Professor Amy
Hungerford: Today it is my
very great privilege and
pleasure to introduce Andrew
Goldstone, a TF in this course.
Andrew is going to provide for
you today the only relief you
will get all term from my voice,
so enjoy it!
On the syllabus it says that I
would be presenting a lecture on
censorship in this slot.
Andrew Goldstone:
That's been suppressed,
actually.Professor Amy
Hungerford: It's been
suppressed.
That's right.
So, I will talk about
censorship somewhat in my last
lecture on Lolita,
 and in preparation for
that, for next week I'd like you
to finish the novel and then
read his essay,
"On a Novel Entitled
Lolita." It should be
bound at the back of your book.
Andrew is a fourth-year student
in the Ph.D.
program in English,
and he is writing a
dissertation on the autonomy of
the work of art in modernism:
on that as a problem,
on that as a subject to be
questioned and understood in a
deeper way than it has been up
until now.
It's a wonderful dissertation.
It prepares him very well for
the lecture he's going to give
you today.
So: Andrew.Andrew
Goldstone: Thanks,
Amy.
So, on Monday we had three main
themes that were used to
introduce this novel to you.
First is the idea that the
novel invites ethical questions
but also holds them off through
parody in the same way that it
uses the tropes of romanticism
and romantic love and parodies
them.
Secondly, we looked at
Humbert's techniques of
rhetorical seduction and related
that to a kind of intellectual
problem that Nabokov sets
himself of trying to make you
identify with this villainous
character.
And that leads to the third big
question we looked at,
which is the place of Nabokov
in this novel amidst the many
layers,
whether he crosses them or
confuses them.
And that's the question that
I'm mostly going to focus on
today.
I'm going to bracket the
ethical question,
leave that for Monday's
lecture, and the way I want to
approach this question of the
style in the novel and the
question of aestheticism is by
placing Nabokov in the context
of literary modernism.
So, I'm going to outline for
you a little bit what I mean by
that term, and then I'm going to
look at some specific
predecessors that Nabokov refers
to,
and the way he uses them.
And then, at the very end,
I'm going to try to connect
that to Nabokov's exile and the
themes of exile.
So, let's start with an
example.
If you look on page 15,
Humbert describes his
adolescence, his education:
At first I planned to
take a degree in psychiatry as
many manqué
talents do;
but I was even more
manqué
than that;
a peculiar exhaustion--I am so
oppressed, doctor--set in,
and I switched to English
literature,
where so many frustrated poets
end as pipe-smoking teachers in
tweeds.
[Well, that's why I'm in
graduate school!]
Paris suited me.
I discussed Soviet movies with
expatriates.
I sat with uranists in the Deux
Magots.
I published tortuous essays in
obscure journals.
I composed pastiches:
[Humbert's poem]:
"Fraulein von Kulp may turn her
hand upon the door.
/ I will not follow her.
/ Nor Fresca.
/ Nor / that Gull." 
So, this is a spoof of a poem
by T.S.
Eliot which I've given you a
piece of on your handout,
so let's look at that for a
second,
Eliot's 1920 poem,
Gerontion. I'm just
going to read a little bit of
this so that you have the flavor
of the thing that Nabokov is
burlesquing:
Here I am,
an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy,
waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot
gatesNor fought in the warm
rainNor knee deep in the
salt marsh, heaving a
cutlass, Bitten by flies,
fought.
My house is a decayed
house.
And the poem goes on,
and this is the tone of a poem.
It's a poem of crisis,
a poem of a kind of hollow
speaker, someone who emerges as,
more or less,
buried alive.
And this is supposed to reflect
both personal crisis and a
historical crisis.
And it comes to a moment where
the possibility of rejuvenation
is described as devoured by a
series of caricatures of
Europeans,
and that's this second part on
your handout,
the people that devour
rejuvenation.
So: By Hakagawa,
bowing among the Titians;
By Madame de Tornquist,
in the dark roomShifting
the candles;
Fräulein von Kulp--[There
she is--]Who turned in the
hall, one hand on the door.
Vacant shuttlesWeave the
wind.
I have no ghosts,
An old man in a draughty
houseUnder a windy
knob.
