Let's talk about unicorns and rainbows

The local newspaper, which had been ailing for a while and now seems to be in a critical condition, reported that a middle-aged man of some local standing now faces charges of allegedly molesting a teenage girl who was known to him.

Meanwhile, there are people--especially undergraduate students--who think that it is inappropriate to teach Lolita.  As if there is nothing that we can possibly learn and understand about humans by reading and discussing Lolita.

It is not an easy text to read.  I know. I have attempted that twice.  The last time was three summers ago.  As I noted then, "my spirit is too weak to continue on with Lolita."  That book, and the real world too, is not for wusses like me.

A literature professor writes about teaching Lolita even though her students complained about it, even though she has been teaching it since 2008.

I was not surprised by the vehemence of your response to the book, but by the suggestion that we should perhaps not read it at all. That by assigning Lolita I am perpetuating trauma and may even be perpetuating rape culture. This last suggestion runs so counter to my own beliefs about what literature does that I found it hard to parry your challenges.

It is almost as if students want literature professors to only teach Aesop's Fables!

Professors need to assign, and students need to read, difficult books. The challenges we face are not new. Our students are not “coddled” (a discourse which I abhor). But we need to read and discuss and come to our own conclusions. Even if that conclusion is that Nabokov contributed to a “Lolita myth” that has at times had horrific resonance in our culture.

Indeed!

Nabokov wrote about the difficulty in getting his book published.

Their refusal to buy the book was based not on my treatment of the theme but on the theme itself, for there are at least three themes which are utterly taboo as far as most American publishers are concerned.  The two others are: a Negro-White marriage which is a complete and glorious success resulting in lots of children and grandchildren; and the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106.

As I noted then:

It was only in 1967 that the US Supreme Court invalidated laws that prohibited interracial marriage.   As far as atheists, Nabokov was not exaggerating by any means; this country might even be ready to elect as president a bisexual Black woman who is a Muslim before the electorate ever warms up to an atheist!

I don't understand the demand that higher education not include such challenging and difficult topics.  If we don't, then all that remains is preparing automatons for the work place, with a curriculum that is based on graphic novels.  Oh wait, we already do that!

Lolita is not for wusses. I am a wuss. Ergo, ...

I read.
I fought.
I quit.

I parted ways with Lolita.
Call me a wimp.
But I don't care.

Death I can handle, and I engage in a whole lot of reading and thinking about it.  Because death happens. It is only a matter of time.  We are mortals who can't figure out our expiration dates.

The complex and tragic story of H.H. and Lolita, on the other hand ...

Of course, those are characters that Nabokov imagined.  But, keep in mind that great literature is nothing but a mirror of who we are.  As I was reading Lolita, I read the following the other day in the "Dear Prudence" column in Slate, which I have been regularly reading for years:

Dear Prudence, I live in a close-knit community, and my husband and I are, or were, close friends with a couple who live in our apartment building. We are all in our late 50s. In our community there is a single mother with an 11-year-old daughter, and many of us are friends with the mother. The husband of the couple who lives in our building offered to be a father figure for the 11-year-old because her father is not in the girl’s life. He tutored the girl in school subjects with which she was having trouble. One day the girl came to me and told me that while she was being tutored in “Mark’s” apartment, his wife had to go out. He then offered to read a book to her. He chose a book about teenagers’ changing bodies. He told her to sit on his lap, which she did, and they leafed through the book until they came to the parts about boys’ changing bodies, and there were drawings of boys’ erect penises and “Mark” asked her if she had ever seen an erect penis. After she told me this, I arranged for her to talk with an experienced social worker. The social worker is convinced that Mark did not molest her, and while what he did was clearly inappropriate, it is not reportable or prosecutable. I can’t get this scenario out of my head.

Even if you have not read Lolita, you know enough about it to immediately see the parallel here with Nabokov's imaginary H.H. scheming to get his nymphet.  When literature portrays a Raskolnikov or a H.H., the characters and the situations that the authors create are not different from the real world people and happenings.  As we often find out to be the case, the real world is stranger than fiction.

Meanwhile, the local newspaper reported this:

A Thurston High School English teacher is under investigation for allegedly sending nude photographs of herself to a male student.
Sgt. Rich Charboneau confirmed that police are investigating an alleged incident involving a Thurston High School teacher but would not confirm her name.
However, Springfield School District spokeswoman Deb Jolda confirmed that the high school teacher under investigation is Stephanie Rodakowski, and said that Rodakowski is no longer employed by the school district.

The real world has more male and female H.H. than we would ever find out.  I suspect that only a few of the real H.H. ever get reported and prosecuted.

