Nora Grubb
April 4, 2016
Boshoff
Language Over Content
(Response Paper Two)
Lolita, itself, is storied name. Moreover, it’s a word that conjures many images, associations, and implications. In Lolita, Nabokov writes fervently and unabashedly about the inner life of Humbert Humbert, a man with a love so deep (“above and over everything there is – Lolita [Nabokov 54]) that it leads him to commit murder. Though Lolita possesses a perverse plotline, to reduce it to “pornography” would be missing the point. This is not a novel about pornography (though Nabokov sure does make pedophilia sing), but a novel about the love of novels and the power of stories, as well as the love of language. It’s about the “esthetic content instead of the physiology,”
…show more content…
Without looking at or possessing someone else, how can we know ourselves? Who are we if not an amalgam of the people we have encountered in our lives? In reality, Lolita is not the vengeful undoer Humbert says she is. She is just a receptacle, a vessel for his lived (and unlived) desire. However “used” Lolita is, she still affirms his existence. Maybe love only has potential in the beginning: “And I thought to myself how fast those little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure inch of their nymphancy,” Humbert thinks to himself (222). Lolita chooses to move on from the love she shared with him, she chooses to forget ‘everything, everything’ that has ever happened to her. But Humbert laments – he is the ‘old lover’ who doe not only ‘treasure’ the time he spent with Lolita, but also wants it back. Humbert’s obsession with nymphets, then, can be read as a euphemism for all relationships. When (and if) a love story ends, the only thing that remains is the fond, ‘nymphet’ moments.
By the end of the novel, the only thing that Humbert and Lolita share is “work of art” (6). Art, here, becomes a synonym for beauty, or the eternal power of language – both of them are immortalized through prose. By toying with the virtues and pitfalls of both plot- and character-driven novels, Nabokov writes a “unique story” that comments on the way a book is made. Aware of “dangerous trends” and consumed by “potent evils” (6), Nabokov conveys that only Humbert Humbert, not Delores Haze, can be “solipsized”
Like Water for Chocolate—a novel rich in history, culture, food, and scandal; a breathtaking portrayal of a love affair, of the strength of character of desperate women, and of humbling traditions—captivates both the soul and mind, enchanting its readers by way of causing them to become immersed in its story-line. Prominent among its themes is that of finding an identity—or a lack thereof—which seems to pervade the lives of those most engaged in the process of self evaluation and discovery, and as such Laura Esquivel’s novel is comparable to Haruki Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes, in which the characters from several stories seem to be in a state of perpetual dislocation and disconnection from the world around them. Tita in Esquivel’s novel, best portrays this struggle of gaining personal identity and freedom amidst repressive, external forces, while specific characters from stories in Murakami’s collection such as “Sleep”, “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women”, or “A Slow Boat to China”, reflect a struggle that arises instead from both external and internal forces. Particularly important however, is Esquivel and Murakami’s contrasting approach to addressing the theme—be it through symbolism, language or characterization—that requires close critique.
Solipsism, which is the theory that one’s mind is the only entity certain to exist, has various moral implications that allow people with solipsistic views of their world to justify their mistreatment of others. In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Humbert Humbert, a self-proclaimed murderer and lover of “nymphets”, demonstrates a solipsistic worldview which causes him to see everything in relationship to himself, creating new personas for various characters and only narrating the series of events from his perspective. Humbert’s solipsism makes him view everything that happens to him solely from his point of view, as he believes his mind is all that exists, therefore making the events that transpire solely acts of fate and the people he encounters figments of his imagination. Humbert’s solipsism compromises the reliability of his narration, as he describes characters exclusively from his point of view by stripping them of their individuality and describing them solely in relation to himself; Humbert’s tendency to write exclusively from his own point of view forces the reader to accept the series of events he presents as the truth, without any external input, allowing him to completely control the reader’s perception of him and the events of the novel.
To sufficiently take a side in the ever-growing debate of pornography, one must first define the concept around which this discourse surrounds itself. A working definition for pornography is a piece of material that has the object purpose of arousing erotic feelings. Radical feminists, however, strictly define it as “the act of sexual subordination of women” (Dworkin 1986).
Vladimir Nabokov suffered a neurological disorder called Synthesia. In this disorder, some senses appear the form of other senses. For his specific case, it allowed him to see letters in color. The literary form of this disorder is writing when one sense describes another. Nabokov’s synthesia allowed for him to compose its’ literary form in a superior manner. Additionally, in its literary implication, synthesia generates juxtapositions of the senses. With and in juxtaposition, he uses the comparison of senses to describe one sense through another sense. Nabokov uses his Synthesia to enhance juxtapositions in order to capture essence of life through words. In his short story First Love, he illustrates importance of using the senses in descriptions
and bad, there is beauty to be seen. Dillard struggles through the novel in search of factual
Nowadays, the novel is considered and sold as a lesbian literature classic throughout the world but for certain public it is not clear whether the characteristics and themes included qualify it as such or it is just a matter of popularity. In its favour it is necessary to consider it as an early precursor of any kind of declared lesbian literature (it was published in 1928). It was one of the first times that lesbian love was depicted extensively by means of a novel and it was an incredibly brave and honest attempt to bring daylight into the darkness of so many people’s life. One of the individual but essential steps lesbians were giving towards social...
Both of the characters obsessions started in their early years of their lives. Young Humbert met Annabel when he was only thirteen, “[they] were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly,…, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by other’s soul and flesh; but there [they] were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do” (Nabokov 12). When Annabel and Humbert finally had the opportunity to “show” their love to each other, they were encountered by two bather...
