"You are a murderer" LOLITA:
we have power in the novel, without us, the story doesn't exist
- metafiction: involved with HH "I won't exist unless you imagine me"
- Stranger than Fiction
- If you stop reading, you are a MURDERER, but if you keep reading you condone HH's actions. You can't win either way...
- "And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita" ~ pg 309
SPEAK, MEMORY endings:
- "the power of imagination is to imagine the things you are not"~ Dr. S
- is the evil character a reflection of the author? ie- Flannery O'Connor, Shakespeare, VN
- The Bolshevik Revolution: homesick for a home that can only be visited in the imagination because they are in exile
- pg 54: is Heinrich von Kleist HH?? "...who, at thirty-three, had fallen passionately in love with [Christian August von Stagemann's] twelve-year-old daughter Hedwig Marie"
- Lewis Carroll and John Duston
VN is obsessed with lost time:
- pg 250 "I wonder, however, whether there is really much to be said for more anesthetic destinies, for, let us say, a smooth, safe, small-town continuity of time, with its primitive absence of perspective, when, at fifty, one is still dwelling in the clapboard house of one's childhood, so that every time one cleans the attic one comes across the same pile of old brown schoolbooks, still together among later accumulations of dead objects, and where, on summery Sunday mornings, one's wife stops on the sidewalk to endure for a minute or two that terrible, garrulous, dyed, church-bound McGee woman, who, way back in 1915, used to be pretty, naughty Margaret Ann of the mint-flavored mouth and nimble fingers."
- pg 283 "I got five dollars (quite a sum during the inflation in Germany) for my Russian Alice in Wonderland. I helped compile a Russian grammar for foreigners in which the first exercise began with the words Madam, ya diktor, vot banan (Madame, I am the doctor, here is a banana). Best of all, I used to compose for a daily emigre paper, the Berlin Rul', the first Russian crossword puzzles, which I baptized krestoslovitsi. I find it strange to recall that freak existence." (in All About Steve, Sandra Bullock plays a woman who creates crossword puzzles, not unlike Nabokov himself)
- pg 287-8 "Conversely, Sirin's admirers made much, perhaps too much, of his unusual style, brilliant precision, functional imagery and that sort of thing. Russian readers who had been raised on the sturdy straightforwardness of Russian realism and had called the bluff of decadent cheats, were impressed by the mirror-like angles of his clear, but weirdly misleading sentences and by the fact that the real life of his books flowed in his figures of speech, which one critic has compared to 'windows giving upon a contiguous world... a rolling corollary, the shadow of a train of thought.' Across the dark sky of exile, Sirin passed, to use a simile of a more conservative nature, like a meteor, and disappeared, leaving nothing much else behind him than a vague sense of uneasiness."
- pg 296 "Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii for my love- from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter- to monstrously remote points of the universe. Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behavior of nebulae (whose very remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the cold, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time. It is a pernicious habit, but I can do nothing about it." ~ this is as close as VN comes to talking about religion in S,M
Vera: his love
America: The New World
photography induces a "soul-sucking death"
Harry Potter Pictures move and are alive, Dumbledore goes into a photograph after he dies...
Charles Whitman: the Texas sniper
ephiphany: 'a sudden manifestation of the divine'
Lolita is a mixture of: Cupid and Psyche, Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Little Red Riding hood, etc
'White widowed male'= black widow spider with the 'our glass' on her back, reminds me of Arachne from Ovid
the forward to Lolita is a fake!!! JR JR= VN
The Frame Narrative:
places that are named after what they look like:
this is Horseshoe Lake, in Woodland, Wa
Displaced Fairytales:
this is Horseshoe Lake, in Woodland, Wa
Displaced Fairytales: Lolita is a FT, Little Red Riding Hood:
- Lolita= Red
- HH= big, bad wolf
- Charlotte= g-ma
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