When Nabokov writes in his marvelous ways words and sentences about H.H. and Lolita, it is almost as if things are happening right in the next room in the hotel with flimsy walls, and I want to yell at H.H. and punch him in his face.  Like how the Bradley Cooper character in Silver Linings Playbook threw out of the window his copy of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, I too want to toss the damn book away.  The difference is that Cooper's character finished the book before he did.  I too read A Farewell to Arms all the way to the end and felt what he felt, which is all the more why I enjoyed watching that scene in the movie.  But, my spirit is too weak to continue on with Lolita.  Especially when I know fully well that it gets worse after where I have stopped, with the end of Part I.

I need a break after all these heavy stuff.  I deserve a break.  From blogging itself.  Maybe I will spend some time with the friend to marvel at the cloud shapes while having a few Fudgsicles ;)

Soon I shall return, and start with the third and final book of this summer's deep-reads, which I hope will be infinitely lighter than what Tolstoy and Nabokov gave me; as Boney M, a favorite during my high school years, wrapped up in one of their hits, "oh, those Russians ...!" ;)

This hermit hates pain and suffering ... yet, he reads Lolita?

It is a fictional world that Nabokov has created, yes.  But, what a tragedy it is.

I am so tempted to ditch the book and watch a Disney movie in which people live happily ever after.  But then, real life is not fairy tales!  While we don't encounter and experience the likes of Humbert Humbert--thankfully-- every day we fight monsters, small and big, weak and strong, and bad to worse to malicious  Such is life!  Humbert Humbert is a metaphor, representing all things evil and representing us humans too.

It is not easy to read how H.H. is slowly laying out his plan, his trap.  I suppose this is also why in real life people choose to turn away from any discussion that is about all things unpleasant. Not all among us are wired to deal with the messiness that we know exists.  I  am such a wuss that I can't even visit with a sick person--my legs weaken and I worry that I will faint.  My stomach practically revolts when I watch or read the horrors that Nicholas Kristof presents, because the suffering there is way beyond my thresholds.  But, just as I am pushing myself to read Lolita, I force myself to visit with the sick friend or relative, and follow Kristof's journeys.  I understand that life is not only about me, and as much as a hermit I am, life includes humanity.

I wondered what the New York Times review said about the book soon after its publication.  Google helped out, as always; in this review from August 17, 1958, I find the following paragraph:

 The author, that is, is writing about all lust. He has afflicted poor Humbert with a special and taboo variety for a couple of contradictory reasons. In the first place, its illicit nature will both shock the reader into paying attention and prevent sentimentally false sympathy from distorting his judgment. Contrariwise, I believe, Mr. Nabokov is slyly exploiting the American emphasis on the attraction of youth and the importance devoted to the “teen-ager” in order to promote an unconscious identification with Humbert’s agonies. Both techniques are entirely valid. But neither, I hope, will obscure the purpose of the device: namely, to underline the essential, inefficient, painstaking and pain-giving selfishness of all passion, all greed—of all urges, whatever they may be, that insist on being satisfied without regard to the effect their satisfaction has upon the outside world. Humbert is all of us.

Nabokov made it clear that he didn't write the novel with any moral in mind.  But, we readers use literature to make sense of the world, and to articulate an understanding of the good and the bad.  We do make use of them to develop our own moral guides.  The paragraph that I quoted sums it up really well.

Caption at the source:
Vladimir Nabokov dictating from notecards as his wife, Véra, transcribed his words in Ithaca, N.Y., in 1958

I shudder when I think about what Nabokov's H.H. will do in the pages to come!  And who knows what horror Kristof will narrate next!  We will press on, right?

Did the Lepcha believe in Dante's nine circles of hell?

A long time ago, in the old country, I loved going to the local "Park club" every weekend, not only to chance upon that girl but also because that's where I could get to watch movies that otherwise was not possible in that small little industrial township. The first ever Malayalam movie that I watched was in that open-air setting.  I never forgot the movie or this song because of how much I was compelled to seriously think for the first time about love and sex and age.  In that Malayalam movie, it was an old man marrying a young woman, whose love was another young man.  To borrow from a recent movie title, "it's complicated."

Of course, in our daily lives back then, people did not talk about love and sex.  Those were essentially taboo. Via metaphors, the elders reminded us youth to control our impulses, even as we were being transported to the fictional print and film worlds where love and sex ruled supreme.  And love and sex and marriage in the old ways was anything but the practices of today.  Children got married.  Sometimes it was fully grown adults who married the children.

The Humbert Humbert character in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita explains his fixation in nymphets and draws comparisons with societies elsewhere:

Marriage and cohabitation before the age of puberty are still not uncommon in certain East Indian provinces.  Lepcha old men of eighty copulate with girls of eight, and nobody minds.  After all, Dante fell madly in love with his Beatrice when she was nine, a sparkling girleen, painted and lovely, and bejeweled, in a crimson frock, and this was in 1274, in Florence, at a private feast in the merry month of May.  And when Petrarch fell madly in love with his Laureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight, in the beautiful plain as descried from the hills of Vaucluse.