What in Eliot is crisis,
in Nabokov is just a joke.
In other words,
these terrifying figures in
Eliot--Fraulein von Kulp--are
just some of Humbert's nymphets.
A fraulein is just a young
woman;
Fresca, another Eliot
character: the fresh woman,
right, a young woman again.
So, I called this a burlesque
of Eliot's modernism.
It takes something meant to be
really serious,
and turns it in to a dirty
joke.
And that's the first way
Nabokov will relate to literary
modernism.
That's quite interesting,
that he takes this approach,
because Eliot in some ways
comes very close to the kind of
ideas about art that Nabokov
himself holds.
Eliot says poems should be
autotelic.
That means they should be an
end unto themselves.
Nabokov will say in that
afterword you're going to read,
"the novel has as its only
purpose to afford aesthetic
bliss."
So, the parody is of something
very close to home.
And this poem that I've given
you will come back on page 134.
You don't have to turn to that
now, but you should think about
that return.
It's much more serious and
strange.
Okay.
So that's enough on Eliot.
Now I want to really
clarify for you what I mean by
this term "modernism."
It just means the art and
literature of the early
twentieth century,
especially the "high art,"
although its roots are
definitely in the nineteenth
century, especially the French
nineteenth century,
fiction and poetry.
In English it begins with the
late novels of Henry James
around 1900, in poetry with
Eliot and with Ezra Pound.
In prose its main exemplars in
English would be James Joyce,
Virginia Woolf.
And you should know about this
movement that it had very rapid
success.
So, although its first centers
are London and Paris,
it's already taught as classic
literature in American
universities before the war;
it's already classic.
So, now,
here's just a list for you:
eight features of literary
modernism that are all important
to Nabokov.
Eight features of literary
modernism: An obsession with the
idea of art's autonomy,
the idea that art is its own
law, that it responds to no
other laws, that it has no other
purpose than its own purposes.
In other words,
art for art's sake.
That's Eliot's autotelic poem.
The only purpose of the work of
art is to afford aesthetic
bliss.
Second, a sense of crisis,
a radical break in culture,
an overturning of conventional
artistic forms that goes with a
sense that civilization itself
is being overturned.
Third, the idea that the
paradigm of experience is
artistic experience,
that the norms for everyone
should be artistic norms of
careful perception,
deep reflection,
that the idea that culture
itself is the saving,
most important activity that
people can engage in.
Fourth--and this goes along
with that--a rejection of
convention, especially sexual
convention,
sexual morality,
and that's the obvious
connection to this book,
the very deep roots of
modernism.
However, at the same time
there's an idea that the artist
is a kind of technician,
someone whose values are craft,
form and style rather than
message, personal expression or
wisdom of any kind.
Sixth, this is a term from the
critic Joseph Frank:
spatial form,
the idea that in place of a
linear narrative you have a
system of cross-references and
repeated motifs that give the
structure of works.
In place that is only visible,
in other words on rereading,
only visible on rereading.
And then,
this anticipates my last
points: Modernism is
self-consciously international.
In other words,
it will look to international
tradition and has as its
ambition to be a culture not
just for one nation but for
many, maybe for all.
It goes along with this eighth
characteristic that's important:
the artist is seen as a kind of
spiritual exile,
someone who is alienated from a
home society and a home culture,
whether or not he or she has
actually left it,
as Nabokov did.
So this is what I mean by
International High Modernism.
You should add to this list of
writers especially Faulkner and
Hemingway, and you should
remember that there's a parallel
American tradition,
the realist tradition that we
saw Richard Wright referring to:
that is Theodore Dreiser,
Sinclair Lewis,
and then going back to the
nineteenth century,
writers like Mark Twain.
I had a teacher who used to
compare Lolita to Huck
Finn.
They are two novels about
traveling across America and an
unconventional couple.
Right?
So, anyway.
Okay.
But now, that modernist
tradition is something that
Nabokov owes a lot to,
but he always tries to
distinguish himself from it.
For Nabokov,
the highest value is
originality.
He says this in his last
Russian novel,
The Gift.
