In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love–
I and my Annabel Lee–
With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud by night
chilling my Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not 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 the wind came out of a cloud, chilling
And killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we–
Of many far wiser than we–
And neither the angels in heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea–
In her tomb by the side of the sea.
So, that’s the whole poem. Humbert is drawing on a nineteenth-century Romantic tradition that still has a certain power. You can hear that incantatory voice of Poe’s speaker in the poem making this doomed love into something aesthetic, but it’s also a kind of cliché. If John Ray works with the clichés of psychiatry and of social work and, in a way, of politics–progressive politics–“bring up a better generation for the future”– Humbert has truck with the clichés of the literary. So, his is a vocabulary of very high-born clichés. It’s interesting. When you read Nabokov’s autobiography, he talks about his own experiments with this kind of poetry when he was young and especially when he was beginning to fall in love with girls that he would meet around St. Petersburg. He represents them as overheated attempts at literature, as dripping with a kind of excess, romantic excess, as essentially unable to do more than repeat a tradition.
What Humbert has found, and I guess Nabokov has given him, in the Poe, is not only that kind of overheated Romantic poetic referent; he’s also chosen, of course, someone who married a very, very young bride. So, Poe, I think at the age of about twenty or twenty one, married his fourteen-year-old cousin. So, for that reason Poe becomes a kind of model, and he’s the model in both ways: both as a pedophile and as someone who imagined himself and his young love fully clothed in the language of romance. So, it’s a kind of fairy tale. Now the fairy tale language that is invoked here, “the princedom by the sea,” is brought back for us vividly in the scene where Humbert first sees Lolita. This is on page 39. So, he’s walking through the house. The “Haze woman” is giving him his tour of the house:
This is a remarkable passage to me. He occupies in this passage every subject position of the fairy tale: the nurse, the hounds and the king. He’s the nurse recognizing the beloved child. He’s the king after her, and the hounds after her. At the same time, I think we feel the freshness of this prose, and we feel the humor of it, the self-parody. So, even though he is counting on us to be seduced by the romantic language, that incantatory trance of there is a certain way in which it’s refreshed for us, like when he says, “The twenty-five years I have lived since then tapered to a palpitating point and vanished.” That is not from the fairy tale. That’s his own voice.
One thing that Nabokov does–and I think this is related to the way words like “throb” and the layers of fiction and reality, how these things permeate into different texts and different layers of the story–he always mixes originality with cliché. He mixes the bad with the good. He has a real disdain for the black and the white, that sense of simplicity. And so, you’re going to find–even at moments where I think we’re meant to understand Humbert’s prose as overwrought, that muscle-bound man that Amis talks about–you’re also going to find in those passages, while you’re being just brought to the sense of parody, just to the edge of what you can tolerate in that vein, you’re going to get a sharp sentence; you’re going to get a sharp piece of very original prose style. This is part of Nabokov’s talent, is to manipulate you. This is another way of manipulating you, is to make you see the cliché and then to draw back from it to something that surprises you. So, this is part of the strategy. And then watch what happens to the prose style and the difference in tone:
And I think there’s a reason why there are quotations around that princedom by the sea and why it’s Poe: a fatal consequence–not just of his early love for Annabel Lee–but a consequence of the poetry. This is another kind of defense: “the poetry made me do it.” It’s the romance that’s being offered in the poetry that lends his life its course. So, here the rationales for his guilt, and our forgiveness of it, begin to multiply.
Now, I want to draw back from just being immersed in those details of the text for a minute to suggest to you that this question of morality is something that Nabokov deliberately courts. When Nabokov was an exile in Europe, he spent a lot of time composing chess problems. These are setups of pieces on the chess board that have particular solutions. And they’re very complex, and they have a kind of aesthetic form to them. And he would aim for certain kinds of elegance in them. He never wanted to have an alternate solution. He always wanted to have a single kind of solution. There are certain themes in chess that refer to different kinds of strategic movements that he would bring out through these little arrangements, and he would spend inordinate amounts of time organizing them. Let me read to you how he describes the action of setting one of these things up:
is, I think, for Nabokov, a kind of chess problem. The chess problem is: how can Nabokov make us identify with a pedophile? How can he produce, from these debased ingredients, what Lionel Trilling called it–and you have this blurb on your back cover– “the greatest love story of our time”? That’s a question for you: is it the greatest love story of our time? Was Lionel Trilling–a great mid-century literary critic–was he seduced by Humbert? What would it mean to be the greatest love story of our time? But certainly Nabokov has in mind the rhetoric of love stories, the shape of love stories, and he’s using those, with all the skill he can muster, to try to make us enter in to the ecstasy that he describes at the heart of this kind of logical problem, the setting up of this logical problem. So, in a way we are the solvers of this problem for him; we are the other half that completes the aesthetic experience; we are there to participate in it with him.
