6. SECCIÓN B

 

UNIT 6: LITERATURA INGLESA Y NORTEAMERICANA 1900-1960

SECCIÓN B, 

TEMA 6: LITERATURA INGLESA Y NORTEAMERICANA 1900-1960

 

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 NIVEL AVANZADO: 

Un autor norteamericano muy popular de principios del siglo XX  que nos cae fuera del programa es Jack London.  Se estrenó hace poco una película inspirada en una de sus novelas, Martin Eden.

Martin Eden. Dir. Pietro Marcello. Based on Jack London's novel. Italy/France, 2019.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4516162/

De Jack London es especialmente memorable su relato sobre una pandemia apocalíptica, "The Scarlet Plage". Su interés va más allá de lo meramente literario. Aquí puede leerse algo más sobre Jack London y la epidemiología evolutiva.

 

-  OTROS AUTORES NORTEAMERICANOS 1900-1960

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Recordad que ya podéis ir leyendo y estudiando los textos de esta sección, que están en la segunda parte de vuestro bloque de fotocopias. Para dudas y consultas sobre ellos y sobre los autores de la sección B, podéis anotarlas y enviármelas por correo a garciala@unizar.es

 

En este tema 6 tratamos (en orden inverso, empezando por abajo) autores ingleses y norteamericanos de principios y mediados del siglo XX. Seguidamente pasamos al tema 7, Literatura inglesa 1960-2000. 

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Richard Gray on Nabokov.

Terminamos el TEMA 6 con unas notas sobre Vladimir Nabokov, clásico moderno de dos idiomas, ruso e inglés, 

—y con una panorámica sobre Samuel Beckett, otro clásico bilingüe en inglés y francés:

 

SAMUEL BECKETT         (1906-1989)

Anglo-Irish and French modernist bilingual writer, conservative bourgeois family, born in Foxrock, Ireland; studied at Portora School, Trinity College Dublin, and the Sorbonne; lived in Ireland, then Paris; loved cousin Peggy Sinclair;  bohemian lifestyle, expatriate skeptic vs. Catholic tradition; admirer and assistant of James Joyce in the 30s; m. Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil; member of the Resistance, lived in hiding in Roussillon during 2nd WW; experimental writer and dramatist in English and French, world success as "absurdist" dramatist with Waiting for Godot; developed an ascetic aesthetics of impotence, decay, minimalism and impoverishment, writing ever shorter and denser works;  Nobel Prize 1969; international success but reclusive character; often directed his own plays; lived and died in Paris)

_____. En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot. Drama, 1951. 1954.
_____. Molloy. Novel. 1951. In English,1955.
_____. Malone meurt / Malone Dies. Novel. 1951. 1956.
_____. L'Innommable / The Unnamable. Novel. 1954. 1958.
_____. Fin de partie /Endgame. Drama. 1954. 1958.
_____. Krapp's Last Tape / La Dernière bande. Drama. 1958. 1959.
_____. Happy Days / Oh les beaux jours. Drama. 1961. 1963.
_____. Play / Comédie. Drama. 1963. 1964.
_____. Not I / Pas moi. Drama. 1973. 1975 

______. Stirrings Still (Soubresauts). Prose. 1988. 1989.

- The New Drama: Beckett and Osborne (Andrew Sanders).

- "Samuel Beckett." In Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.*
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett

- En YouTube se pueden ver varias obras de Beckett. Por ejemplo, Catastrophe.  O la que hemos incluido como lectura obligatoria, Krapp's Last Tape.

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NIVEL AVANZADO: 

- Un audio en français sur Beckett: Une vie, une œuvre.

- Samuel Beckett's experimental fiction, in THE NEW NOVELISTS OF THE 1950s.

- Vladimir Nabokov: A documentary and a lecture on Lolita.

________________________

________________________

 

E. E. CUMMINGS     (1894-1962)

Edward Estlin Cummings, US man of letters, modernist poet, dramatist and novelist; b. Cambridge, MA; grad. Harvard, Master of Arts 1916, ambulance volonteer in France, unjustly accused of treasonable correspondence 1st WW, defender of individualism and creative eccentricity vs. social regimentation, 20th-c. Transcendentalist.


