On the other hand, this also sounds like something Pocahontas might say
on March 28, 2012 at 5:47 pmFor any of you who are unfamiliar with the concept of referential mania, I strongly recommend reading the Vladimir Nabokov story “Signs and Symbols” (which is, I think, the original source of the disease: a particularly uncanny and frightening sort of narcissism). The New Yorker has a version online, but if you have the time to go to the library or the money to go to a bookstore (ha ha, go to, as if you wouldn’t just order it online) I recommend reading it from an edition of Nabokov’s collected stories. The New Yorker has a very particular editorial style, and I think there are slight alterations in their version – worth going to the original.
You might also look into the recent movie Take Shelter, starring Michael Shannon and America’s current favorite China doll, Jessica Chastain. (That sounds snarky. I think she’s a marvelous actress.) This movie, while not documenting referential mania per se, features a hero plagued by a similar problem: Michael Shannon’s character, Curtis, has dreams about a terrible oncoming storm, which seems to be portented by everything around him. He throws his life into building a bomb shelter, but no one believes him about what is to come. His family has a history of mental illness, so he himself realizes that there is a chance that the storm is only in his head. But the fear is so real, and so driving.
Anyway, someone please watch it so I can talk to you about it. Being mired in the invisible terror of the world is an interest of mine.
Interesting that author Vladimir Nabokov ellsedsny digressed on what was and wasn’t pornography. A moot point should be just that, why tire on about the subject? He states in a letter that his novel is a tragedy. There is nothing of the tragic in Lolita. The protagonist is a muddling, ineffective, fall away man. His particular reality finds him immersed in the ordinary, a book dusty gnat that needs shooing away. There is no tragedy in lust or acting on an urge. To play out a tragedy one needs an epic character or an epochal moment in time so as to frame out the rise and fall. Humbert Humbert is exactly that, two of the same name, two in the crowd and so banal you have to squint to actually see him.