Today's class was spent essentially recapping the plot of Lolita, with all the intricate detail which results when one analyzes it. This is an assignment actually, which everyone forgot to do: to annotate a page from Lolita, selected purely at random if we so choose. This, while we are being technical and practical, ties in with the assignment to do a mid-term paper, 2 to 3 pages in length, discussing a segment from any book by N. Due some time in October.



From discussion and digression of Lolita's plot, we brought up connections outside of the novel which tie-in with it--ie. the film The Night of the Hunter, in which a mother marries a monster who imperils her children(and starring Shelley Winters, who also played Charlotte Haze in the Kubrick film version of Lolita)--and connections within the novel itself: in the class list, we have McFate, Aubrey. McFate is the sense of cosmic plotting H.H. detects throughout the novel. But than the name of the school he teaches at is Beardsley. If one takes the names "Aubrey" and "Beardsley" and puts them together, we come up with the name of an author and illustrator of erotic images(or so I gather from our being forbidden to look the pictures up).


And how there are several fairy tales at play in the book, in particular Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid and Bluebeard. Look especially at The Enchanted Hunters section.


And the notion of how N. has written, with this novel, a meta-fiction, in which the characters in a text know that they are characters. Examples include, but are not limited to, John Fowles The French Lieutenent's Woman and Cervantes' Don Quixote.


And we are all to send three sentences to Amanda in response to her very reasonable and pertinent question: Why a pedophile? Why choose to write about a pedophile?Because it is question that is worth asking: why should we read a novel about this highly immoral character? One is then directed to page 283, which Dr. Sexson refers to as the moral center of Lolita. And the scene in which Lo is playing tennis, which is an unsullied, epiphanic moment for H.H.