Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.15291/SIC/2.7.LC.3
The Enchanted Hunters in Nabokov’s Lolita
Justine Shu- Ting Kao
; Tamkang University
Abstract
In Nabokov’s Lolita, Humbert Humbert’s The Enchanted Hunters, as a quest for love, aims to reconstruct a felicitous world or integrate various fragmentary details into an organic unity that revives a lost love, experiencing it on the basis of irony, and revealing a simulation of the desire, violence, and despondency which have been expressed in myths of nymphs and Persephone. The protagonist never reaches this unity, but his narrative of erotic and romantic love reveals him as a pathetic addict engaged in mechanical reproduction related to the phenomena of desire, seduction, violence, and sex. His The Enchanted Hunters does not simulate what he expects of his childhood love with Annabel; rather, it simulates the erotic imagination suggested in Mary D. Sheriff’s term “nymphomania,” in which artists fall degenerately to a model of tragedy.
Keywords
simulation; nymph; nymphomania; The Enchanted Hunters
Hrčak ID:
183094
URI
Publication date:
15.6.2017.
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