Or, he doesn't say it;
his autobiographical hero says
it: "Any genuinely new trend in
art is a knight's move,
a change of shadows,
a shift that displaces the
mirror."
Okay.
Any genuinely new trend is a
knight's move.
I just remind you,
in chess the knight doesn't
move in a straight line.
It starts out in a straight
line and then it hops off on a
diagonal.
Unlike any other piece,
it skips over pieces in the
way.
So the knight,
far from going on a straight
course, surprises you.
You might think of walking in
here expecting Professor
Hungerford on censorship and
getting me instead.
But this is a very important
idea for Nabokov both as a way
of treating predecessors and as
a way of writing.
And I want to show you that way
of writing very early in the
book on page 10 now.
Let's take a look at that.
This is at the top of the page: 
My very photogenic mother
died in a freak accident
(picnic, lightning) when I was
three,
and, save for a pocket of
warmth in the darkest past,
nothing of her subsists within
the hollows and dells of memory,
over which, if you can still
stand my style (I am writing
under observation),
the sun of my infancy had set:
Okay.
So this is a knight's move:
from traumatic event of the
mother's death--should be the
center of the sentence;
it's just dismissed--hopped
beyond into this stylistic wash,
a golden haze.
And he goes on to describe the
sensations of early childhood.
So, the strategy of the
knight's move is to frustrate
your expectations,
to leap over the apparently
important events into something
else characterized by a kind of
aesthetic play,
and these parentheses are a
real icon of that.
A critic has counted 450 sets
of them in this novel,
the parentheses,
an important example of the
knight's move.
And I want to show you
another kind of knight's move,
and to do that I'm going to
talk just for a moment about
Nabokov's relationship to the
French writer,
Proust.
Proust is the great
aestheticist of modernism,
the novelist who writes about
art,
who holds up art as a value,
as well as giving a theory of
memory--memories are important
in Lolita;
that really comes from
Proust--a theory of memory that
has a lot to do with the work of
the artist.
Nabokov, in 1966 he said this:
"The greatest masterpieces of
twentieth-century prose"--this
is convenient;
take this down--"are,
in this order:
Joyce's Ulysses,
Kafka's
Transformation"--that is,
The
Metamorphosis--"Bely's
St.
Petersburg," a pretty
obscure Russian avant-garde
novel, "and the first half of
Proust's fairy tale,
In Search of Lost Time."
I'm not sure the fairy tale
should remind you of that first
meeting between Humbert and
Lolita that we looked at on
Monday,
described in fairy tale terms.
But actually,
the thing I want to think about
is a crude pun there,
a "fairy" tale.
Proust is himself gay.
One of his big subjects is
homosexuality,
and Nabokov's reaction to this
is really homophobic.
This is not just about
Nabokov's personal prejudice.
It's about a relationship to
predecessors who are seen as too
similar.
The danger for
Nabokov--remember that his value
is originality--the danger is
that he will fall too in love
with something too like himself.
He has to hold off this
possibility of being too
attracted to these male
predecessors who are too similar
to him.
This should cue you to think
about the theme of doubling in
this novel, to think about the
possibility of desire between
men here,
to think about the word
"queer," the treatment of Gaston
Godin, that funny French
character in Beardsley,
to think about Humbert's
constant protestations that he's
attractive to all women,
about his supposed virility.
And it should just make you
wonder whether pedophilia is in
itself a kind of knight's move
from homosexuality.
In other words,
is there another form of
perverted desire hiding behind
the one that's in front of us?
Just a suggestion:
look on page 20,
still in Humbert's early life,
near the bottom:
It happened for instance
that from my balcony I would
notice a lighted window across
the street and what looked like
a nymphet in the act of
undressing before a co-operative
mirror.
Thus isolated,
thus removed,
the vision acquired an
especially keen charm that made
me race with all speed toward my
lone gratification.
So, we have a kind of image
there of the autonomous
aesthetic pleasure,
right,
the pleasure of imagination
that's taken alone,
according to one's own thoughts
rather than in some broader,
more social form.
But abruptly,
fiendishly, the tender pattern
of nudity I had adored would be
transformed into the disgusting
lamp-lit bare arm of a man in
his underclothes reading his
paper by the open window in the
hot,
damp, hopeless summer
night.