Works

Cummings, E. E. The Enormous Room. Narrative. 1922.
_____. Tulips and Chimneys. Poems. 1923.
_____. &. 1925.
_____. is 5.  Poems. 1926.
_____. ViVa. 1931.
_____. (Untitled work). 1930.
_____. Eimi. 1933.
_____. Tom. 1935. (Satirical ballet based on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin).
_____. No Thanks. 1935.
_____. 50 Poems. 1940.
_____. I x I. 1944.
_____ . XAIPE.  1950.
_____. Poems: 1924-1954. 1954.
_____. 95 Poems. 1958.
_____. 73 Poems. 1963. (Posth.).
_____.  Complete Poems, 1904-62.   1993.

- Unas notas sobre el poeta modernista norteamericano e. e. cummings.

Y otro poeta modernista inglés. Notas clicando en su nombre:

W. H.  AUDEN     (1907-1973)

Wystan Hugh Auden, modernist English poet, born in York; anglo-catholic family; studied at Gresham's School, Holt and Christ Church, Oxford;  homosexual, 1928 stay in Berlin with Isherwood, 1930s taught in Scotland and Downs School, Birmingham; professional writer late 30s, leftist sympathies before the war, turned conservative thereafter, cultivated Christian humanism and literary tradition; trips to Spanish War and China; expatriate in US 1939; US citizen c. 1946, lived half-year in Europe and USA with life partner Chester Kallman in New York; summer stays in Ischia and Kirschtetten; honorary Professor of Poetry U of Oxford, 1956-60s; died in Vienna.

Auden, W. H.  Poems. 1930.
_____. Look, Stranger! Poems.  1936.
_____. "Spain 1937." Poem. 1937, 1940.
_____. "In Memory of W. B. Yeats." Poem. 1939.
_____. "In Time of War." Sonnet sequence. 1939.
_____. Another Time. Poems.  1940.
_____. New Year Letter. Poems. 1941.
_____. The Age of Anxiety. Poems. 1947.
_____. The Shield of Achilles. Poems. 1955.
_____. Homage to Clio. Poems. 1960.

_____. About the House. Poems. 1965.
_____. Los señores del límite: Selección de poemas y ensayos (1927-1973). 2007.
 


____________________________________________

Sección B, NIVEL AVANZADO:

- Dos influyentes críticos de la sociedad moderna y sus tendencias distópicas: Huxley y Orwell

—muy relevantes los dos en la era 2020.

Introducción a 1984 de Orwell 

La distopía de Orwell se hace realidad.

 

- Un documentaire, en français, sur Le meilleur des mondes et 1984— ...aujourd'hui.

-  Orwell en España: Rebelión en la pocilga

                                           ___________

 

-  Los poemas de Sylvia Plath, poeta feminista y suicida.


- Dylan Thomas, poeta galés, recita uno de sus poemas en la radio.



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WILLIAM FAULKNER        (1897-1962)

_____.  Soldier's Pay. Novel. 1926.
_____. Mosquitoes. 1927.
_____. Sartoris. Novel. 1929.
_____. The Sound and the Fury. Novel. 1929.
_____. As I Lay Dying. Novel. 1930.
_____. "A Rose for Emily." Story. 1930.
    http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/English_Literature/Rose/el-text-E-Rose.htm
    2012
_____. Sanctuary. Novel. New York: Random House, 1931.
_____. Light in August.  Novel. 1932.
_____. Pylon. Novel. 1935.
_____. Absalom, Absalom! 1936.
_____. The Wild Palms. Novel. 1939.
_____. The Hamlet. Novel. 1940. (Vol. 1 of the Snopes trilogy).
_____. The Big Sleep. Film script based on Raymond Chandler's novel. 1946.
_____. Go Down, Moses. Stories / novel. 1942.
_____. Collected Stories of William Faulkner. 1950.
_____. Requiem for a Nun. Novel. 1951.
_____. A Fable. Novel. 1954.
_____. The Town. Novel. 1957. (Vol. 2 of the Snopes trilogy).
_____. The Mansion. Novel. 1959. (Vol. 3 of the Snopes trilogy).

William Faulkner was a US southern writer, major modernist novelist and story writer; b. William Harrison Falkner in New Albany, Mississippi; l. Oxford, Lafayette county; Nobel Prize for Literature 1949; Pulitzer Prize 1955, 1962; d. Byhalia, Mississipi. He is best known for his complex narrative style involving the memories and mental worlds of characters, and for his portraits of Southern society. Faulkner's South is scarred by the legacies of racism and slavery, with deep-set social divisions as traditional rural communities both decay and endure amid twentieth-century disruptions.

ON FAULKNER'S  NOVEL THE SOUND AND THE FURY.



