Okay, but there's a lot more humor in Thompson's Recoil, when
Pat has to get that corpse out of the elevator, or in
Highsmith's Ripley Underground when Ripley is trying to get
the corpse out of his wine cellar in the wheelbarrow and it
keeps falling over, than there is anywhere in Lolita. Lolita
is a psychological study of one type of child molester...and
the child he molests, for in Lolita, the child is NOT
innocent. Nabokov makes Humbert a tragic but not detestable
figure. Clair Quilty is much easier to hate than Humbert is.
One can even relate in some ways to Humbert's problem. In the
wide world there is some crazy denial that children don't
think about sex until they're 16 or so. Anyone's who's
actually lived life knows children experiment with sex much
much younger than that. That adults have a responsibility to
control their behavior with children is the given. That some
adults cannot and why, is the subject of the novel. I'm sure
there were passages in Lolita that made me smile, but I would
not catagorize Lolita as a "very funny" novel. Any more than
the life of Paul Shanley was a very funny life.
Patrick King
--- Richard Moore <
moorich@aol.com> wrote:
> --- In
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, Patrick King
> <abrasax93@...> wrote:
> >
> > Could you possibly quote some of the
especially
> > hillarious passages you recall so I can
understand
> at
> > least what you mean?
>
> If you are expecting me to quote a few
> knee-slappers, that isn't going
> to happen. Dissecting humor is a grim task
that
> kills the object of
> the examination and it is the sort of
academic
> exercise that I find
> tedious in the extreme. As I said before, I
respect
> your opinion but
> we clearly find humor at times in different ways
and
> in different
> places.
>
> Richard Moore
>
>
>
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