sitting next to may very well be thinking about Nabokov.

"What a nice company picnic this is. Hey, would you mind passing me that salt shaker over there? Oh. Sorry for startling you. Ah, I see that you have a sort of a faraway look in your eyes. Um, you weren't thinking about Nabokov, by any chance, were you?"

 

[StillILearn]

So everyone now thinks i spend my time online looking at fish porn

Gem, I'm laughing! For a while there I was making my family watch various Lolita videos with me, and I had a CD version of Lolita in my car CD player. I'd be sitting out front of the middleschool reading a paperback version of Lolita while waiting for my g'daughter and her friends (twelve and thirteen year-olds) to pile out of the building and into my car. Everythng on my computer referred to nymphets, HH or Quilty. It's a wonder I didn't get arrested, and I'm a grandma. I can only imagine what the guys felt like.

 

[Peder]

At ease, everyone.

Oh, Steffee wasn't the "One Story" bit brought out in "Everything Nabokov"? I tried searching, with too much luck.
I'll look around here.

It was in "How to Read Literature Like a Professor," and I'll find it in a minute.
So rest a bit,
Peder

 

[steffee]

Speaking of Avatars, Steffee; I was lurking around here yesterday and my 9 year old nephew came in and spotted your avatar (the family is over for the long weekend). He now refuses to drink water. He stopped my sister form drinking some last night, and when she asked why, he replied "cos gemmies computer says fish have the sex in it". So everyone now thinks i spend my time online looking at fish porn

Really? Jeez, I'm sorry Gem.

I'm kind of taken with the notion that at any given moment the person you are sitting next to may very well be thinking about Nabokov.

"What a nice company picnic this is. Hey, would you mind passing me that salt shaker over there? Oh. Sorry for startling you. Ah, I see that you have a sort of a faraway look in your eyes. Um, you weren't thinking about Nabokov, by any chance, were you?"

It was in "How to Read Literature Like a Professor," and I'll find it in a minute.
So rest a bit,
Peder

Thank you, Peder.

 

[Peder]

One Story

"..But there's a greater truth, at least as I see it, beyond all these interpretive activities, a truth that informs and drives the creation of novels and plays and stories and poems and essays and memoirs even when (as is usually the case) writers aren't aware of it. I've mentioned it before and have employed it throughout, so it's no very great secret. Moreover, it's not my personal invention or discovery, so I'm not looking for credit here, but it needs saying again, so here it is: there's only one story.
...
What's it about?
That's probably the best question you'll ever ask, and I apologize for responding with a really lame answer: I don't know. It's not about anything. It's about everything.....It's about everything that anyone wants to write about. I suppose that what the one story, the ur-story, is about is ourselves, about what it means to be human. I mean what else is there?....Mostly though we are interested in ourselves in space or time, in the world. so what our poets and story tellers do for us -- drag a rock up to the fire, have a seat, listen to this one -- is explain us-and-the-world, or us-in-the-world.
On one level everyone who writes anything knows that pure originality is impossible....What I am talking about here involves a couple of concepts we need to consider.

The first ... is intertextuality... a most useful notion that comes to us from the great Russian formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who limits it pretty much to fiction, but I think I'll follow the example of T. S. Eliot, who, being a poet, saw that it operates throughout the realms of literature. The basic premise of intertextuality is really pretty simple: everything 's connected. In other words anything you write is connected to other written things.....[every writer's] work interacts with other works. And those works with others. The result is a sort of World Wide Web of writing. Your novel may contain echoes or refutations of novels or poems you've never read.

The second is archetype...the mythic original on which a pattern is based. Somewhere back in myth, something, a story component let's call it -- comes into being. It works so well that it catches on, hangs around, and keeps popping up in subsequent stories. That component could be anything: a quest, a form of sacrifice, flight, a plunge into water, whatever resonates and catches our imaginations, setting off vibrations deep in our collective unconscious, calling to us, alarming us, inspiring us to dream or nightmare, making us want to hear it again.. And again and again and again. When we hear or see or read one of these instances of archetype, we feel a little frisson of recognition and utter a little "aha!" And we get that chance with fair frequency, because writers keep employing them....

Those stories -- myth, archetype, religious narrative, the great body of literature -- are always in us. Always with us. We can draw upon them, tap into them, add to them whenever we want....That one story that has been going on forever is all around us.

How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Thomas C. Foster, Harper Collins, 2003, pp.185-192​

 

[StillILearn]

Thank you, Peder.

 

[Peder]

Thank you, Peder.

You are very welcome. It loses clarity somewhat in the excision, but OTOH it does put me on the trail of Bakhtin.

And, oh, you kidder,SIL!
How is The Doubtful Asphodel?
Peder

 

[pontalba]

I'm kind of taken with the notion that at any given moment the person you are sitting next to may very well be thinking about Nabokov.

"What a nice company picnic this is. Hey, would you mind passing me that salt shaker over there? Oh. Sorry for startling you. Ah, I see that you have a sort of a faraway look in your eyes. Um, you weren't thinking about Nabokov, by any chance, were you?"

Company Picnic? You would not find me at one of those for sure. The idea fairly reeks of bugs in food, ants crawling all over....everything..ewww. No, I'm not really an outdoor person. Now I do on occasion, enjoy sitting outside and reading. I'm afraid thats the extend of outdoorsmanship for me.

 

[pontalba]

Peder Thats a great outtake! I did some searching on the threads, and couldn't find the reference. Thanks.

 

[steffee]

lol Pontalba.

Thanks, Peder, that's great.