An introduction to Hemingway and Faulkner  (by Richard Gray)
http://vanityfea.blogspot.com.es/2012/12/hemingway-and-faulkner.html




____________________________________

ERNEST HEMINGWAY      (1899-1961)

_____.  In Our Time. Stories. 1925.
_____. The Sun Also Rises. Novel. 1926. (= Fiesta)
_____. Men Without Women. Stories. 1927.
_____. A Farewell to Arms. Novel. 1929.
_____. Death in the Afternoon. Essay. 1932.
_____. Winner Take Nothing. Stories. 1933.
_____. Green Hills of Africa. Novel. 1935.
_____. To Have and Have Not. Novel. 1937.
_____. The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. 1938.
_____. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Novel. 1940.
_____. Men at War. Stories. 1942.
_____. The Old Man and the Sea. Novel. 1952.
_____. The Dangerous Summer. Report. 1960.
_____. A Moveable Feast. Memoir. 1964.
_____. Islands in the Stream. Novel. 1970.
_____. The Garden of Eden. Novel. 1986.
_____. True at First Light. Novel. 1999.



Hemingway was a major US novelist and short story writer; doctor's son, second of six children, b. Oak Park, Illinois; father committed suicide; reporter at Kansas City Star volunteer ambulance driver in Italy 1st WW, wounded and decorated; USA 1919, married and settled in Paris as foreign correspondent 1921, reporter at Greco-Turkish war 1922, "Lost Generation" expatriate with Ezra Pound, Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein; became Catholic, reporter at the Spanish War and anti-Nazi activist during World War II; left-wing sympathies, lived in Key West and Cuba; travelled widely; wrote modernist fiction with aesthetics of impersonality and spare realistic style, journalist, traveller, sportsman, big-game hunter and sporting fisherman; socialite, divorced, several marriages and divorces; alcoholic, suffered severe accidents, Nobel Prize for Literature 1954, seriously ill, electroshock sessions, committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho.


 


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SECCIÓN B, nivel AVANZADO:

-  Hemingway and others.

- Un audio en français sur Ernest Hemingway: Une vie, une œuvre.

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VIRGINIA WOOLF     (1882-1941)


English woman of letters, modernist writer and forerunner of feminist criticism, b. at High Park Gate as Adeline Virginia Stephen, daughter of scholar Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth; lived in Bloomsbury, London, 1904-, nucleus of the "Bloomsbury Group" of intellectuals and artists; contributor to the Times Literary Supplement; married Leonard Woolf 1912; leading modernist novelist and critic; loving "lesbian" friendship with writer Vita Sackville-West; suffered frequent mental disturbances and heard voices; committed suicide by drowning in the river Ouse, Sussex.

_____. The Voyage Out. Novel. 1915.
_____. Night and Day. Novel. 1919.
_____. "The Mark on the Wall." Experimental prose. http://www.online-literature.com/virginia_woolf/855/
_____. Jacob's Room. Novel. 1922.
_____. Mrs. Dalloway. Novel. London: Hogarth, 1925.
_____. The Common Reader.  1925.
_____. To the Lighthouse. Fiction. 1927.
_____. Orlando: A Biography. Novel. 1928.
_____. A Room of One's Own. 1929.
_____. The Waves. Novel. 1931.
_____. The Years. Novel. 1937.
_____. Between the Acts. Experimental novel. 1941.
_____. The Moment and Other Essays. 1948.
_____. A Writer's Diary.
_____. Moments of Being. Memoirs.
_____. The Diary of Virginia Woolf.





 Why should you read Virginia Woolf ?







El grupo de Bloomsbury, círculo modernista bohemio chic de Londres.


"Virginia Woolf: Huerto, jardín y campo de batalla." Conferencia de Laura Freixas,
http://www.march.es/conferencias/anteriores/voz.aspx?id=2961&l=1
  


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 Sección B, NIVEL AVANZADO: Virginia Woolf

 

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Muchos autores quedan fuera de programa, entre ellos algunos de los más populares actualmente—Stephen King, Agatha Christie.... Como no podemos incluir más autores en el programa, para curiosear sobre estos "fuera de programa" os remito a la Wikipedia, que es excelente sitio para empezar—incluyendo los autores del programa. Aquí Agatha Christie (en la edición inglesa mejor, claro).


En SparkNotes http://www.sparknotes.com  encontráis abundantes materiales didácticos sobre literatura inglesa, introducciones, guías de estudio, etc.

