Some considerations for the third day of Lolita discussions:

Roger Angell: “an ironic playfulness that deepens and disarms horror.”

Richard Rorty*:  Humbert Humbert represents “the special sort of cruelty of which those who are capable of bliss are also capable.”  And…

Lolita is a reflection “on the possibility that there can be sensitive killers, cruel aesthetes, pitiless poets—masters of imagery who are content to turn the lives of other human beings into images on a screen, while simply not noticing that these other people are suffering.”

But look again at the argument that a work of fiction’s primary value is in creating a state of “aesthetic bliss” (pp. 314-15).  If this bliss is the ultimate goal, you have to define it very carefully so as not to omit other emotions that fully-alert humans should be feeling as well.

Rorty again: “ecstasy and tenderness are not only separable, but tend to preclude each other.”

And one more passage from Rorty: “It dawns on [a reader of Lolita] that he himself was just as inattentive to that month-long sentence, and to that dead moustached son, as Nabokov suspected he had been.  The reader, suddenly revealed to himself as . . . cruelly incurious, recognizes his brother in Humbert.  Suddenly Lolita does ‘have a moral in tow.’”

*Richard Rorty, "The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty." First appeared in The Ordering Mirror: Readers and Contexts (New York: Fordham UP, 1993), pp.198-220.