Chapter 71 About a Book Titled "Lolita"

Given that I have dressed the character who wrote the preface to the book, the worldly John Ray, any comment coming directly from me would make one feel—and in fact make me think—that it was a play on Vladimir Nabokov, to discuss his own book.There are, however, a few points that do warrant discussion; moreover, the technique of speaking out for oneself allows for a fusion of imitation and type. Teachers of literature are prone to asking "What is the author's intent?" or, worse, "What is this person trying to say?"As for me, I happen to be such an author: when I set out to write a book, I have no other purpose but to finish the book; The interplay of connected plots" is an old term.This, I admit, sounds like a juggler explaining how one trick works by performing another trick.

The first slight pulsations I felt were in Paris in late 1939 or early 1940, when I was immobilized by acute intercostal neuralgia.As far as I can remember, the initial stroke of inspiration was in part triggered by a piece of news in the newspaper.A monkey in a botanic garden, after months of training by a scientist, has created the first painting of an animal: it is smeared with the bars of the cage that imprisoned the poor creature.There is no written link between the impulses in my mind and the thoughts that arose later.However, it was these thoughts that produced the blueprint for my current novel, a short story about thirty pages long.I wrote it in Russian, the language in which I had written my novels since 1924 (most of which were not translated into English, and all were banned in Russia for political reasons).The man in the story is Central European, the unnamed precocious girl is French, and the location of the story is Paris and Provence.I married him to the little girl's sick mother, who died shortly thereafter.He tried unsuccessfully to seduce the orphan in a hotel room.So Arthur (that's his name) crashes into a truck and gets crushed under the wheels.On a moonlit wartime night, I read the story to a few people, Mark Ardanov, two Socialist Revolutionaries, and a woman doctor.However, I was dissatisfied with this novel and destroyed it one day after I immigrated to the United States in 1940.

About 1949, in Ithaca, in upstate New York, a pulse that had never quite died down began to haunt me again.The connection plot came back with renewed enthusiasm and inspiration, asking me to revisit the subject.This time it is written in English.English was the language spoken by my first governess, a Miss Rachel Holme.It was in St. Petersburg, about 1903.The precocious girl now bears a touch of Irish blood, but is, in fact, the same girl, and the basic idea of ​​marrying her mother remains; but otherwise, the work is new and quietly The novel has taken shape. The writing of this book proceeded slowly because of many interruptions.It took me about forty years to write Russia and Western Europe, and now I am faced with the task of writing America.Collecting local material that would allow me to inject a bit of the usual "reality" (one of the few words that have no meaning without quotation marks) into the brew of my personal imagination is much harder at fifty than When I was young in Europe, the age of receptivity and memory was naturally at its best.There are other books to be written in the meantime.Once or twice I had nearly burned my unfinished manuscript, and had carried my darling to the shadow of the crooked incinerator on the innocent lawn, when a thought stopped me, I thought: For the rest of my life, the ghost of the burnt manuscript will haunt my desk.

Every summer, my wife and I go hunting for butterflies.The resulting specimens are housed in scientific institutions such as the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology or the Cornell University Collection.A collection-place tag tacked to the underside of the butterfly would be helpful to a 21st-century scholar interested in studying the growth history of little-known species of butterflies.In Trured, Colorado; Averton, Wyoming; Portal, Arizona; Just keep writing vigorously.In the spring of 1954, after the manuscript was transcribed, I immediately started looking for a publishing house. At first, after the advice of an old and cautious friend, I obeyed him and proposed that the book not be signed by the author.But I was worried that I would regret it soon, and I felt that I might cover up the truth, and the concealment revealed the reason, so I decided to sign my name for publication.I found four American publishing houses, W, X, Y, and Z, and handed over the typescripts of the novels one by one. They asked the editors who read the manuscripts to go through them, but they were all stunned. They were even surprised. To the surprise of my wary old friend FP.