______________________

Un autor norteamericano muy popular de principios del siglo XX  que nos cae fuera del programa es Jack London.  Se estrenó hace poco una película inspirada en una de sus novelas, Martin Eden.

Martin Eden. Dir. Pietro Marcello. Based on Jack London's novel. Italy/France, 2019.*

http://redaragon.elperiodicodearagon.com/ocio/cine/pelicula.asp?id=35560#trailer

         2020

De Jack London es especialmente memorable su relato sobre una pandemia apocalíptica, "The Scarlet Plage". Su interés va más allá de lo meramente literario. Aquí puede leerse algo más sobre Jack London y la epidemiología evolutiva.

 

-  OTROS AUTORES NORTEAMERICANOS 1900-1960

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T. S. Eliot           (1888-1965)  

Thomas Stearns Eliot, US/British poet, critic and dramatist; b. St Louis; Ph.D. Harvard; st. France and Germany, l. London, bank clerk at Lloyd's; married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, expressed disgust with sex in poetry; unhappy marriage, wife with mental problems, separated 1933; married Vivien Eliot 1957; l. London; conservative social critic, influential modernist poet and critic, poetic dramatist; anti-modernist in ideas, "classicist, anglo-Catholic and monarchic"; w. as poetry ed. for Faber and Gwyer, later Faber and Faber; major influence on English-speaking literary world; Order of Merit 1948; Nobel Prize for Literature 1949; d. London.

______.  Prufrock and Other Observations. Poems. 1917.  

_____. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Essay. 1919.

_____. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London, 1920.

_____. "The Metaphysical Poets." Essay. 1921.

http://myhome.naver.com/for_eliot/prose/metaphysical.htm

         2008

_____. The Waste Land. Poem. 1922.

_____. "Ulysses, Order and Myth." Essay. 1923.

_____. Dante. Essay. 1929.

_____. Ash Wednesday. Poem. 1930.

_____. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. 1933.

_____. After Strange Gods. Criticism. New York: Harcourt, 1933.

_____. Murder in the Cathedral. Drama. 1936.

_____. The Family Reunion. Drama. 1939.

_____. Four Quartets. Poems. 1943.

_____. The Cocktail Party. Drama.  1949.

_____. Collected Poems 1909-1935. London: Faber, 1957.

_____. On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber, 1957.

_____. Selected Essays. New ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960.

_____. Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber, 1963. 1974.*

_____. To Criticize the Critic. New York: Farrar, 1965.

_____. Selected Poetry of Thomas Stearns Eliot. In Representative Poetry Online. U of Toronto.

         http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poet111.html

         2005-08-10

 Unas notas sobre T. S. Eliot

 

 
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Sección B: Drama, T. S. Eliot, Modernism: NIVEL AVANZADO



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JAMES JOYCE         (1882-1941)

Expatriate Irish writer, leading modernist, experimental novelist; lived a bohemian life in Trieste and then Paris; famous for his representation of the 'stream of consciousness' of his characters in narrative, and for his complex multilayered wordplay and intertextual allusions. Joyce is the ultimate model for 'difficult' and elitist Modernist literature, initially censored in English-speaking countries on grounds of obscenity.



Joyce, James. Dubliners. Short stories. 1914.
_____. Exiles. Drama.
_____. Stephen Hero. Novel.
_____. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Novel. 1916. (Rewriting of Stephen Hero).
_____ . Ulysses. Experimental novel. Paris, 1922.
_____. Collected Poems. 1937.
_____. Finnegans Wake. Experimental novel. 1939.



- An introduction to James Joyce, from the Norton Anthology.

- Jorge Luis Borges, "Conferencia sobre James Joyce." (audio): https://youtu.be/i_ZTt_JQXRU

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SECCIÓN B,  James Joyce - NIVEL AVANZADO.


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Empezamos la sección B con un premio Nobel irlandés, W. B. Yeats:

W. B. YEATS     (1865-1939)

Anglo-Irish poet; b. Sandymount, Dublin; son of painter J. B. Yeats; lived in London 1874-83; later in Dublin / London / Sligo; associated to the folk Irish revival in late 19th, then Modernist poet and close friend of Ezra Pound; a superstitious believer in occultism and magic, he held anti-bourgeois aristocratic ideals and sympathized with Fascist movements and traditionalism. He was in love with nationalist Maud Gonne, but was rejected by her; he married a "psychic" wife, 'George' Hyde-Lees in 1917; Irish Free State senator allied to the interests of the Protestant landed classes and a friend of Lady Gregory, he promoted with her the Irish National Theatre at the Abbey Theatre and  lived in a tower in her land; Nobel Prize for Literature 1923.


