-invites and holds them off through parody ethical questions -Humberts techniques of rhetorical seduction -place of Nabokov

in the novel Literary modernism p.15: At first I planned to take a degree in psychiatry as many manqu talents do; but I was even more manqu than that; a peculiar exhaustion, I am so oppressed, doctor, set in; and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movies with expatriates. I sat with uranists in the deuxMagots. I published tortuous essays in obscure journals. I composed pastiches: Fraulein von Kulp/may turn, her hand upon the door;/I will not follow her. Nor Fresca. Nor/ that Gull. -parody of T.S Eliots Gerontion: a poem of personal/historical crisis; possibility of rejuvenation is devoured; -what in Eliot is a crisis, is a joke in Nabokov: a burlesque of Eliots modernism; -Eliots ideas about art: poems should be autotelic; ends onto themselves -Nabokov: the novel only has purpose to afford aesthetic bliss (this poem returns on page 134, much more serious and strange) Modernism: the art/literature of the early 20th century; roots in 19th century (esp. French) literature; -late novel of Henry James; in poetry with Eliot and Ezra Proud -prose: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf -a movement that had rapid success; taught as classic literature before the war 8 features of literary modernism 1. obsession with the idea of arts autonomy; art is its own law; art for arts sake 2. a sense of crisis; a radical break in culture, artistic forms being overturned; civilization itself is being overturned 3. the paradigm of experience is artistic experience; artistic norms should be everybodys norms; culture itself is the saving/most important activity people should engage in; careful perception and deep reflection 4. rejection of convention; esp. sexual conventions, sexual morality;

5. artist is a kind of technician; values are of craft, form and style; rather than message/wisdom/personal message 6. spatial form; term from critic Joseph Frank: in place of a linear narrative, a system of close references and repeated motifs that give the structure of works; only visible in re-reading 7. consciously international; ambitions to be a culture for many nations; 8. artist is seen as a kind of spiritual exile; alienated from home country; International high modernism Esp. Faulkner and Hemingway -parallel American tradition; Dreiser, Mark Twain in 19th century Nabokov -modernist tradition; what he owes a lot to and always tries to distinguish himself from it -highest value is originality -any new trend in art is a knights move; a change of shadows; -pg. 10; -to frustrate your expectations, to leap over the apparently important events, into something else characterized by a kind of aesthetic bliss; important feature: parenthesis; Proust -the great aesthetist of modernism; giving a theory of memory; work of the artist -Joyces Ulysses, Kafkas Metamorphosis, first part of Prousts Fairy tale, In search of lost time -Proust: gay; -Nabokov: relationship with predecessors who are seen as too similar; attraction and disidentification The theme of doubling; Joyce -stylistic virtuosity -crapulous attention to banal details -constant use of superimposed structure; -puns

p.221: Vivian Darkbloom from Joyce Joyce: p.51: list of names Mcfate; icon of the difference between the realistic world of Joyce and the already aestheticized world of this novel; a parody of real randomness; -artificial, processed, bland, easily consumable version of fate -Mcnugget of the modernist novel; Short circuit between the Joycian idea of taking ordinary life and transforming it into aesthetic -in the text, reality has been already rendered aesthetic; -a poem to a crazed, aroused mind of Humbert -the artificial taking the place of real -p.84: -taking the narrative of real events -p.118 -nothing is ordinary, left to chance; Correspondence between the place that Humbert meets Lolita and the place that Humbert rapes her -transformation of real fated, arbitrary events to conspicuously artificial, conspicuous tricks; a response particularly to exile -exile; denaturalized world; everything must be decoded, figured out and reinvented; -a state of discontinuity; but reward is the possibility of invention; -the knights move; skips over forms of violence; -p.192: One of the latticed squares in a smalla knights move from the topalways strangely disturbed me. -feeling of damage;

Nabokov -the real writer has no given values at his disposal; he must create them himself; the material of this world might be real enough, but is chaos; recombined; -evocation of how writer and reader meet; at the summit of the misty mountain of the imagination -a totally idealized sense of how reader encounters it; -the mark of censorship is still on the book; Nabokovs essay: On a book entitled Lolita p.313: on the genre fiction of pornography -artistic originality turns out to be the murderer to the fans disgust -likened to the murderer of convention -criminality of artistic originality; allies it with the figure of Humbert -suggests that the banal attention to convention that is in fact what needs to be censored and done away with Nabokovs secret map of Lolita:

p.316 -the scenes that delight him; the nerves of the book The second road trip of the novel that Lolita initiates -most conspicuous feature; the increase of violence in the novel; he hits her, he pushes her, he rapes her repeatedly; -his style becomes more manic; even funnier; -outright comedy scenes in the novel; especially the shooting of Quilty; -Humbert presents himself as a hapless madman; he vomits in a resort in Colorado; physical deterioration; gets desperate -Lolita gets more calculating; -p.207: -Lolita takes on the role of an artist -fight over Lolitas participation in the play; Humberts suspicion of some deceit in Lolita; -Lolita seduces Humbert -passes from his prose to her acting