It is true that in European antiquity, and continuing until the eighteenth century (notable examples come from France), deliberate obscenity was not incompatible with comic flashes, or biting irony, or even with the passions of eminent poets when they were dissolute. Yes, however, it's also true that in modern times the term "pornography" connotes second-rate quality, commercialization, and certain strict narrative rules.Obscenity must be paired with mediocrity, since all types of aesthetic enjoyment have to be completely replaced by simple sexual stimulation, which requires the traditional term to act directly on the recipient.The same old rigid rules pornography writers have to follow are about making the recipient feel guaranteed to be satisfied, just as, say, a detective fan feels sure to be satisfied—the real murderers of detective stories, if you don’t Mind you, it turns out to be artistic originality, artistic originality that detective fans find annoying (for example, who wants to read a detective novel without any dialogue at all?).In erotic fiction, therefore, the plot is confined to combinations of clichés.Style, structure, image must never distract the reader from his lukewarm desires.There must be a character describing the scene in the novel.The paragraphs between these sexual description scenes must be reduced to the splicing of meaning, the simplest form of logical communication, and brief explanations and explanations. Readers are likely to skip these paragraphs, but they must be aware of the existence of splicing, so as not to Feeling cheated (a mentality created by the conventions of "real" fairy tales I read as a child).In addition, the sexual scenes in the book must follow a gradual climax route, with new changes, new combinations, and new sexual content, and the number of participants is constantly increasing (the gardener was also called in at Sade's). ).Therefore, at the end of the book, there must be more sexual content than in the first few chapters.

Certain tricks in the opening chapters (such as Humbert's diary) tricked my original readers into thinking they were reading an obscene book.They thought there would be more and more obscene scenes as they read on.And once there is no obscene description, these readers will stop reading, find it boring and frustrated.I suspect this is one of the reasons why not all four publishers have read the manuscript.I'm not interested in whether they think my book is pornographic.They refused to buy my book not because of my treatment of the subject but because of the subject itself.Because, there are at least three topics in the book that are absolutely taboo for most American publishers.The other two themes are: the perfect and glorious marriage of a black man and a white man, with many grandchildren;

Some reactions from the editors who read the manuscript were very interesting: one reviewer said that his company might consider publishing my book, if I changed my Lolita to a twelve-year-old boy in a gloomy, desolate place In a granary in the environment, he was seduced and raped by a farmer named Humbert.Tell the story in short, punchy, "real" sentences ("He's crazy. I see, we're all crazy. I see God is crazy." etc.).While you should all know that I hate symbols and allusions (partly because of my feud with Freudian voodoo and partly because of my distaste for generalizations invented by literary mystics and sociologists), However, one normally clever editor, after flipping through the first volume, called it "Old Europe seducing young America," while another who flipped through the book said "Young America has seduced old Europe." The consultants at X Press were so overwhelmed by Humbert that they stopped reading at page one hundred and eighty-eight, and yet they wrote so sweetly that the second part of the book was too long.But Y Publishing House expressed regret that there are no good people in the book. Z Publishing House said that if they print it out, the president and I will go to class.

It is absurd to say that a writer in a free country should not be expected to care about the exact line between beauty and sensuality. I can only appreciate it, but no more than the judgment of those who put pictures of young and beautiful mammals in magazines Accurate, because to be published in these magazines, the neckline of general clothes should be low enough for insiders to chuckle, but also high enough for laymen not to frown.Excited mediocrity thumbs out enormously mediocre tomes, which are hailed as "powerful" and "bright" by book reviewers.I think there are some readers who find the bold text in such novels provocative.There are also some refined people who will think it meaningless because it doesn't teach anything.I neither read didactic novels nor write didactic novels.Whatever John Ray said was not moralistic.For me, fiction only exists to the extent that it can bring me what I would directly call aesthetic happiness, a kind of happiness that is more or less always connected with art (curiosity, honesty, kindness, Intoxication) the companionship of other states of existence.There are not many such books.All the other books are either craps of the time, or what some call literature of thought, which is often a crap of the time, like great chunks of plasterboard, carefully laid down from generation to generation. It is said that someone took a hammer and knocked it down hard, hitting Balzac, Gorky, and Mann.

