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pedersencr
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 8:25 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 921 Location: New Orleans
Melody,
You are right! I didn't check. I guess I was mixing thoughts with scenes in the movies where all three are together.
Charles
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lshap
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 8:47 pm Reply with quote
Site Admin Joined: 12 May 2004 Posts: 4246 Location: Montreal
Melody's take is dead-on, and I'm pretty sure Nabokov included other mentionings of Lolita's desperate horror, not even counting her continued attempts to escape Humbert.

Humbert's first-person attempts at excusing his actions were pretty transparent - even he seemed to realize, retroactively, the soul-crushing harm he caused her.
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yambu
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 8:58 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 23 May 2004 Posts: 6441 Location: SF Bay Area
Joe Vitus wrote:
Marj,..... "Annabelle Lee" is a poem by Poe in which the narrator mourns the death of a woman he grew up with, and loved, and who has died. The narrator of this poem isn't a maniac, but by citing a work by Poe, and twining his identity with Humbert, perhaps Nabokov alludes to the possibility that his protagonist, like so many of Poe's, is not in his right mind and not to be trusted as a source of information.
The narrator IS unhinged:

.....The Angels, half so happy in Heaven,
Went envying her and me
Yes! That was the reason (as all men know
In this kingdom by the sea)
That a wind came out of a cloud by night
Chilling and killing my Annabelle Lee.......

I know this is a Romantic convention, but Poe didn't have to add "...as all men know...". Marj, and others, download a copy - it's short - and you will see why it is the perfect match for HH's childhood love.

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yambu
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 9:31 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 23 May 2004 Posts: 6441 Location: SF Bay Area
pedersencr wrote:
.....In Lyne's film, I thought Melanie Griffith's pronunciation (as Charlotte Haze) of "That's my Lo," was utterly fantastic, with intonation and emphasis exactly as if she were saying "That's my chair."
In the book, it's "That was my Lo.....and these are my lilies."

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yambu
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 10:18 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 23 May 2004 Posts: 6441 Location: SF Bay Area
[quote="pedersencr"].....There are motels with the cutesy names he ennumerates; there are service station attendants such as he describes; there are touristy road-side attractions such as he mocks; and there are sappy ads pointed toward the American consumer.....

The two chapters in Part Two with Headmistress Pratt had me laughing harder than anywhere else in the book:

"We are not concerned, Mr. Humbird, with having our students become bookworms....What we are concerned with is the adjustment of the child to group life. That is why we stress the four D's: Dramatics, Dance, Debating and Dating..."

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pedersencr
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 10:33 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 921 Location: New Orleans
Marj wrote:
Charlie, (darn, did it again!)

Just to clarify, are you saying Lolita was more a victim of circumstance, ie Bad parenting?

If so how would you describe Humbert's movtives? Obsession, love, lust or a combination of all of the above? Although I do have a problem equating love and obsession. No matter how sexy Calvin Klein would like obsession to appear.


Marj,
Had a long answer to your short questions, but lost it. Will rethink and repost tomorrow.
G'night
Charles (but Charlie is OK too) Smile
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yambu
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 10:35 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 23 May 2004 Posts: 6441 Location: SF Bay Area
Joe Vitus wrote:
......Because the novel is told, like a story by Poe (don't forget the Annabelle Lee "prologue"), from the point of view of a deranged mind, deciphering what really occurred is a problem.
It's a"problem" for the reader in the immediate sense. But I'm sure you wouldn't want this story narrated by a third person voice. The beclouded vision of one ruled by a monstrous passion gives us an ambiguity that enriches the story so much. Was Lo really innocent of what was happening when they were on the couch? "...There she stood and blinked, cheeks aflame, hair awry, her eyes passing over me as lightly as they did over the furniture..."

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yambu
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 10:47 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 23 May 2004 Posts: 6441 Location: SF Bay Area
mitty wrote:
[quote="Marj.....I think she was trying to seduce him, but did not actually understand the reality of what she was doing. The consequences of her actions. The "hormonal" wanting was there, but not the brakes of maturity.....[/i]
Very good, Mitty. She is a child, but old enough to not possibly miss How HH was obsessed with her. Having no love from her mother, early on she would play with Humbert's attentions, in an on and off again way, for the sport of it.