So, the object of this
wonderful aesthetic reverie,
the nymphet,
turns out to be an adult male.
And I just want you to ask
yourself why that could be.
But, Nabokov's relationship
to this modernist past is not
just the burlesque that he
visits on Eliot,
is not just this complicated
attraction and
dis-identification that he works
on with Proust.
An element of admiration is
also present,
and that's really part of his
relationship to Joyce.
Remember that he names Joyce as
the greatest master of
twentieth-century prose.
I'm just going to name for you
four features of Joyce's style
that are important to Nabokov:
stylistic virtuosity,
the ability to imitate any
style;
at the same time,
a scrupulous attention to the
banality of everyday life and
all its detail;
yet, the third characteristic,
the constant use of a
superimposed structure.
So, in Ulysses,
famously, Joyce puts the
narrative of the Odyssey
on top of a day in Dublin,
or in Joyce's earlier novel,
A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man, a linear
narrative in which a young boy
grows up is structured as a
series of structurally
paralleled chapters in which
moments in each one correspond
to the ones in successive
chapters.
And this comes with a kind of
suggestion that that banal
reality is redeemed by the
artist's activity.
Fourthly, Joyce loves puns.
So does Nabokov.
This is incredibly important,
and there's a direct glance at
that just ahead of where you
read, so don't turn here.
I don't want to spoil what's
coming up, but on page 221 there
is a reference to--don't look,
don't look--to a writer named
Vivian Darkbloom plagiarizing
from Joyce;
Vivian Darkbloom you remember
from Monday.
That's the anagram of Vladimir
Nabokov, so it's an explicit
recognition.
And the thing that's being
plagiarized, I've actually given
you on the handout.
It's a little piece of
Finnegans Wake,
which is Joyce's work in which
almost every word is a pun.
I'll just read you a sentence
of this so you know what it's
like: "Say them all but tell
them apart, cadenzando
coloratura!
R is Rubretta and A is Arancia,
Y is for Yilla and N for
greeneriN.
B is Boyblue with odalisque O
while W waters the fleurettes of
no-vembrance."
And that spells out "rainbow."
Right.
The important thing here is
that Nabokov acknowledges this
debt to Joyce as not just a
parody, but a real debt.
And so now I want to think at
more length about another Joyce
allusion which shows how
complicated the relationship to
his predecessor is.
And, with Eliot,
I read the Nabokovian version
first.
This time I'll give you the
Joyce first.
So this is on your handout as
well from Chapter 2.
This describes the hero,
Stephen Dedalus,
as a young boy trying to write
a poem.
And eventually in the novel he
will succeed in writing a poem,
but here he doesn't manage to.
And so, this is a kind of
forecast of what will happen
later on.
The further complication is
that here he's writing a poem
and then he remembers an earlier
attempt;
that layering of memory,
and that kind of layering,
is actually a prototype for the
layering in Lolita:
The next day he sat at
his table in the bare upper room
for many hours.
Before him lay a new pen,
a new bottle of ink and a new
emerald exercise.
[Skip a little.]
On the first line of the page
appeared the title of the verses
he was trying to write:
"To E-- C--."
He knew it was right to begin
so for he had seen similar
titles in the collected poems of
Lord Byron.
When he had written this title
and drawn an ornamental line
underneath, he fell into a
daydream and began to draw
diagrams on the cover of the
book.
He saw himself sitting at his
table in Bray the morning after
the discussion at the Christmas
dinner table,
trying to write a poem about
Parnell on the back of one of
his father's second moiety
notices.
But his brain had then refused
to grapple with the theme and,
desisting, he had covered the
page with the names and
addresses of certain of his
classmates: Roderick Kickham,
John Lawton,
Anthony MacSweeney,
Simon Moonan.
The version of this that comes
up in the novel is in the midst
of Humbert's diary,
and the diary itself,
I should say,
owes a lot to Joyce.
And I've given you a piece of
that diary to look at on your
own on the handout.
But this is the moment that
directly alludes to
Portrait, and it's
really very important for
understanding Nabokov's
technique.
