A woman sitting next to me on the plane from Ohio to New York saw my book, said she read it in high school and that it was her favorite."The desperation is touching, really sad to me," this woman said. It was, in her opinion, a love song.
Weird. I've been reading it as a story of addiction.
Theis passage on page 71 shows how we both can be right.
"So Humbert the Cubus schemed and dreamed --and the red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher, while upon a succession of balconies a succession of libertines, sparkling glass in hand, toasted shattered the glass, and boldly imagined (for I was drunk on those visions by then and underrated the gentleness of my nature) how eventually I might blackmail--no, that is too strong a word--mauvemail big Haze into letting me consort with little Haze by gently threatening the poor dotting Big Dove with desertion, if she tried to bar me from playing with my legal step-daughter. in a word, before such an Amazing Offer, before such a vastness and variety of vistas, I was as helpless as Adam at the preview of early oriental history, miraged in his apple orchard.
And now take down the following important remark: the artist in me has been given the upper hand over the gentleman."
1 comment:
Listen to what Hum says here:
I KNEW I HAD FALLEN IN LOVE WITH LOLITA FOREVER; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita. She would be thirteen on January 1. In two years or so
she would cease being a nymphet and would turn into a "young girl," and then, into a "college girl"--that horror of horrors. The word "forever"
referred only to my own passion, to the eternal Lolita as reflected in my blood. The Lolita whose iliac crests had not yet flared, the Lolita that
today I could touch and smell and hear and see, the Lolita of the strident voice and rich brown hair--of the bangs and the swirls and the sides and the curls at the back, and the sticky hot neck, and the vulgar vocabulary-...-that Lolita, my Lolita, poor Catullus would lose forever.
You and your aerolocutor are both right...and I share the opinion that the desperation and love are moving (the last page brings me tears, both when I finished the book, and as I glanced at it just now....[don't read it; wait till you get there])
Now to the text itself...notice how the passage before the one you quoted ends, "'You either lie, Dolorous Haze, or it was an INCUBUS.'No, I would not go that far"...next paragraph: "Humbert the CUBUS schemed and dreamed" ['cubus' again, internal rhyme]..."higher and higher"..."succession of balconies a succession of libertines" [repreated words]..."vastness and variety of vistas" [alliteration]. Nabokov's prose is full of these devices...pay close attention.
Post a Comment