And, on the handout that I have given you [I’m not going to read it now ’cause we’re running out of time; I’d like you to read that at home and I’m going to refer to it later] the world of imagination and of the aesthetic is very much on the surface of this text. And you can see it in lots of ways, too, just in that little bit of the first chapter that I read to you, that sense of fancy: “a fancy prose style.” So, you want to think of “fancy” not just as a sort of effeminate ornamentation, but as that older-fashioned sense of the word: “the fancy”, the imagination. So, imagination is a privileged realm for Nabokov, and it is a realm that always has about it that golden glow. And as you read , try to notice how much light imagery there is. For Nabokov, sunlight, goldenness–all those midges, the golden midges, the downy golden hair on Lolita’s limbs, her tawny skin–all of that goldenness is very much of a piece with the world of imagination. So, it’s as if imagination makes everything glitter, and its color is that of the most aesthetic of metals, of gold. So, keep these things in mind as you read, and in the next couple of lectures you’ll see more of the development of argument about the book, but I hope this gets you started.
[end of transcript]
Discuss the publication history of Lolita, controversies after its publication, the banning of the novel, and the criticism, biography, and works of author Vladimir Nabokov. Where did Nabokov choose to first have Lolita published? Why? How did critics respond to the controversial subject matter of the novel?
Describe the genre of Lolita. What genre is the novel traditionally grouped into and how did Nabokov respond to this grouping? What genre did Nabokov feel Lolita fit best into? Why? Do you agree?
Define “narrative point of view” and analyze the narrative perspective of Lolita. How does the novel’s Foreword establish who the narrator of Part 1 will be? Does H.H. relate his story in the present or past tense? How reliable a narrator is Humbert Humbert?
Discuss the author’s use of literary allusion in the novel. What does the...
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(approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) |
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By Emily Mortimer
My father, John Mortimer, brought me up to believe that you can be a good person and kill someone and a perfectly awful person who never gets so much as a parking ticket your whole life. It’s an education I’m proud of. He was an author and a criminal defense barrister — in his words, “the only playwright ever to have defended a murderer in the central criminal court at the Old Bailey” — and his prowess in both professions rode on his ability to see past easy morality and to respect the fact that the truth is never one-sided and therefore art should not be, either.
My father defended a lot of murderers — his favorite clients, because he said they had generally got rid of the one person on earth who was really bugging them, and a kind of peace had descended over them — but his other specialty was obscenity. He was of the “I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” school of thinking. He became well known in the field for championing such works as the Sex Pistols’ album “Never Mind the Bollocks” (charged with public indecency), Oz magazine’s schoolkid edition (featuring a centerfold of the beloved cartoon character Rupert the Bear with an enormous erection) and Hubert Selby Jr.’s transgressive novel “Last Exit to Brooklyn.” All were prosecuted in England, and all but the Sex Pistols under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959.
My dad, who died in 2009, is with me every day somehow or another — in the funny things my kids come out with, in my conversations with my mother, in wondering what he would have had to say about this or that. But there was a period a few years ago when I found myself thinking about him a good deal more than usual. I was publicizing a film called “The Bookshop.” The film was directed by the Catalan filmmaker Isabel Coixet, who had adapted it from Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel. It takes place in the year 1959 and tells the story of Florence Green, a lonely widow (played by me) who decides to open a bookshop in a little coastal town in the west of England.
The film was released in 2017 during the first wave of the #MeToo movement, which was a fitting moment for the story — being about a quietly heroic single woman in her middle age who comes up against the powers that be (mostly men) in her bid both to run a small business and to arrive at some sort of self-realization. But an interesting subplot in both the novel and the movie came up a good deal in the conversations I was having with journalists. The year 1959 was when “Lolita” was published in England, and Florence Green is faced with the dilemma of whether or not to sell the novel in her shop. In every interview I was asked by journalists what I thought about “Lolita” as a work of fiction and whether I thought it publishable today. I thought about my father and about a time when fiction was still considered dangerous enough to prosecute. I thought about the fact that “Lolita” had escaped the absurd gaze of the obscenity law. I wondered if indeed the novel might have an even more difficult time getting published now than it did in the 1950s, and I wished my dad were still alive to talk to about it all.
I’d read “Lolita” in college, and I was too lazy to bother to read it again when preparing for my part in “The Bookshop.” I was already a huge fan of Nabokov’s — I had bought copies of his memoir, “Speak, Memory,” in bulk to hand out to my friends at college, and I had worn thin his “Lectures on Russian Literature,” which are as withering as they are brilliant. (I’ll never forget my shocked delight at his excoriation of Dostoyevsky as “a mediocre writer with wastelands of literary platitudes.”)
But I’d been talking so knowledgeably about “Lolita” to the press that I was overcome with a kind of sheepish compulsion to read it again, after the fact. I bought a copy and I read it, and I realized as I did that I had absolutely and for certain never read it before. I can’t have done. Any expertise I’d claimed to have on the subject of “Lolita” was invented. All I knew must have come only from SparkNotes, plot summaries and crib sheets, and maybe from watching the movie. Because if I had ever read “Lolita,” I would have certainly remembered the experience. I wouldn’t have been so shocked and scandalized, my breath wouldn’t have been so taken away, my brain and heart and soul wouldn’t have been so twisted and fried and made to feel so sad, so upset, so elated and so blown apart all at once.
