On Richard Rorty's Reading of Vladimir Nabokov by Leona Toker Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life. That this darkness is caused merely by the walls of time separating me and my bruised fists from the free world of timelessness is a belief I gladly share with the most gaudily painted savage. Rorty may have expected some such protest.
Vocabularies can, however, be provisional, partial, unsatisfactory.
In other words, Nabokov's works deal less with victims than with victimizers, showing us why we can all find ourselves on the side of the hammer rather than the nail. Rorty discusses Nabokov's thematic and rhetorical approaches to the issue of cruelty. The thematic approach consists in the portrayal of artists or quasi-artists who do not synthesize ecstasy with tenderness and, in their pursuit of ecstasy, do not care, or do not care enough, for the suffering of others. He shows that the incuriosity with which Humbert treats the Kasbeam barber is also evinced by ourselves if, preoccupied with other things, we do not understand that Charlotte really mourned the loss of her younger child and that, for Dolly, the inaccessible normal family life would come to be represented not only by Avis's healthy pink dad but also by the little brother. But the moral is not to keep one's hands off little girls but to notice what one is doing, and in particular to notice what people are saying.