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Marj
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 10:54 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 10497 Location: Manhattan
As soon as I read "the sport of it", everything came together.

Excellent post, Yambu.

Nite, Charles. I am taking no more chances! Cool
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yambu
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 10:58 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 23 May 2004 Posts: 6441 Location: SF Bay Area
mitty wrote:
....I was surprised to see that Nabokov did the screenplay on the 1960 version. One would be led to believe that version would be the more correct one?? And yet I did not find that to be the case.
Kubrick radically altered that screenplay, so much so that years later Nabokov published his own version, itself a thorough revision of his original. The unpublished original has not surfaced.

I haven't seen the Kubrick film in twenty years. When I did see it, I think I walked out when I saw that Lolita was not the right age. I felt Kubrick had lost his nerve, and so had tampered with the very heart of the story.

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Joe Vitus
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 11:02 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 14498 Location: Houston
Yambu,

Good point! I was thinking, well he's not in an aslyum for killing his roommate, nor is he recalling a man he walled up in response to an insult. But this narrator isn't quite what we'd call well-adjusted, either, is he?
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Melody
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 11:03 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 2242 Location: TX
Mitty & Yambu, I actually agree with both of you about Lolita wanting/needing attention, getting it any way she could. But honestly, I don't see her taking advantage of HH's sickness because she didn't, um, grasp it until it was too late.

One of the most hateful things HH writes, which I suppose he thinks justifies everything:


Quote:
I have but followed nature. I am nature's faithful hound. Why then this horror that I cannot shake off? Did I deprive her of her flower? Sensitive gentlewomen of the jury, I was not even her first lover.

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Joe Vitus
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 11:09 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 14498 Location: Houston
Pedersencr,

I don't mind you jumping in at all. I think Nabokov offers us the out that the only "reality" of relevence to this story is the world of the novel, i.e., the world Humbert constructs. We don't have to bother trying to decipher the actual story, though in the back of our minds we know that there probably is one.

I don't know if you've read Little Big Man, but it offers a similar situation. We're given to understand through the preface that the narrator is not only very old, but also not necessarily to be trusted. Once the novel proper starts, we can decide for ourselves how far-fetched or how accurately we want to take it.
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mitty
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 11:22 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 02 Aug 2004 Posts: 1359 Location: Way Down Yonder.......
yambu wrote:
mitty wrote:
....I was surprised to see that Nabokov did the screenplay on the 1960 version. One would be led to believe that version would be the more correct one?? And yet I did not find that to be the case.
Kubrick radically altered that screenplay, so much so that years later Nabokov published his own version, itself a thorough revision of his original. The unpublished original has not surfaced.

I haven't seen the Kubrick film in twenty years. When I did see it, I think I walked out when I saw that Lolita was not the right age. I felt Kubrick had lost his nerve, and so had tampered with the very heart of the story.


Now that (the screenplay) would be something I'd like to read! Sue Lyon was way too old to play the role. But you know as well as I do, that a true aged girl would not have passed the "censors" of the time. Even in the last version, the girl was not as young as in the book. But far more passable. Both actresses radiated a coldness, and.......a lack of emotion. Maybe that was from being violated, and used so badly at so young an age. A shell so to speak.

I rented both Lolita's from Netflix. I'd seen the James Mason version when it came out, and had not seen the latter at all. I was really too young to understand the nuances, I just remembered the creepyish vibes.
Oh, I did remember Humbert pulling over and his arm paining him terribly. Too many instances were lumped together. Him running after the car. Heart condition, etc. I did like the way the later one presented the scene with the flat, and him chasing the car on the forested road as opposed to no chasing, and the desert road in the original.

It wasn't until I saw the Mason version again that the nickel dropped, and I realized that it was Quilty all along. I mean as the "psychiatrist" that came to see Humbert (regarding the play). Peter Sellers was great.
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mitty
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 11:28 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 02 Aug 2004 Posts: 1359 Location: Way Down Yonder.......
One other thing on the lack of maternal affection. I am quoting the mother. "She had been spiteful, if you please, at the age of one, when she used to throw her toys out of her crib so that her poor mother (italics mine) should keep picking them up, the villainous infant!" this to Humbert.

I mean puhleeezzze.
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