My idiocy means that I am stumped about: (a) Lepcha: who are they and did they really practice this?; (b) was this Dante thing for real?; (c) the name Petrarch rings a bell, but I can't' place it; and (d) what the heck does "descried" mean?

I knew I would run into such situations even when I chose Lolita as one of my summer deep reads.  And that is exactly why I chose that--it was not because of the plot of the older man's relationship with a young girl.  That story-line is merely the vehicle for me to to understand a little bit more about the human condition, and it is working out well thus far.

The annotations in the book answers a whole bunch of questions that arise as I read the book, and Google fills in with the rest.  But, I got really, really curious about the Lepcha.  In India?  Wikipedia helps out!

What amazes me is this: Nabokov did not have any Wikipedia. No Google. No nothing.  Yet, he easily strings together a paragraph in which he mentions the Lepcha, Dante, and Petrarch, and the fine details about them?  WTF!  At this rate, when a new academic year begins, I will be really, really convinced that I am a fake who doesn't know any damn thing and I will hope that students never ever find that out ;)

Do I deserve this face? Really!

One of the many wonderful things about reading the Economist is this: the correspondents bring in quotes that are just charming.

The trigger for such a post is this: the latest issue of the Economist has a special on Singapore, to mark the city-state's fiftieth birthday.  The lead essay begins with:

At 50, according to George Orwell, everyone has the face he deserves. Singapore, which on August 9th marks its 50th anniversary as an independent country, can be proud of its youthful vigour.

It took me a while to get past the opening sentences.  After all, it was not too long ago that I crossed the five-oh.  "everyone has the face he deserves"?  I don't deserve to look better than this?  I don't deserve to look like George Clooney or a Bradley Cooper? ;)

Here's the unfortunate aspect of it all--Orwell himself did not live to look at himself in the mirror and decide whether he deserved that face.  He was only 47 years old when he lost the battle against tuberculosis.

I wonder whether Nabokov thought he deserved the face that he had when he wrote Lolita; he was a little over fifty at that time.  He was in Oregon when he finished writing that novel.  In Ashland.  And he apparently wrote a poem, titled "Lines written in Oregon."  Guess where it was published?  Yep, the New Yorker!  This is all way too fascinating how the different things are inter-connected ;)

Esmeralda! now we rest
Here, in the bewitched and blest
Mountain forests of the West.
Here the very air is stranger.
Damzel, anchoret, and ranger
Share the woodland’s dream and danger.
And to think I deemed you dead!
(In a dungeon, it was said;
Tortured, strangled); but instead –
Blue birds from the bluest fable,
Bear and hare in coats of sable,
Peacock moth on picnic table.
Huddled roadsigns softly speak
Of Lake Merlin, Castle Creek,
And (obliterated) Peak.
Do you recognize that clover?
Dandelions, l’or du pauvre?
(Europe, nonetheless, is over).
Up the turk, along the burn
Latin lilies climb and turn
Into Gothic fir and fern.
Cornfields have befouled the prairies
But these canyons laugh! And there is
Still the forest with its fairies.
And I rest where I awoke
In the sea shade – l’ombre glauque –
Of a legendary oak;
Where the woods get ever dimmer,
Where the Phantom Orchids glimmer –
Esmeralda, immer, immer.

But this means that I have to now struggle to figure out what the poem is really about!  No wonder Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew didn't care about poems and feelings;  in that same essay in which it quoted Orwell, the Economist notes that Lee's maxim was "poetry is a luxury we cannot afford,”

I wonder whether Lee deserved his face when he was fifty! ;)

I suppose I do have an alias: Poseur!

I did something which is not that much unusual for me: I started reading Lolita by first reading Vladimir Nabokov's afterword.  And am all the wiser as a result.

In writing about the American publishers who turned down the book--this was in 1954, more than sixty years ago!--Nabokov notes:

Their refusal to buy the book was based not on my treatment of the theme but on the theme itself, for there are at least three themes which are utterly taboo as far as most American publishers are concerned.  The two others are: a Negro-White marriage which is a complete and glorious success resulting in lots of children and grandchildren; and the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106.

It was only in 1967 that the US Supreme Court invalidated laws that prohibited interracial marriage.   As far as atheists, Nabokov was not exaggerating by any means; this country might even be ready to elect as president a bisexual Black woman who is a Muslim before the electorate ever warms up to an atheist!

Nabokov wraps up the afterword with autobiographic notes related to the country from where his parents fled--Russia--and the language--Russian:

My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses--the baffling mirror, the velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions--which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.