In his "On a Book Entitled Lolita", Vladimir Nabokov recalls that he felt the "first little throb of Lolita" run through him as he read a newspaper article about an ape who, "after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage." The image of a confinement so complete that it dominates and shapes artistic expression (however limited that expression may be) is a moving and powerful one, and it does, indeed, reflect in the text of Lolita. Humbert Humbert, the novel's eloquent poet-narrator, observes the world through the bars of his obsession, his "nympholepsy", and this confinement deeply affects the quality of his narration. In particular, his powerful sexual desires prevent him from understanding Lolita in any significant way, so that throughout the text what he describes is not the real Lolita, but an abstract creature, without depth or substance beyond the complex set of symbols and allusions that he associates with her. When in his rare moments of exhaustion Humbert seems to lift this literary veil, he reveals for a moment the violent contrast between his intricately manipulated narration and the stark ugliness of a very different truth.
Post-structuralism is a theory containing a wide array of ideas concerning meaning, reality, and identity. Post-structuralism believes that the mind receives “impressions from without which it sifts and organizes into a knowledge of the world” which is expressed in language, or symbols (Selden, Widdowson 128). The “subject,” or person, “grasps the object and puts it into words”(128). Knowledge is formed from various types of communication which “pre-exist the subject’s experiences,” the subject existing as a being that is “not an autonomous or unified identity, but is always ‘in process’”(129). There are many assumptions of post-structuralism, but only one will be focused on here, in terms of Lolita and Humbert. This assumpti...
In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, the overruling drive of the narrator, Humbert Humbert, is his want to attest himself master of all, whether man or woman, his prime cravings, all-powerful destiny, or even something as broad as language. Through the novel the reader begins to see Humbert’s most extreme engagements and feelings, from his marriage to his imprisonment, not as a consequence of his sensual, raw desires but rather his mental want to triumph, to own, and to control. To Humbert, human interaction becomes, or is, very unassuming for him: his reality is that females are to be possessed, and men ought to contest for the ownership of them. They, the women, become the very definition of superiority and dominance. But it isn’t so barbaric of Humbert, for he designates his sexuality as of exceptionally polished taste, a penchant loftier than the typical man’s. His relationship with Valerie and Charlotte; his infatuation with Lolita; and his murdering of Quilty are all definite examples of his yearning for power. It is so that throughout the novel, and especially by its conclusion, the reader sees that Humbert’s desire for superiority subjugates the odd particularities of his wants and is the actual reason of his anguish.
Literary critic and the novel’s annotator Alfred Appel Jr. claims “what is extraordinary about Lolita is the way in which Nabokov enlists us, against our will, on Humbert’s side… Humbert has figuratively made the reader his accomplice in both statutory rape and murder” (Durantaye, Style Is Matter: the Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov 8). Nabokov employs various literary devices such as direct second reader address, metaphor, and allusions through Humbert Humbert as a means to conjure up feelings of empathy. The reader comes to find that . It is clear that Humbert Humbert uses second person address as a way to control how the reader perceives him. Through the use of this narrative mode, he aims to convince the reader that his sexual violence is artistically justifiable and that the art he creates is a remedy for mortality. I will argue is that art is not a remedy for mortality because in Humbert Humbert’s creation of Lolita, t...
Lumby’s beliefs and many of her arguments are reiterated in two other articles over the relationship between feminism and porn. In A Feminist Defense of Pornography by Wendy McElroy readers can find the different positions in the argument detailed and described, albeit with a bias towards one standing over the others. McElroy’s bias and position agrees with Lumby’s belief that porn and feminism need each other in a way, but McElroy takes the idea a bit farther by stating that it’s not just feminists, but all women that porn benefits (McElroy, par 27).
...has been proven and documented that Humbert is known to alter the truth and flat out lie when he is put into a tense situation in order to get himself out of trouble. Since a trial is usually used to decide whether a person is found guilty of his or her crimes it is only reasonable to believe that Humbert would lie in his narrative about his travels with Lolita in order to save and protect himself, thus cementing the fact that he cannot be trusted as a reliable narrator.
His first redeeming attribute is his real and true love for Lolita. Humbert infact confesses that, “I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight and ever sight”(270). If the reader thinks back to the beginning of the novel Humbert refers to Lolita as someone who only brought him lust. Humbert also makes it a point to tell the audience that he only like girls who fall into his nymphetic criteria and anyone who is too old does not appeal to him. When Humbert sees Lolita though after three years of being apart he says that “I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine”(278). No matter how she has age and move past her nymphetic stage of life Humbert still loves her. Humbert even goes on to say that, “No matter, even if those eyes of hers world fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn-even then I world go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita”(278). This is true love that he is feeling. No matter what happens to her he will still love her. Humbert has
By writing Valmont as a libertine and having Tourvel succumb to sexual passion, Laclos seems to argue that sexual desire is a stronger desire than remaining devout. Even if this is true, Laclos also seems to suggest that it is morally wrong to fall victim to sexual desire. This is evident when Tourvel writes, “As long as my life is necessary for his happiness, I shall treasure it and consider myself a lucky woman. If some day he has other views, he will never hear a word of protest or blame from me. I have already faced up to this possibility and made my decision” (288). This is the most important statement in the letter because it proves that Tourvel has some doubt to the longevity of her relationship, and she accepts the price she will have to pay for falling victim to her sexual desire. This thought is reemphasized when Tourvel writes, "You can now see how I am bound to be unaffected by the fear . . . that Valmont may ruin me” (288). It is almost as if Laclos reemphasizes her acquiescence to show that Tourvel doesn’t mind that she has ruined herself as long as she can act on her desire to love Valmont, even if that love is fated to end and she has to forsake her religious