Yeats, W. B. "The Madness of King Goll." Poem. 1884, pub. 1887.
_____. "The Wanderings of Oisin." Poem. 1889.
_____. "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." Poem. 1890.
_____. "The Sorrow of Love." Poem. 1891.
_____. The Countess Kathleen. Drama. 1892.
_____. Crossways. Poems. 1892.
_____. The Rose. Poems. 1893.
_____. "Who Goes with Fergus?" Poem. 1893.
_____. The Land of Heart's Desire. Drama. 1894.
_____. The Wind among the Reeds. Poems. 1899.
_____. The Shadowy Waters. Dramatic poetry. 1902, 1906.
_____. In the Seven Woods. Poems. 1903.
_____. The Green Helmet and Other Poems. 1910.
_____. Deirdre. Drama. 1906.
_____. Responsibilities. Poems. 1914.
_____. "Easter 1916." Poem. 1916.
_____. "The Second Coming." Poem. 1919
    http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html
_____. The Wild Swans at Coole. Poems. 1919.
_____. "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death." Poem. 1919.
    http://www.thebeckoning.com/poetry/yeats/yeats.html
_____. Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Poems. 1921.
_____. "Leda and the Swan." Poem. 1923.
_____. "Among School Children." Poem. 1926.
_____. "Sailing to Byzantium." Poem. 1926
_____. The Tower. Poems. 1928.
_____. The Winding Stair, and Other Poems. 1933.
_____. A Full Moon in March. Poems. 1935.
_____. "Under Ben Bulben." Poem. 1938.


An introduction to W. B. Yeats, from the Norton Anthology. With links to further criticism. 

Wikipedia is also a good resource for all our writers in section B: W. B. Yeats.




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Sección B, NIVEL AVANZADO: A Yale lecture on Yeats.






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SECCIÓN B:

 

UNIT 6: Literatura inglesa y norteamericana 1900-1960

Comenzamos la sección B con los autores del siglo XX. Recordad que los autores de la sección B no entran como tema de redacción: sí como preguntas cortas, y como comentario/traducción. Son para preparación individual,  con los materiales que iré añadiendo aquí...

... y con el manual que os habéis comprado, sin duda. Aquí está el manual recomendado, el de Alexander:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9a3FSxKl6ZlV0dkUkJSWHR0dEU/view?usp=drivesdk   (Michael Alexander: A History of English Literature)

Y aquí otro de NIVEL MÁS AVANZADO, el de Oxford:

PDF (The Short Oxford History of English Literature)

—oOo—

 

 

 5. Literatura inglesa y norteamericana 1900-1960

Gray on Nabokov (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 From A History of American Literature, by Richard Gray:

(...) 

It is difficult to think of a European émigré writer further from all this than Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977). In fact, the verbal shift that seems required, from immigrant to émigré, suggests some of the difference. Nabokov was born into a wealthy, prominent family in St. Petersburg, Russia and as a youth traveled extensively. His father, a liberal aristocratic jurist, opposed the tyranny of the czar then that of the bolshevviks. He took his family into exile, then was murdered in Berlin in 1922 by a reactionary White Russian who later became a Nazi official. Nabokov lived in Berlin and Paris between the two world wars. There, he produced a critically acclaimed series of poems, short stories, and novels in Russian. Then, in 1940, in flight from various forms of totalitarianism, he emigrated to the United States where he began teaching Russian literature. His frist novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, was published in 1941; it concerns a young Russian in Paris, the narrator, who discovers the true nature of his half-brother, and English novelist, while writing his biography. This was followed by Bend Sinister in 1947, about a politically uncommitted professor in a totalitarian state who tries to maintain personal integrity. Four years later, Nabokov published his first memoir, Conclusive Evidence, later retitled Speak, Memory and, under this title, revised and expanded in 1966. Four years after that, in turn, came the book that established his fortune, his reputation for some and his notoriety for others, Lolita, published first in France then, after censorship problems were resolved, in the United States in 1958. It tells of the passion of a middle-aged European émigré, who calls himself Humbert Humbert, for what he terms "nymphets" in general and the 12-year-old girl he calls Lolita in particular, and their wanderings across America. It was Nabokov's first novel set in his new home in the New World; and its success allowed him to devote himself full time to his writing. Three more novels appeared after the first publication of Lolita: among them, Pale Fire (1962), a postmodernist tour de force purporting to be a poem about an exiled Balkan king in a New England college town and the involved critical commentary on the poem by an academic who admits to being the king himself. Along with the two other novels, Pnin (1957) and Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), there are novellas, short stories, a play, critical studies and commentary, translations of his earlier Russian novels, lectures and correspondence, and a monumental translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1964). All of the work reflects, in some way, Nabokov's aesthetic of subjective idealism. All of it plays variations on an observation made by the academic commentator in Pale Fire: "'reality' is neither the subject nor the object of true art," that commentator observes, "which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average 'reality' perceived by the communal eye." 