If not for the revolution in 1917, Nabokov's parents might not have left Russia in 1919, when the author was young man of twenty.  An undergraduate program--with honors, of course--at Trinity College came next.  Then back to Berlin and then on to Paris.  And then to the US as a forty-year old man where he lived as a writer and as a faculty at the best institutions: Stanford, Harvard, Wellesley,and Cornell.  And then to move back to Europe--to Switzerland--in 1961 where he lived until his death in 1977.  I wonder if he would have ever imagined that the Soviet Union would disintegrate a mere decade later.

The copy that I am reading includes extensive notes by an acclaimed scholar, Alfred Appel, who--and I know this only because I did a Google search--died six years ago.  The intellectual accomplishments of Nabokov and Appel immediately expose me for who I am--an academic fraud.  My job title ought not to have a word like "professor"--a word that the world used in addressing the likes of Appel and Feynman and so many others.

Appel writes about Nabokov's intellect:

[A] scientist, linguist, and author of fifteen novels, who has written and published in three languages, and whose vast erudition is most clearly evidenced by the four-volume translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, with its two volumes of annotations and one-hundred page "Note on Prosody"

Those were some giants!

And then there were the butterflies.  Nabokov's expertise on butterflies is not any secret, of course.  I remembered reading an essay about that in the New Yorker not too long ago.  Again, thanks to Google, I tracked it down.  That essay's beginning says it all about Nabokov the intellectual:

Vladimir Nabokov once said, “A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.” The famed author exhibited both equally in his writing and in his non-literary pursuits, which included lepidopterology, the study of butterflies and moths. Although he is of course best known for his intricate novels and essays, the past decade has seen a rediscovery of Nabokov’s entomological ventures. On Tuesday, the Times revealed that a team a scientists had vindicated a nearly seventy-year-old theory of his about the development of the Polyommatus blue butterflies

That New Yorker essay quotes the following from an interview that Nabokov gave in 1967:

The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru. It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.

The unexpected twists and turns in life!

All these thoughts even before I have gotten to the first page of chapter 1 of Lolita.  It doesn't surprise me though.  And I look forward to more. A lot more.

Source

"curiosity is insubordination in its purest form."

A decade ago, I went to an academic conference that featured in the program a Azar Nafisi as a plenary keynote speaker. "Azar who?" was my thought; hey, I am not a village idiot for nothing!

But, after that meeting, I have often quoted her comments on academics:

[In] conveying knowledge, the academy has a far more important and subversive way of dealing with political issues. Knowledge provides us with a way to perceive the world. Imaginative knowledge provides us with a way to see ourselves in the world, to relate to the world, and thereby, to act in the world. The way we perceive ourselves is reflected in the way we interact, the way we take our positions, and the way we interpret politics.
Curiosity, the desire to know what one does not know, is essential to genuine knowledge. Especially in terms of literature, it is a sensual longing to know through experiencing others—not only the others in the world, but also the others within oneself. That is why, in almost every talk I give, I repeat what Vladimir Nabokov used to tell his students: curiosity is insubordination in its purest form. If we manage to teach our students to be curious—not to take up our political positions, but just to be curious—we will have managed to do a great deal.

"curiosity is insubordination in its purest form."  We don't usually associate curiosity and insubordination.  But, Nafisi, by providing that Nabokov quote in a context that is familiar to me, made that so clear.  Insubordination via curiosity often comes with a price, of course.  But, that is a price--small or big--that we pay if we value the knowledge that results.

Re-reading her essay, I now find more gems, further validating yet another Nabokov observation on re-reading; Nafisi writes:

No amount of political correctness can make us empathize with a woman who is taken to a football stadium in Kabul, has a gun put to her head, and is executed because she does not look the way the state wants her to look. No amount of political correctness can make us empathize with a child who is starving in Darfur. Unless we evoke the ability to imagine, unless we can find the connection between that woman or that child and ourselves, we cannot empathize with either of them.

Nafisi continues:

When a Nabokov or a Flaubert writes of the worst tragedies, we read on even as we cry. We celebrate the triumph of that imagination over the shabby reality that kills people like Lolita or Emma Bovary. That is the triumph of art.

I remember all too well my feelings as I read A Farewell to Arms.  Great works in literature have that phenomenal power to take us into the author's imagined world and we feel the emotions that the characters experience.  I don't read them in order to analyze the sentence structure or the word play or anything else.  I read them because I want to understand the human condition, which those great works easily and powerfully convey.

Nabokov's Lolita is on the coffee table.  But, maybe I need to check on the real world before I return to the imagined one.

Why put myself through all these, right?  You forget that a life of curiosity is what I signed up for.  A curiosity that, I hope, will lead to knowledge and wisdom.  After all, to quote Marcel Proust:

We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, and effort which no one can spare us