[Bodell]

I too read this around 14 and have revisited recently at 30. I was most intrigued by the but I fully written sentences when I was younger but now I’m older see it in a much more complicated light. A good sort of complication.

I think of Lolita as a puzzle of a story. There are quite a few clues that lead to a metaphor that make since of HH’s proclamations at the end. I think Nabokov was satirizing himself as an artist through HH’s character. This view makes Delores the incarnation of “art” and HH the artist. The artist “loves” art as it affirms his whole life and reason for being. He seeks to control art, own it, and manipulate it for his own purposes. HH does not realize till the end that art/Delores lives and breaths on its/her own and that this autonomy outside of his control is truly what makes her her and art beautiful. Her struggle becomes real to him in the end, even if only a glimpse he does to me seem to actually recognize her as something separate not something he owns. He sees that seeking to calcify art only kills what was special about it in the first place; something like worshiping a corpse.

It reminded me of a statement David foster Wallace said once. (I’m paraphrasing heavily here) when I’m done with a book I’m dead and the book lives on through the readers. I think he was trying to say that he does not control the ultimate meaning of his own work and if he did it would be the other way around his book/art would be dead.

Amy Hungerford has 3 lectures on Lolita this is the 2nd one given by a guest speaker. I suggest all of them (Hungerford is a great literary analyst) but this one is a compelling argument for the above. https://youtu.be/QPnxLNFzA8s