Which suggests the fundamental difference between Nabokov and even a writer like Singer, let alone Olsen or Ozick. "To be sure, there is an average reality, perceived by all of us," Nabokov admits in Strong Opinions (1973), a collection of his answers to questions about himself, art, and public issues. "But that is not true reality: it is only the reality of general ideas, conventional forms of humdrummery, current editorials." "Average reality," Nabokov insits, "begins to rot and stink as soon as the act of individual creation ceases to animate a subjectively perceived texture." Any book he makes, any art anyone makes that is worth reading is "a subjective and specific affair," Nabokov suggests. It is the creative act that effectively maintains reality just as—and the analogy is his—electricity binds the earth together. As a writer, a creator, he has "no purpose at all when composing the stuff except to compose it." "I work long, on a body of words," as Nabokov puts it, "until it grants me complete possession and pleasure." According to this subjective idealist creed, there can be no totalizaing, totalitarian reading of experience, no monolithic entity entitled "life." There is only the "manifold shimmer" of separate, specific lives, my life, your life, his life, or her life. As Nabokov has it, "life does not exist without a possessive epithet." Nor is there some kind of absolute truth or absolute morality attainable, a master narrative of history or ethics that the artists must discover and disclose. "Reality is an infinite succession of stops, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable," Nabokov argues. "You can never get near enough"; and so "whatever the mind grasps it does so with the assistance of creative fancy, that drop of water on a glass slide which gives distinction and relief to the observed organism." There is no place here for naturalism or didacticism. "I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction," Nabokov confesses. "Why do I write books, after all? For the sake of pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty." "Lolita has no moral in tow," he adds. "For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I bluntly call aesthetic bliss." That bliss is the triumph of art, for Nabokov. Its tragedy is suggested by an anecdote Nabokov tells about the original inspiration for Lolita. Which is a story about an ape, who, after months of coaxing, produced the first ever drawing by an animal. "This sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage."

Lolita is certainly Nabokov's finest book. Before it was published, he wrote of it to Edmund Wilson, "its art is pure and its fun is riotous." The purity of its art has several dimensions. Structurally, Nabokov uses traditional romance patterns only to deconstruct them. Humbert Humbert reveals how he desired Lolita, possessed her, fled with her across America after the death of her mother, Charlotte Haze, lost her to a man named Quilty, then killed her new lover. It is the elemental romance structure used here to startling, inverted effect, with elements of quest, attainment, journey, loss, pursuit, and revenge. The love plot is propelled forward in a straight line, in accordance with whose unrelateing extension Charlotte loves Humbert, who loves Lolita, who loves Quilty, who seems to love no one at all. And, as in the courtly love story, the desire of the narrator becomes a metaphor for other kinds of daring, transgression, and retribution. "Oh, My Lolita, I have only words to play with!" Humbert declares early on in the novel. And that discloses another kind of arfulness. The narrator is telling his story as he awaits trial for murder. A "foreword" by one "John Ray Jr. Ph.D." informs us that Humbert died "in legal captivity" after writing this "Confession of a white Widowed Male" "a few days before his trial was scheduled to start." Humbert is a peculiarly knowing narrator. "I shall not exist if you do not imagine me," he tells the reader. Using a style both outrageously lyrical and outrageously jokey, he is constantly teasing, eluding his audienc. Undercutting what might seem predictably valid responses, he plays on the whole litary history of dubious antiheroes and duplicitous first-person protagonists from Diderot to Dostoyevsky. "I am writing this under observation," Humbert admits. Within the narrative, this is literal, since he is in the psychiatric ward of the prison and his cell has an observation window. But Humbert is additionally, acutely aware of being under our observation as well. That helps make his story slippery, his character protean, and his language radically, magically self-referential. Like all Nabokov's novels, but even more than most, Lolita is a verbal game, a maze—what one character in Pale Fire christens a "lexical playfield."

