Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Welcome To The Riviera!


In Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, character development is the name of the game. Written in first person, Humbert Humbert tells his story to the jury and to the reader after being convicted of pedophilia, crafting a narrative that is both painstakingly disturbing and charming. The prose is impeccable. Although Humbert establishes his character as a well educated European psychologist, his writing is almost lyrical. He uses alliteration, and even internal rhyme in his writing to make it a pleasure to the reader. His story begs to be read out loud, slowly, taking in each word and trying to decode it from a sane perspective. His vocabulary is fantastic as well. Reading this novel without a dictionary would be a sore mistake, as he uses synonyms on synonyms to bring back motifs that could be missed otherwise, not to mention casual french and historical jargon. His description of scenery is vivid and precise, counting exact numbers of objects and layering abstract metaphors to describe the temperament. This is especially noted in his countless descriptions of Lo and her activities, for example their meeting “beyond it, there came a sudden burst of greenery-’the piazza,’ sang out my leader, and then, without the least warning, a blue sea wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses”(Nabokov, 39). And it goes on. And on. Even in this passage, the layers of his prose are evident. On page 9, the first page of the book he discusses his father, who owned a “luxurious hotel on the Riviera”(Nabokov, 9), showing the Riviera reference to his past love with Annabell and the seaside adventures which fostered his first love as a child. At points the writing is poetic, for example “I might have sat there in the rocker and pretended to read. Playing safe, I kept away, for I was afraid that the horrible, insane, ridiculous, and pitiful tremor that palsied me might prevent me from making my entree with any semblance of casualness”(Nabokov, 42), and later on the same page “on her stomach, showing me, showing the thousand eyes wide open in my eyed blood, he slightly raised shoulder blades, and the bloom along the incurvation of her spine, and the swellings of her tense narrow nates clothed in black, and the seaside of her schoolgirl thighs”(Nabokov, 42). Again on page 56, “Aubrey McFate (as I would like to dub that devil of mine) to arrange a small treat for me on the promised beach, in the presumed forest. Actually, the promise Mrs. Haze had made was a fraudulent one” (Nabokov, 56). Every sentence just drips with imagery and contains a natural rhythm. In reading this book, I have taken Prose’s advice to “put every word on trial”. Nabokov himself, in Good Readers and Good Writers, charges the reader to detach themselves from the emotional level with the characters and cherish the art, the creation, the mastery of words that the author uses to fully realize story. Humbert as a narrator gives that “spine-tingling” sense, proving himself incredibly human, capable of emotion and diction on a high level. However at the same time he is pompous and repulsed by essentially anyone who is not a nymphet, creating a self-humored distance from other people and reinforcing his incredible loneliness. Ultimately, his rhetoric establishes his slice of the human condition, demonstrating real and normal things to create credibility, then delving into how sanity is bent due to disease, love, vampirism, desperation...

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