Lolita: How does a man's desire enter the literary narrative?

The American writer Nabokov is known to us, mainly the shocking novel "Lolita", although this novel seems to be popular, telling the love story of a middle-aged man and an underage girl, in fact, there is another mystery.

Lolita's writing of "desire" goes straight to the depths of the human heart, and everyone is trapped by desire and cannot get rid of it. It can be said that Lolita has a referential meaning in addition to the signifier. Nabokov's novels are all wonderful, but they are all jokes; to the point of making jokes to the point of groundbreaking, Nabokov is unparalleled.

In Nabokov's eyes, the world is a potential novel. Writers are like magicians, deconstructing life with artistic intuition, deriving beauty from the commonplace reality, "bringing to life the details of any fictional world." With the help of the writer's multiple perspectives on the world, Nabokov completed imagination, parody, and irony.

In fact, I've always wondered how a writer who gave up his native language (Russian) could write a great novel in English. Nabokov himself once said that his personal tragedy was that "I had to abandon the richness of my mother tongue, the natural tone of voice that I could pick up, the Russian language that I could master skillfully, and replace it with second-rate English." So I lost all my gear: dazzling mirrors, black velvet backgrounds, those implicit associations and traditions, and a native magician, dressed in a white tuxedo, personable and skillful in handling these devices, could magically transcend his cultural heritage. ”

The Faint Fire is arguably the most peculiar of all Of Nabokov's novels, and at the beginning of its appearance, postmodern collage writing almost frightened orthodox critics, even avant-garde critics, who considered it not to be a novel. Yet the Latin American novel master Carpenter said: "When the novel is not like a novel, it can become a great work, such as Proust, Kafka and Joyce – in our time, any great novel begins with the reader being surprised that this is not a novel." ”

Nabokov's novel, titled "The Faint Fire", is actually an allusion to Shakespeare's tragedy "The Timon of Athens", which means that the moon steals the sun's brilliance and reflects a faint glow. The Faint Fire doesn't offer readability, it just challenges people's intelligence. The novel has almost no fixed answers, but it presents the author himself, or unfinished poetic commentary. The peculiar structure, the intertextual narrative, is no longer the focus of the novel, the key is why the author narrates it this way.

Of course, there may be no answer to all this. Nabokov wrote it, and as for the interpretation, it was the business of the reader or the critic, and it had nothing to do with the author. It should be known that Nabokov was a writer who emphasized genius and was dismissive of realistic fiction. I seemed to see Nabokov sneering slightly, and the faint fire gradually burned, illuminating the entire night sky.