The lexical playfield belongs, of course, to the author eventually rather than the narrator. It is Nabokov who discovers pleasure and difficulty in the complex web of allusion and verbal play—"the magic of games," as Humbert calls it—that constitutes the text. There is, in any event, a distinct difference between the games of the narrator and those of the author; or "Lolita" the confession and Lolita the novel. It is this. Humbert remains so trapped in his words, the "singposts and tombstones" of his story, that he does not realize he is using Lolita. Nabokov does. A great deal of intercultural fun is derived from the contrast between the "old-world politeness" of Humbert and what he perceives as the intriguing banality of America. This is an international novel, in one of tis dimensions, and it offers a riotously comic contrast between different languages, different voices. The verbal hauteur of Humbert ("You talk like a book, Dad," Lolita tells him) collides, in particular, with the unbuttoned slangy creativity that is a verbal element of the girl he pursues and possesses ("Yesser! The Joe-Rea marital enigma is making yaps flap"). And that collision has the dramatic advantage of allowing Lolita, as she is to herself, to escape through the chinks of the narrative. "Lolita had been safely solipsisized," Humbert claims, after he has used her as an unsuspecting aid to masturbatory fantasy. But he does not really solipsisize her, turn her as he puts it into "my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita," even for the period that he writes or we read the text. Perversely, Nabokov once claimed that "one day a reappraiser will come and and declare that I was a rigid moralist kicking sin . . . and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride." That reappraisal is celarly required here, for what we as readers witness is Humbert committing the cardinal sin in the subjective idealistic moral lexicon: he takes another human being as a means rather than an end. In the process, he commits child abuse and statutory rape. But that is subsumed, for Nabokov, under the determining, damning fact that he has acted like a moral totalitarian with Lolita. He has imprisoned her within his own reality, denying her her right to hers—and, as a corollary to that, her specific right to be an ordinary, vulgar, obnoxious but charming but not charmed or enchanted or mesmerized child. Momentarily, Humbert senses this when, in the last chapter of Lolita, he hears from his cell sounds coming from the valley below. "What I heard was the melody of children at play," he confesses; "and then I knew that the poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord." The note of longing and loss was one that Nabokov was particularly inclined to sound. He once said that "the type of artist who is always in exile" was one for whom he felt "some affinity," which was perhaps natural for someone who spent nearly all his life as an émigré. What charges it with a tragic pathos here, however, is the pain of knowing, as Humbert does for a brief, enchanted moment, that there is nothing worse than this: to rob someone of their childhood—to steal from them the chance to say, right from the start, this is my reality, my life.

Vladimir Nabokov

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My Most Difficult Book: The Story of 'Lolita' (NIVEL AVANZADO)

A Lecture on Lolita (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Nabokov, Vladimir

 (from the Oxford Companion to American Literature, 6th ed.):

 

NABOKOV, VLADIMIR (1899-1977), born in Russia of a patrician family, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, came to the U.S. (1940) and was naturalized in 1945. He was a professor of Russian literature at Cornell (1948-59) until his own literary success allowed him to retire. 

His ingenious, witty, stylized, and erudite novels include Laughter in the Dark (1938), published in England as Camera Obscura (19346), after the original Russian title, about the moral deterioration of a respectable Berliner; The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), in which the narrator, a young Russian in Paris, discovers the true nature of his half-brother, an English novelist, by writing his biography; Bend Sinister (1947), about a politically uncommitted professor in a totalitarian state who tries to maintain personal integrity; Pnin (1957), amusing sketches about the experiences of an exiled Russian professor of entomology at an up-state New York college; 

*Lolita (Paris, 1955; U.S., 1958), a farcical and satirical novel of the passion of a middle-aged, sophisticated European émigré for a 12-year-old American "nymphet," and their wanderings across the US.; 

Lolita, novel by Nabokov, published in Paris (1955) and in the U.S. (1958).

