![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragojustineFirst: Ask and I shall receive. Flist, you rock.
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
This book hits all of my narrative, textual loves so hard it may as well have been written for me. I haven't read anything that does such a good job of making the reader complicit since Clockwork Orange. Humbert is a brilliant unreliable and borderline actually duplicitous narrator, the book is set up with a wonderful framing device. It's structurally brilliant (symmetry and doublings galore) and linguistically brilliant (allusion and euphony and coinages and puns!) and it does a brilliant job of playing with narrator, author, and reader (oh, the fingerprints of the author, everywhere- audacious!) conflating and doubling and then separating them again. The humor is dark and striking, the few actual glimpses into Lolita herself are heartbreaking, the mystery to solve is wonderfully foreshadowed, the text draws attention to itself as text and textual game rather than trying to sustain disbelief...
The damn thing could be custom written for me. I haven't fallen this hard in new-author genius-crush since... Faulkner? Or maybe Borges or Eco or Wolfe. I might as well take out a damn ad. "Give me an unreliable narrator, a mystery to solve, a textual puzzle with some fourth-wall breaking, and a mass of allusions, and I will roll over for you like a little cocker spaniel begging to be pet." I am such a predictable reader.
The structure of presenting a book with all main characters already dead, presenting Humbert in jail waiting for trial and dead before he could be tried- it leaves the reader very clearly positioned as jury, as moral arbiter. The reader is asked to judge three moral questions at three textual levels (within Humbert's narrative, at the actual trial, Humbert's crime of murder; above Humbert's narrative but within the frame of the book, whether Humbert's creation of a piece of romantic art in any way ameliorates or atones for his abuse of Lolita; and outside the frame of the novel, whether the novel as a whole is a piece of art despite its subject matter). It's notable that none of those three questions has to do with the morality of Humbert's pedophilia itself. The book is resolutely amoral on that point (a-moral, in the classic definition, non-moral and not un-moral). Humbert's eventual guilt for that crime is ripe with signs of the unreliable narrator, and pressed by the structural needs of the story. The text demands to be read AS TEXT, and demands the reader to answer its particular agenda rather than their immediate visceral reactions. The book's disdain of psychology (also at several different textual levels) tries to keep you focused away from "human nature" and "human condition" and "the best in all of us" and "social patterns of victimization" and all that utter crap, and focused right down on THESE characters, THIS text, with a particularity that I find refreshing. It's all part of the big bag of tricks to force complicity, engagement rather than disgust.
It was certainly an interesting book to hit my first book club meeting with. That's for damn sure. Lots of very intelligent, interesting people there (though only half finished it), but talking about human condition and monster inside of all of us and psychological interpretation and moral horror of pedophilia.... and I'm sitting there going, "but the TEXT!" it makes me wonder to what extent the way I read is just... bizarrely idiosyncratic.
Downside: I have my![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
spn_nostalgia fic due in a month, and I don't think I'll be able to write incest for AT LEAST two weeks. *little shudder*
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
This book hits all of my narrative, textual loves so hard it may as well have been written for me. I haven't read anything that does such a good job of making the reader complicit since Clockwork Orange. Humbert is a brilliant unreliable and borderline actually duplicitous narrator, the book is set up with a wonderful framing device. It's structurally brilliant (symmetry and doublings galore) and linguistically brilliant (allusion and euphony and coinages and puns!) and it does a brilliant job of playing with narrator, author, and reader (oh, the fingerprints of the author, everywhere- audacious!) conflating and doubling and then separating them again. The humor is dark and striking, the few actual glimpses into Lolita herself are heartbreaking, the mystery to solve is wonderfully foreshadowed, the text draws attention to itself as text and textual game rather than trying to sustain disbelief...
The damn thing could be custom written for me. I haven't fallen this hard in new-author genius-crush since... Faulkner? Or maybe Borges or Eco or Wolfe. I might as well take out a damn ad. "Give me an unreliable narrator, a mystery to solve, a textual puzzle with some fourth-wall breaking, and a mass of allusions, and I will roll over for you like a little cocker spaniel begging to be pet." I am such a predictable reader.
The structure of presenting a book with all main characters already dead, presenting Humbert in jail waiting for trial and dead before he could be tried- it leaves the reader very clearly positioned as jury, as moral arbiter. The reader is asked to judge three moral questions at three textual levels (within Humbert's narrative, at the actual trial, Humbert's crime of murder; above Humbert's narrative but within the frame of the book, whether Humbert's creation of a piece of romantic art in any way ameliorates or atones for his abuse of Lolita; and outside the frame of the novel, whether the novel as a whole is a piece of art despite its subject matter). It's notable that none of those three questions has to do with the morality of Humbert's pedophilia itself. The book is resolutely amoral on that point (a-moral, in the classic definition, non-moral and not un-moral). Humbert's eventual guilt for that crime is ripe with signs of the unreliable narrator, and pressed by the structural needs of the story. The text demands to be read AS TEXT, and demands the reader to answer its particular agenda rather than their immediate visceral reactions. The book's disdain of psychology (also at several different textual levels) tries to keep you focused away from "human nature" and "human condition" and "the best in all of us" and "social patterns of victimization" and all that utter crap, and focused right down on THESE characters, THIS text, with a particularity that I find refreshing. It's all part of the big bag of tricks to force complicity, engagement rather than disgust.
It was certainly an interesting book to hit my first book club meeting with. That's for damn sure. Lots of very intelligent, interesting people there (though only half finished it), but talking about human condition and monster inside of all of us and psychological interpretation and moral horror of pedophilia.... and I'm sitting there going, "but the TEXT!" it makes me wonder to what extent the way I read is just... bizarrely idiosyncratic.
Downside: I have my
spn_nostalgia fic due in a month, and I don't think I'll be able to write incest for AT LEAST two weeks. *little shudder*