So, page 51,
near the bottom:
Thursday:
We are paying with hail and
gale for the tropical beginning
of the month.
In a volume of the Young
People's Encyclopedia I
found a map of the States that a
child's pencil had started
copying out on a sheet of
lightweight paper,
upon the other side of which,
counter to the unfinished
outline of Florida and the Gulf,
there was a mimeographed list
of names referring,
evidently, to her class at the
Ramsdale School.
And I think of that front
and back of the page as another
kind of knight's move.
You think you're looking at one
thing, and you land on another.
It is a poem I know
already by heart: Angel,
Grace Austin,
Floyd Beal,
JackBeal,
MaryBuck,
Danielâ€¦
[and so on;
I'll come back to this list,
actually;
just skip to the bottom on page
52]
Talbot, EdgarTalbot,
EdwinWayne,
Lull,--[a lull in the book,
right?]
Williams,
Ralph Windmuller,
Louise A poem,
a poem forsooth!
So strange and sweet was it to
discover this Haze Dolores:
she, in its special bower of
names with its bodyguard of
roses,
a fairy princess between her
two maids of honor.
That's the fairy tale again.
In a way this is just like the
Joyce.
A list of names leads up to
this aesthetic sensation,
the revelation of a poem.
The ordinary materials of life
become the basis for a kind of
artistic achievement.
However, obviously this is not
like the Joyce,
where there is a realistic
depiction of a young boy trying
to write, getting bored and
failing.
Here something else is
happening, because the list of
names is not ordinary.
Right.
There is that bower of roses.
That refers to Mary Rose
Hamilton;
Haze, Dolores;
Hanek, Rosaline.
And then there's Emile Rosado
and Carmine Rose--a red
rose--Angel, Grace--
really!--Stella Fantasia.
And then even the ordinary
names are kind of plants,
because almost every name on
this list comes back elsewhere
in the book.
You could look,
for example,
for Louise Windmuller or Vivian
McCrystal.
And then, right in the middle
(oh, and then we have
Shakespeare too:
Miranda Anthony,
Miranda Viola) and right in the
middle you have a kind of
explanation planted:
McCoo,
Virginia;
McCrystal, Vivian;
McFate Aubrey.
McFate, which as you know
is something Humbert gets kind
of obsessed with,
is the icon of the difference
between the realistic world of
Joyce and the already
artificial,
already aestheticized world of
this novel.
No one was ever really named
McFate.
McFate is a kind of parody of
real randomness.
You might think of it as having
the same relation to real fate
as Chicken McNuggets do to
chicken.
In other words,
you might think of it as a kind
of artificial,
processed, bland,
easily consumable version of
fate.
I really mean that.
One of the funny things about
that debt to Finnegans Wake
is, Finnegans Wake as
a book of puns is unreadable.
Nobody reads it except
specialists like me.
Lolita was a bestseller.
Nabokov made so much money from
it he was able to retire to
Switzerland.
And you should ask yourself
what about this novel makes that
possible;
why is that,
that you have this McNugget
version of the modernist novel?
And I don't really mean that to
disparage the novel,
but it makes it clear that
there's some kind of difference
between this and the works that
Nabokov is looking back to.
I want to think a little bit
more about this idea of a
McFate.
There is a kind of short
circuit between the Joycean idea
of taking ordinary life and
transforming it into an
aesthetic order,
because the ordinary is already
aesthetic in the book.
In other words,
chance is already fated.
The thing that stands for
randomness in this book,
the thing that looks like
ordinary detail,
has already been arranged to
give you artistic pleasure.
That's why Humbert can be
instantly delighted in the list
of names.
This doesn't look forward to
Humbert's poem;
it already is a poem and it is
a poem to the crazed,
aroused mind of Humbert.
So, the artificial has taken
the place of the real here,
and this novel really reminds
you of that all the time.
On 84, Humbert's thinking of
killing Charlotte,
and he says,
"No man can bring about the
perfect murder.
Chance, however, can do it."
Chance can do it,
and of course the perfect
murder does happen.
Charlotte Haze dies as if by a
total accident,
but we're aware that the
accident is so perfect that it
was arranged.
So, this is the,
kind of, hand of Nabokov,
taking a narrative of real
events and twisting it into
something that makes a kind of
sense,
taking fate and making it
McFate.
And I want to show you one
more example of that,
in the scene where Humbert and
Lolita have reached the hotel,
the Enchanted Hunter.
This is on page 118 near the
bottom.
"In the slow,
clear hand of crime,
I wrote 'Dr.
Edgar H.
Humbert and daughter,
342 Lawn Street,
Ramsdale.'
A key, 342, was half shown to
me, magician showing object he
is about to palm and hand it
over to Uncle Tom."
The coincidence--normally,
in real life,
it would be a delightful
coincidence to go to a hotel
room that has the same number as
your street address--here it's a
kind of too-easy icon of the
correspondence between the place
where Humbert meets Lolita and
the place where he rapes her.
And the book just tells you
that, right, in one of those
parentheses--"the magician
showing the object he is about
to palm"-- the ordinary event
which is really trickery,
a suggestion that nothing has
been left to chance in the
novel;
nothing is ordinary.
Now, as I come to my last
section here,
what I want to suggest is that
this kind of transformation of
arbitrary,
real fated events into
conspicuously artificial tricks
(which you might think of a
knight's move on the real:
fate;
McFate) is a response in
particular to exile,
in particular to Nabokov's
condition of exile.
An exile, living in a foreign
country, lives in a kind of
denaturalized world,
a world where,
instead of everything making
instant sense everything has to
be decoded.
Right.
Nothing is initially known to
make sense;
everything has to be figured
out and reinvented.
In that afterword to this book,
Nabokov says he had to invent
America.
That's because he didn't know
it already;
it wasn't given to him.
Now, in a way this is a
terrible state,
a state of discontinuity with
the world you exist in.
But it has a payoff,
kind of, a payoff which is the
possibility precisely of
inventing, and this is visible
everywhere in this book.
One example is the
transformation of housework.
This is on page 179.
"My west-door neighbor"--west
door--"who might have been a
businessman or a college
teacher,
or both, would speak to me once
in a while as he barbered some
late garden blooms or watered
his car,
or, at a later date,
defrosted his driveway (I don't
mind if these verbs are all
wrong)."
Of course, the point is that
they're all wrong.
The point is that this
clichéd suburban life of
mowing the lawn,
washing the car and so on has
been transformed--precisely
because Humbert is a
foreigner--into something you
can laugh at,
something you can enjoy,
something that you can apply
the knight's move to.
And this is,
even a couple pages before,
explicitly described as
something particular to
foreigners.
Because, you remember,
Gaston Godin says about the
school that Lolita's going to go
to,
the girls are taught "not to
spell very well,
but to smell very well."
And Humbert comments that it's
"with a foreigner's love for
such things";
the foreigner's love for this
kind of move is a response to
this denaturalized world of the
exile.
It's important,
in this connection,
to remember that the knight's
move as a way of avoiding
obstacles,
in particular,
keeps skipping over forms of
violence.
There is that mother's death at
the beginning.
There is another moment in
which Humbert is tracing his
hand along Lolita's leg and he
discovers a bruise there that
he'd given her accidentally.
That's early on in the book.
In other words,
this surprise is a violent
surprise.
You can even look at the
mention of a knight's move in
this book.
That's page 192: 
One of the latticed
squares in a small cobwebby
casement window at the turn of
the staircase was glazed with
ruby,
and that raw wound among the
unstained rectangles and its
asymmetrical position--a
knight's move from the
top--always extremely disturbed
me.
The knight's move--which is
just a playful way of describing
where the window is,
right-- the knight's move is
nonetheless a kind of wound or
damage.
So, even as it's the prototype
for originality,
it's also something very
disturbing and harmful.
And that conjunction,
I want to suggest,
that conjunction has to do with
the traumatic event of having
had to emigrate,
having had to take up another
language.
