Free In Rough Country by Joyce Carol Oates

The last four or five stories might have been printed out by the Great Automatic Grammatizator or by “Georgy Porgy” who, after his nervous breakdown, seems to have become a writer-satirist whose final object of satire is writing itself:
    I find that writing is a most salutory occupation at a time like this, and I spend many hours a day playing with sentences. I regard each sentence as a little wheel, and my ambition lately has been to gather several hundred of them together at once and to fit them all end to end, with the cogs interlocking, like gears, but each wheel a different size, each turning at a different speed. Now and then I try to put a really big one right next to a very small one in such a way that the big one, turning slowly, will make the small one spin so fast that it hums. Very tricky, that.

REVISITING NABOKOV’S LOLITA
    Laughter is the primeval attitude toward life—an attitude that survives only in artists and criminals.
    â€” OSCAR WILDE
    L ike all classics, Lolita is a special case. An occasion for enormous controversy—bitter denunciations, fulsome praise—at the time of its publication in 1955, the novel has acquired, over the decades, like such scandalous predecessors as James Joyce’s Ulysses and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover , the patina of the lewd classic: far more people have heard of it, and have an opinion about it, than have read it. Individuals with virtually no interest in literature, particularly the fussily self-referential, relentlessly ornate Nabokovian manner, know who Lolita was, or is; or imagine that they do. Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Lolita, or The Confession of a White Widowed Male , the hapless lover of the twelve-year-old American schoolgirl, provides a definition of the “Lolita” prototype:
    Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or manytimes older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.”
    (Is Humbert Humbert a pedophile? In fact, he gives little evidence of being attracted to girls as young as nine, fortunately; his erotic attractions are for older girls, who arouse his ardor as “little nymphs” or “nymphets,” who seem to mimic adult sexuality while retaining a childlike innocence.) Nabokov makes clear by way of Humbert’s background that the nymphet-prototype precedes the actual girl: as Humbert had been in love as a prepubescent boy with a girl named Annabel, whom the slangy, vulgar, so very American Lolita later embodies. We are meant to think that Humbert’s (perverse, criminal) predilection for prepubescent girls is his fate, and not his choice.
    Famously, Humbert confides in the reader, as to a panel of jurors, his most shocking revelation:
    Frigid gentlewomen of the jury! I had thought that months, perhaps years, would elapse before I dared to reveal myself to Dolores Haze; but by six she was wide awake, and by six fifteen we were technically lovers. I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me.
    And, later, in trying to describe “that strange, awful, maddening world—nymphet love,” Humbert confides:
    I have but followed nature. I am nature’s faithful hound. Why then this horror that I cannot shake off? Did I depriveher of her flower? Sensitive gentlewomen of the jury, I was not even her first lover.
    Like Oscar Wilde, similarly torn between the “demonic” attractions of the flesh, in Wilde’s case for young boys, and the propriety of a sternly judging society, Humbert Humbert experiences his predicament as so hopeless, the conflicts of his appetites so beyond remedy, he has no recourse but to turn to comedy for solace. Lolita is richly stocked with “realistic” details, for Nabokov had a sharp, shrewd eye, especially for