-her work in the play that trains her to certain affectations -she now is using the clichs of romance to seduce him into following her map of their second journey -p.209: -the realm of that mountain of the imagination; Humberts meditation on looking at a map and seeing a range of in which the imagination can have pure play -he becomes disappointed; finds them much less romantic; a garbage dump -the chapter break from Lolitas first efforts at motivating the romantic clichs, immediately pay off in transporting him to that mountainous imagination; this is how we know that shes got him; shes got him in the imagination; shes not only seduced his lustful body; she has him fully under her power at this point; -p.231-232: The pose of tennis service; the same pose that she uses to seduce him in the scene she had seduced him; she is acting out a form;

-in the first case, she acts out the form of romantic fiction; the heroine swooining back; -in this scene, the form of the game, the perfect form of tennis; -perfect imitation of absolutely top knotch tennis; its perfect tennis, but she never wins -non-utilitarian quality that is a mark of her wholeness; -if aesthetic bliss is what Nabokov confesses is his ultimate aim for art; something like that is what Lolita gives us in her perfect tennis form without the will to win; the frankness, the beauty, the kindness, the lack of deception; -a version of play; of childrens play; not a competitive play; a pure play; -the image of the chess problem; not in the middle of a game; its a puzzle; its delight a solitary quality; not in the course of competitive play; -self-absorbed autonomous play of Lolitas tennis form; the same kind of play that children have; it doesnt have point; its all process and form

-if the threat to a work of art, to the novel is convention -threat to this kind of novel; parallel to the threat to children; -all sorts of children; p.213-215 -three images of cancelled children; to characterize Lolita; her childhood is stolen from her by Humbert; -in this scene, the mothers imaginative preoccupation that cancels her children; she is preoccupied with the new child; -pregnancy an image of the imagination?; inner meaning/significance, a figure of what preoccupies her -her distant internal smile; the same that Lolita is supposed to have; -Lolitas famous smile; her smile is the response to an internal imagined life; -children who have the potential to play, are consistently cancelled over and over again

-otherexamples p.223: Mona, Lolitas friend from the play, her baby sibling dies; -the bodies of children pile up Carved, blue-stone children; -town of Elphinstone; a little child of stone; -children dead, children turned to stone; The dark side of that fairy tale quality; -p.207-208: The threat against Lolita is growing with her body as she becomes bigger; -Humberts desire to crystalize what he has taken from her -she is in chains, and just because it is ornamented, dimunitive, doesnt mean it is not a chain; doesnt mitigate against the confinement he has perpetuated on lolita; it is around her throat, that vulnerable place -art as play; a performance; embodied art;

-another kind of art; gemm-like, hard, cold; equally formal but dead; blue-stone children; this is the other form that aesthetic can take; -two valences of what the aesthetic can look like -if it can look like the gem, it can last forever -his account as that kind of enduring stone-like object, gives immortality, but traps her there in that immortality with him; -he is as immortal as she is; -like the chainlet, takes that stone-like distillation of life, turning rain to stone, turning to life to a representation by your tormentor, to something durable; -the problem with art is that it is immortal; if life is threatened over and over again by mortality, dead children, lo,itagrowning up inevitably, putting her at risk; thats mortality/passage of time -art that is lapitory and living; art that is living by the virtue of living can also die -autonomous art that has a life of its own; ti lives on after the authors death;

-problem is: something about life that is depended on the possibility of its negation; -the potential to decay that makes them beautiful -the problem here: nabkov dreams of autonomous art; like butterflies; -one moment when the butterfly appears; in the scene that Humbert and Lolita play tennis -mark of their equality as artists; -the butterfly is the perfect work of art; both a representation and alive; it has eyes on its wings; it looks like a leaf; it is nature in its aesthetic form as imitation of itself; life as an imitation of life; -can you make a novel that will sprout wings and grow claws in secret? -an image of the metamorphosis of the butterfly within the chrysalis -the novel to be like a living butterfly; -the threat; that it will be like an aquamarine; -image of the jewel; dead childhood even for him; p.307

-the living voice is missing; the corpose of the novel; with marrow, blood and flies -Dolly Schiller aptly named for the german romantic philosopher; play as a mode of aesthetic; Dolly takes on that identity as the romantic figure; and she dies giving birth to a baby girl; she has taken on the mantle of romantic artist; she dies giving brith to a living person -2 modes of creativity; shes giving birth to a living live thing; not a creation that is more like stone but an actual person; the paradox of wanting your work to be a living work of art, made animate, personified, that exposes it to mortality; that kind of risk; -dolly embodies that other kind of creativity; giving birth to a child; this kind of creation is a failure; it cannot succeed in the confines of this novel -this absence, this failure of any birth, marks a vanishing point of art; that art cannot quite compete with the real inventivess of nature and of human persons -hes going to try to give us a living prose; but this is the end against which it finds itself pressed

-a novel both a confession and a parody of confession