Nabokov will say that his
private tragedy is that,
let's see:
[His]
private tragedy,
which cannot,
and indeed should not,
be anybody's concern,
is that I had to abandon my
natural idiom,
my untrammeled,
rich, and infinitely docile
Russian tongue for a second-rate
brand of English devoid of any
of those apparatuses--the
baffling mirror,
the black velvet backdrop,
the implied associations and
traditions--which the native
illusionist,
the frac-tails flying,
can magically use to transcend
the heritage in his own
way.
Here, being in exile prevents
Nabokov from making that
knight's move.
And you might think about that
homophobic attitude to a
Proustian past,
the fear that it's too like
what he wants to do.
But the main point here to
think about is that feeling of
damage.
On the other hand,
the critic Michael Wood has
pointed out that Nabokov didn't
lose Russian.
He didn't lose it on the way
while he was riding the boat;
he decided to stop writing in
it.
And Wood says this:
"Nabokov could appreciate
language itself only after he
had made himself lose a language
and had found another in the
ashes of his loss."
A kind of economy,
a balance between the loss of
one language and a particular
set of techniques that comes in
its place.
These techniques are really
I think the source of the most
appealing writing in this book,
and so let's look now at one of
those evocations of the American
landscape which I just think
maybe are the closest the book
comes just to pure beauty.
On page 152--oh,
and by the way,
this book was written on road
trips.
Nabokov's wife,
Vera, drove him on thousands of
miles of trips around the
country while he was writing
this novel and hunting
butterflies,
so think about that--but here
is 152, evocation of the
landscape:
By a paradox of pictorial
thought, the average lowland
North American countryside had
at first seemed to me something
I accepted with a shock of
amused recognition,
because of those painted oil
cloths which were imported from
America in the old days to be
hung above washstands in central
European nurseries,
and which fascinated a drowsy
child at bedtime with the rustic
green views they depicted:
opaque,
curly trees,
a barn, cattle,
a brook, the dull white of
vague orchards in bloom,
and perhaps a stone fence,
or hills of greenish
gouache.
So, so far the American
landscape is already a work of
art, already part of a European
memory.
Then something else happens:
"But gradually the models of
those elementary rusticities
became stranger and stranger to
the eye,
the nearer I came to know them.
Beyond the tilled plain"--in
other words, the already
worked-over, domesticated
plain--"beyond the toy roofs,
there would be a slow suffusion
of inutile loveliness,
a low sun in a platinum haze
with a warm,
peeled-peach tinge pervading
the upper edge of a
two-dimensional,
dove-gray cloud fusing with the
distant amorous mist."
"Inutile loveliness" is
kind of the key word of
Nabokov's technique,
and he says the novel has as
its only purpose to provide
aesthetic bliss.
So, here is inutile loveliness
coming just from seeing the
landscape as a stranger.
Humbert goes on: 
There might be a line of
spaced trees silhouetted against
the horizon,
and hot, still noons above a
wilderness of clover,
and Claude Lorrain clouds
inscribed remotely into misty
azure with only their cumulus
part conspicuous against the
neutral swoon of the background.
Or again, it might be a stern
El Greco horizon,
pregnant with inky rain,
and a passing glimpse of some
mummy-necked farmer,
and all around alternating
strips of quicksilverish water
and harsh green corn,
the whole arrangement opening
like a fan, somewhere in
Kansas.
So, a European artist actually
appears again there,
with Claude Lorrain,
but kind of made strange:
given that knight's move,
given a new twist.
So--instead of familiar,
incorporated into this
profoundly strange,
vast landscape that gets
Humbert's most appealing
rhetoric--the rhetoric of an
exile.
But, I don't want you to think
that this just means
everything's okay.
Of course, everything is not
okay.
Even Humbert will tell us so.
Just a few pages later,
on page 175,
he talks about his journey:
We had been everywhere.
We had really seen nothing.
And I catch myself thinking
today that our long journey had
only defiled with a sinuous
trail of slime the lovely,
trustful, dreamy,
enormous country that by then,
in retrospect,
was no more to us than a
collection of dog-eared maps,
ruined tour-books,
old tires, and her sobs in the
night--every night,
every night--the moment I
feigned sleep.
We have to pair that with that
other evocation of the landscape
to see this alternate idea,
that actually this distanced
criss-crossing of the landscape
could be damaging.
