Post for 10/17

I'm still dealing with and unpacking the Roth. (In a sidenote, I loved that Roth couldn't tell that John Ray Jr. wasn't a "real" editor." I find the fictionality of that character so absolutely paramount to this book. I wonder how Roth would react upon realizing the falsehood of the character.) I really like Roth's conceptions of reality, fiction, and the way Nabokov blurs the boundaries of both. I think, if we follow Roth's idea, (or perhaps it was Appel's) that the characters  that the most virtuous characters are the ones who are able to balance the the "real" as well as the "fictional" worlds. Roth goes on to discuss (rightly so,) that Humbert Humbert is completely incapable of balancing these two. This ends up destroying him. What I think is sort of interesting about this, is that this makes Lolita a tragedy, in a fairly traditional sense. Humbert Humbert, incapable of both keeping track of reality or fiction, is fatally flawed. Humbert can't remember or understand the difference between a reality or fiction. So, what makes that interesting, is the idea that Humbert may be honest, and also not accurately tell the story.  This slips into the idea of the subjectivity of truth. I just read "Six Characters in Search of an Author" for another class, and I have since been thinking about the way the two works deal with "reality" by creating a "real" infrastructure around the story. I think about the idea of the difference between Truth and truth. Facts vs. truth. I don't really have the feeling that Humbert intentionally lies very much, because I think he does not have the appropriate grip on what is and is not real, what is right and what is wrong. I don't know. It's all so complicated, and difficult. I keep trying to work and re-work these ideas, and they so often don't follow through.

More than the how, which Roth goes rather deeply into, I'm more interested in the why. What is the point? Why does Nabokov play with reality and fiction? What should Humbert's inability to sort reality from fiction say about us as people? Is Nabokov just playing a game to say that the best way to go about things is to be able to neatly separate "reality" from "fiction"? What a horribly secular thing to think. What a horribly separatist thing that is to say. If we can agree that Humbert Humbert is being honest, despite how often he lies, than wouldn't it be fair to say that we are all full of massive subjectivities, and that Nabokov is trying to say that we should both keep our realities in place, as well as acknowledging our own fictions, and the realities and fictions of others? I don't know if that question made any sense.