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Lolita , novel by Vladimir Nabokov , published in 1955 in France. Upon its American publication in 1958, Lolita created a cultural and literary sensation.
The novel is presented as the posthumously published memoirs of its antihero, Humbert Humbert . A European intellectual and pedophile, Humbert lusts obsessively after 12-year-old nymphet Lolita (real name, Dolores Haze), who becomes his willing inamorata. The work examines love in the light of lechery.
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Excellent Extended Essay - English. Examination of how the domestic symbols of the house and food establish the themes of dislocation, miscommunication and loneliness in Jhumpa Lahiri's 'Interpreter of Maladies' (2014) How does Cormac McCarthy portray common thematic elements in No Country for Old Men and The Road? (2009)
The essay, "On a Book Entitled Lolita," is the first of many attempts by Nabokov to control the narrative both surrounding the novel and of the book itself. ... "It might be a good idea at this point to film the extended metaphor of the next paragraph" (Screenplay 40).
But let's get back to the Lolita. When Humbert steps in one of these pretty gardens he sees a truly magnificent scene. A little girl wearing girly and innocent summer clothes sunbathes on a ...
IB Extended Essay English A1 To what extent does Vladimir Nabokov use Humbert as a character to convey a greater meaning within the reader's initial perception of the book Lolita? Candidate name: Rodrigo Pessoa de Queiroz Davies Candidate number: School: Aiglon College Supervisor: Jonathan Bayntun Word Count: Abstract
Lolita Essay. Vladimir Nabokov. This Study Guide consists of approximately 75 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Lolita. Print Word PDF. This section contains 8 words (approx. 1 page at 400 words per page)
Lecture 5 - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita Overview. Professor Amy Hungerford introduces the first of three lectures on Nabokov's Lolita by surveying students' reactions to the novel, highlighting the conflicting emotions readers feel, enjoying Nabokov's virtuosic style, but being repelled by the violence of his subject matter. Nabokov's childhood in tsarist Russia provides some foundation ...
This comprehensive lesson plan includes 30 daily lessons, 180 multiple choice questions, 20 essay questions, 20 fun activities, and more - everything you need to teach Lolita!
These highlight the diverse range of topics covered by International Baccalaureate® (IB) Diploma Programme (DP) students during their extended essays. Some examples are: "An analysis of costume as a source for understanding the inner life of the character". "A study of malnourished children in Indonesia and the extent of their recovery ...
After looking past its controversial sexual nature, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita can be read as a criticism of the capitalist system. Nabokov uses the relationship between the novel's narrator, Humbert Humbert, and the novel's namesake, Lolita, as an extended metaphor to showcase the system's inherent exploitive nature in a way that shocks the reader out of their false consciousness, by making ...
Lolita An Analysis of the Repulsive in Nabokov's Lolita This paper will show why Vladimir Nabokov chose to illustrate a theme that is considered by many to be repulsive: it was a theme through which he could hold the mirror up to society and reflect what he saw happening in the world around him. hen Nabokov's Lolita debuted first in Paris and then in America in the 1950s, it provoked one of ...
An earlier version of this essay included several sentences adapted, without attribution, from an article by Caitlin Flanagan, "How 'Lolita' Seduces Us All," that appeared in the September ...
Lolita, novel by Vladimir Nabokov, published in 1955 in France.Upon its American publication in 1958, Lolita created a cultural and literary sensation. The novel is presented as the posthumously published memoirs of its antihero, Humbert Humbert.A European intellectual and pedophile, Humbert lusts obsessively after 12-year-old nymphet Lolita (real name, Dolores Haze), who becomes his willing ...
Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita was first published in France 1955, after being rejected by four publishers whom feared they would be incarcerated. However, it's understandable why the story of a young pubescent girl, being groomed by her paedophilic step-father and then engaging in a sexual relationship whilst embarking on a journey across ...
similar all-encompassing control over Lolita. As her legal guardian, Humbert controls Lolita's housing situation, her education, and the financial assets her mother left to her. This total control over her life allows him to constantly move her across the country and prevent her from going to school so that he can continue his abuse of her.
Open Document. Lolita Through a Marxist-Feminist Lens After looking past its controversial sexual nature, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita can be read as a criticism of the capitalist system. Nabokov uses the relationship between the novel's narrator, Humbert Humbert, and the novel's namesake, Lolita, as an extended metaphor to showcase the system's ...
Lolita Essay. When Vladimir Nabokov finished writing the novel Lolita he knew the explosive subject matter that he was now holding in his hands. After being turned down by publishing houses on numerous occasions to unleash his controversial story to the public, it was finally published by the French in 1955. Many critics were shocked and called ...