In the psychopathic ward of a prison while awaiting trial for murder, 37-yearold Humbert Humbert writes out his life story. Though once wed to a woman about his age, he has long been obsessed by a passion for nymphets: girls between the age of nine and 14. Coming from Europe to the U.S. on business, he meets and marries the widowed Charlotte Haze only to be near her 12-year-old daughter Lolita. To achieve this he considers murdering Charlotte, but when she is killed by accident he takes Lolita on a cross-country junket, planning to seduce her, only to be seduced by her, for she is no longer a virgin. Lolita escapes from his jealous protection, and he does not learn of her again until she is 17, married, and pregnant. Then she tells him that during her days with him she had loved Clare Quilty, a famous playwright. Even though their affair is long in the past, the infuriated Humbert Humbert murders Quilty and is jailed but dies of a heart attack before his trial.

*Invitation to a Beheading (Russia, 1938; U.S., 1959), a Kafkaesque story of a man sentenced to die for some unknown expression of individuality and his resultant discovery that he has a real soul; 

Invitation to a Beheading, novel by Nabokov, published in Russia in 1938, and in the U.S. in 1959. 

Cincinnatus C. is in prison awaiting execution for his crime of "gnostical turpitude" or "opacity" since his soul has been impenetrable and not open to other people. There he recalls his past life, including marriage to Marthe, a nymphomaniac mother of two deformed children, and his own teaching of crippled children in a kindergarten. He also spends time thinking of ways to escape or talking with the prison director, Rodrig Ivanovich, and M'sieur Pierre, ostensibly another prisoner but actually his executioner. In time he learns to avoid his confusion of dreams of the past with present reality and discovers how to surround his soul with a structure of words that permits him to communicate with others. Nevertheless he is led to his execution, but as one part of him puts his head on the block, another part leaves to join the onlooking crowd of people who are "beings akin to him."

*Pale Fire (1962), a satirical fantasy called a novel, which is a witty, ironic, and complex tour de force concerning a poem about an exiled Balkan king in a New England college town and the involved critical commentary on the poem by the king himself;

Pale Fire, a novel by Nabokov, published in 1962. 

An unfinished poem of 999 lines of heroic couplets, titled "Pale Fire," by John Shade is the subject of an inept but lengthy exegesis of 160 pages by Charles Kinbote. Although ostensibly a literary scholar, Kinbote admits he is actually Charles Xavier, last king of Zembla (1936-58), overthrown in a revolution. One of the revolutionary leaders, Gradus, has pursued the monarch in New Wye, Appalachia, in the AU.S., where as Kinbote he is teaching at Wordsmith College. There Kinbote has made friends with the poet John Shade in the hope of persuading him to write an epic immortalizing Zembla and its last monarch. However, Gradus accidentally kills Shade while trying to assassinate the ex-king. Charles makes off with the manuscrip of the unfinished poem that he persuades himself is a cryptic version of the desired epic, and therefore is editing the work for publication he creates the very elaborate commentary that forms the body of the novel.

The Gift (Russia, 1937; U.S., 1963), a pseudo-autobiography about Russian expatriates in Berlin after World War I; The Defense (Germany, 1930: U.S., 1964), about a young Russian master of chess who treats life as another game; The Eye (1965), about a Russian émigré living in Berlin; Despair (1966), about a man who contrives his own murder; King, Queen, Knave (1968), his second novel, originally published in Germany (1928), also the setting for the story of a young man's affair with his married aunt; Ada or Ardor (1969), a witty parody whose involved plot, set in a fanciful land, deals with a man's lifelong love for his sister Ada; Mary (1970), the author's first novel (Germany, 1926), about a young Czarist officer exiled in Berlin and his first love affair; Glory (1971), the fifth (Paris, 1932) of his nine novels written in Russian, a comic portrait of a Russian émigré's wanderings; Transparent Things (1972), a novella about a rootless American's marriage and murder of his wife; and Look at the Harlequins! (1974), a novel about an author who very much resembles Nabokov himself.

His stories have been gathered in several collections; his light, witty verse appears in Poems (1959) and Poems and Problems (1971), the latter including also problems in chess, and The Waltz Invention (1967) is a play.  

Conclusive Evidence (1951), revised as Speak, Memory (1966), gathers autobiographical sektches of life in Imperial Russia. Strong Opinions (1973) prints replies to journalists' questions about himself, literature, and public issues. 

He wrote a study of Nikolai Gogol (1944) and made a translation with commentary of Eugene Onegin (4 vols., 1964, revised 1977). 

The correspondence of Edmund Wilson and Nabokov, much of it about his translation of Pushkin, appeared in 1979. Other posthumous publications include Lectures on Literature (1980) and Lectures on Russian Literature (1981).

 

 

 

 

Especiación y retrospección: El diseño inteligente de Nabokov

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