Think of those other violent
knight's moves,
like skipping past the mother's
death.
Somehow this is skipped past,
that--the sobs in the night.
There's another version,
yet another version,
that relates back to that funny
figure of Gaston Godin.
And I spoke about Proust;
Gaston Godin has a picture of
Proust on his wall,
and in fact,
he has pictures of all great
figures of French
modernism--André
Gide, the dancer Nijinsky--all
figures of this kind of
aestheticism,
this belief in the power of
art, and all gay,
as Godin himself is.
And Humbert has a kind of
hatred for that,
which he voices on page 173.
Sorry, 183: 
There he was,
devoid of any talent
whatsoever, a mediocre teacher,
a worthless scholar,
a glum, repulsive,
fat, old invert,
highly contemptuous of the
American way of life,
triumphantly ignorant of the
English language.
There he was,
in priggish New England--[here
are we!]
crooned over by the old and
caressed by the young,
oh, having a grand time and
fooling everybody,
and here was I.
And the contrast here is
between someone who has remained
tied to that European past,
remained comfortably
alienated--and by that very
means been able to fit into
society--with someone who is in
a much more ambivalent position,
someone who's trying to become
an American writer,
as Nabokov says he's doing:
trying to invent America,
trying to bridge the gap
between Russian and English,
but always finding that English
is only a kind of second best.
And in fact it's more than
that: he translated Lolita
back in to Russian later on,
and he added a second afterword
where he said this:
That wondrous Russian
tongue that, it seemed to me,
was waiting for me somewhere,
was flowering like a faithful
springtime behind a tightly
locked gate whose key I had held
in safekeeping for so many
years,
proved to be nonexistent.
And there is nothing behind the
gate but charred stumps and a
hopeless autumnal distance,
and the key in my hand is more
like a skeleton key.
So, there's a kind of lost
paradise of European culture
which he can't get back,
even with this spectacular
effort in English.
So, that suggests that it's not
all to the good;
it hasn't been saved by taking
up these knight's move
techniques, the defamiliarizing
techniques;
there's still a record of
damage.
And so, I'm going to end a
little early,
just throwing out an analogy
for you.
And it's an analogy that
Nabokov himself tries to debunk
completely in that afterword.
So, you should be skeptical of
it, but then you should also ask
yourself whether you can really
do completely without it.
Might it be that Nabokov's own
relationship to American
culture, his relationship to the
English language that he
transforms,
is like Humbert's relationship
to Lolita;
that is, might it be that it's
a kind of kidnapping of an
American innocent by a
cosmopolitan European for his
own ends,
ends which are seen as a kind
of perversion?
That's that element of violence
that keeps coming back,
the trail of slime across this
dream of transforming reality,
in this Joycean way,
into something saved,
the dream of turning fate,
the fate of a dead mother--or,
in Nabokov's own case,
a father killed by
assassination,
a brother killed in a
concentration camp--turning that
into this beautifully worked
out,
playful system,
defined by puns,
and images, and a spell of
rhetoric.
In other words,
could it be that all of this
modernist technique that Humbert
succeeds in putting to his own
ends--that Nabokov succeeds in
putting to his own ends--is not
an unambiguous good,
but a record of a kind of
damage?
Now, on Monday you're going
to hear about this novel's
confrontation with the idea that
art could be saving,
that it could somehow be
redemptive, but here I think is
a hint that it's something that
the novel simply laughs at
hollowly.
And you might think of one last
example.
all these things I've been
saying about the delight in
words is put in the mouth of
that horrible woman,
the headmistress of the
Beardsley School,
Miss Pratt, on page 197.
Miss Pratt says to Humbert,
"I'm always fascinated by the
admirable way foreigners,
or at least naturalized
Americans, use our rich
language."
In other words,
that the aesthetic discovery of
English is something that just
kind of fits comfortably into
this prejudice of the dull
suburban American.
So, I'll just end there with
this thought,
this doubt, about Nabokov's own
use of modernist technique in
this novel,
about the emphasis on the
aesthetic here:
whether it could be--not just
that triumph of the imagination
that Humbert sees in the list of
the names--but a mark of a wound
that can't be healed.
