Terrific Responses
These are splendid responses that will engender a great discussion of this complex, difficult, pleasurable and painful novel. The game-playing theme is an apt one for entry, so in class let’s start with it. We talked last week about the novel’s wordplay and Ariana has done a good job of highlighting some of the elements that, as she says, offer readers a challenge to stick with the second half, despite its slower pace and drawn out plot. For everyone, think about how the game playing ties in with the detective story that ultimately illuminates why HH is in jail writing this “confession.”
A note to all: be sure to place your names on your entries and have them registered on the sidebar. I think it is Savannah’s entry that dives into the psychological state that HH has come to by the time he has carried out the murder and is in jail for it. That will take us into the spinning process that unfolds, moving from his initial obsessiveness to his attempts to control Delores, to his paranoia that proves to be real, his delving into questions of fate and determinism as cause and excuse (and as the post suggests, what does it say about us as readers to have gone along with him at stages.
Sami has provided a strong grounding for the ways in which the documents from Peiss provide the context for the novel. As she astutely points out, the famous and for some infamous Kinsey report and the McCarthy hearings and the publication of Lolita all take place in the same time period. Grasping this allows us to better understand Nabokov’s creations/creatures/characters as well as Foucault’s arguments about the deployment of sexuality and its networks of power relations that intertwine perversity, promiscuity, and hysteria with normality, stability, and responsibility.
The other unnamed post (I think by Richard) focuses insightfully on the fluid power relations between HH and Delores, pointing out her place of resistance (reverse discourse) and efforts to gain control over her situation and Humbert. Also of importance for our discussion is the status of truth that this post brings up. If, as it states, “Truth” does not exist in HH’s accounts, does it reside in some form in and through the novel? A similar question emerges about love, which ties in with HH’s “poor truth.”
Thanks to all of you for these thoughtful and richly suggestive responses to the novel.