Some reviewers added another crime to me, which they said was anti-American.This one charge hurts me far more than the stupidity of obscenity and immorality.Because of the depth and breadth (a lawn in the suburbs, a meadow in the mountains), I set up many North American scenes.I need an uplifting environment.Nothing could be more inspiring than vulgar.However, as far as vulgarity is concerned, there is no essential difference in manners and attitudes between Gubei and Xinbei.Any proletarian in Chicago can be as bourgeois as a duke (in Flaubert's favor).I choose an American motel over a Swiss hotel, or an English hotel room, simply because I am trying to be an American writer and claim only the same rights that other American writers enjoy.Besides, my Humbert character is a foreigner, an anarchist, and I don't agree with him on many things except the precocious girl.All my Russian readers know that my old world—Russia, England, Germany, France—is as beautiful and personal as my new world.

Lest some of what I say here sound like a rant, I hasten to add that anything other than "why did he write it?" or "why am I reading about crazy people?" In addition to the fools who have read the typescript or the Olympia Press edition of this book, there are many intelligent, sensitive, and determined people who have understood the book far more deeply than I have here explained the creative conception. I think that every serious writer holds in his hand one or another of his published books, always feeling in his heart a consolation.Its small constant fire kept burning in the basement, and as soon as the thermostat in my heart was touched, a small familiar warm current would quietly burst out.This consolation, the light of the book in the ever conceivable distance, is a most friendly affection; the more the book conforms to preconceived characters and colors, the more abundant and softer is its light.Even so, however, there are still places, side roads, favorite valleys that you recall more eagerly and appreciate more fondly than in the rest of the book.I haven't read it since I saw the proof in the spring of 1955, but the book gave me a pleasant feeling, because it was quietly with me in the house, like a summer day, you know When the mist cleared, it was bright.Whenever I think about it like this, I always seem to pick out passages of imagery, like Toxavage, or the roster of the Ramsdale School, or Charlotte saying "Waterproof ’, or Lolita trudging toward Humbert’s gift, or the picture to decorate Gaston Godin’s patterned attic, or that Kasbeam The Barber (it took me a month to write about him), or Lolita playing tennis, or Elphinstone Hospital, or pale, pregnant, lovely but incurable, in Gresta ( The capital in the book) dying Lori Shearer, or the jingle from a small valley town up the mountain road (where I caught my first discovery of a small female light blue butterfly named Nabokov).These are the nerves of the novel.These are secret threads, coordinates that are not easy to detect, and this method is used to unfold this book-although I know very well that these places and other scenes will be flipped over by those readers, or not. Pay attention, or never even turn to it, because they first read the book with the impression that it is similar to Memoirs of a Slutty Woman or A Merry Man in Love.Granted, I do have multiple references in the book to vague references to a pervert's physical desires, but we're not kids after all, illiterate juvenile delinquents, boys in British boarding schools who spend the night in homosexual hoopla After that, I have to endure the strange things like reading the works of ancient Greece and Rome in Jieben.

The idea that you can learn about a country, or a social class, or an author by reading fiction, is childish.Yet one of my few close friends read it with genuine concern that I (I!) should be living "among such depressing people"—and that the only hardship I experienced was To live all day in my workshop with discarded limbs and unfinished bodies. After it was published by the Olympia press in Paris, an American critic said it was the record of my love affair with romance.Substituting "English" for "legendary tales" would make this terse formula more correct.However, here, I feel that my voice is too shrill.None of my American friends have read my books in Russian, so every assessment of the merits of my English books is bound to be impossible to be accurate.My personal tragedy cannot and should not be anyone's concern, but my tragedy is that I have to discard my natural language habits, my free and expressive language. , Russian, which can be mastered easily, is replaced by second-rate English, but there are none of these props-bewitching mirrors, black velvet backdrops, and implicit associations and traditions-but with these props, the personable , Indigenous magicians in tuxedos can use them skillfully, transcending tradition with their own style.