(...)
I once read of an interview given by Roman Polanski in which
he described listening to a lurid radio account of his offense even as he was
fleeing to the airport. He suddenly realized the trouble he was in, he said,
when he came to appreciate that he had done something for which a lot of people
would furiously envy him. Hamlet refers to Ophelia as a nymph (“Nymph, in thy
orisons, be all my sins remembered”), but she is of marriageable age, whereas a
nymphet is another thing altogether.
(...)
But, just as Humbert’s mind is on a permanent knife-edge of
sexual mania, so his creator manages to tread the vertiginous path between
incest, by which few are tempted, and engagement with pupating or nymphlike
girls, which will not lose its frisson. (You will excuse me if, like Humbert, I
dissolve into French when euphemism is required.) For me the funniest line in
the book—because it is so farcical—comes in the moment after the first motel
rape, when the frenzied Humbert, who has assumed at least the authority and
disguise of fatherhood, is “forced to devote a dangerous amount of time (was
she up to something downstairs?) to arranging the bed in such a way as to
suggest the abandoned nest of a restless father and his tomboy daughter,
instead of an ex-convict’s saturnalia with a couple of fat old whores.” None of
this absurdity allows us to forget—and Humbert himself does not allow us to
forget—that immediately following each and every one of the hundreds of
subsequent rapes, the little girl weeps for quite a long time …
(...)
But, just as Humbert’s mind is on a permanent knife-edge of
sexual mania, so his creator manages to tread the vertiginous path between
incest, by which few are tempted, and engagement with pupating or nymphlike
girls, which will not lose its frisson. (You will excuse me if, like Humbert, I
dissolve into French when euphemism is required.) For me the funniest line in
the book—because it is so farcical—comes in the moment after the first motel
rape, when the frenzied Humbert, who has assumed at least the authority and
disguise of fatherhood, is “forced to devote a dangerous amount of time (was
she up to something downstairs?) to arranging the bed in such a way as to
suggest the abandoned nest of a restless father and his tomboy daughter,
instead of an ex-convict’s saturnalia with a couple of fat old whores.” None of
this absurdity allows us to forget—and Humbert himself does not allow us to
forget—that immediately following each and every one of the hundreds of
subsequent rapes, the little girl weeps for quite a long time … How
complicit, then, is Nabokov himself? The common joking phrase among adult men,
when they see nymphets on the street or in the park or, nowadays, on television
and in bars, is “Don’t even think about it.” But it is very clear that Nabokov
did think about it, and had thought about it a lot. An earlier novella, written
in Russian and published only after his death—The Enchanter—centers on a
jeweler who hangs around playgrounds and forces himself into gruesome sex and
marriage with a vache-like mother, all for the sake of witnessing her death and
then possessing and enjoying her twelve-year-old daughter.
do ensaio: "Vladimir Nabokov: Hurricane Lolita", 2005.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário