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Description
Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, the sordid and self-professed "confessions of a white widowed male" named Humbert Humbert, concludes with a striking, if somewhat unsavory, reflection. Having narrated the story of his abduction and molestation of his thirteen-year-old step-daughter, Dolores Haze, and described his eventual murder of her impotent lover and subsequent abductor, the pornographer Clare Quilty, Humbert announces, "This then is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies." (1) Why, in the metaphoric gore of his own act of narration, does the incarcerated Humbert Humbert call attention to the fact that he has "reread" the story which he has (presumably) just penned? To what extent is his--and, by extension, the reader's--appreciation for the commingled elements of beauty and atrocity that he describes (the "marrow," the "blood," and the "beautiful bright-green flies") premised upon this act of rereading? (2) What does an act of rereading--both in and of Nabokov's Lolita--involve, entail and encourage, exactly?
In his chapter entitled, "'A Thousand Times and Never Like': Rereading for Class," Peter J. Rabinowitz argues that we often use the term "reading" to refer to two essentially different and distinct activities: "reading against memory" or "the process by which a reader makes retroactive sense of an already completed text," and "configurational" reading or reading "toward the end." For Rabinowitz, the former constitutes "the act of holding a work up to itself"; "reading against memory" emphasizes "the act of looking at the formal ingenuity of its coherence rather than being carried along by the perplexing flow of the plot," and thus it "stresses design at the expense of dramatic force." (3) Ultimately, Rabinowitz concludes that "reading against memory" is really an act of rereading in disguise: it treats a text's retrospective coherence as an ever-present given by retroactively identifying it as that which is always immediately apparent.
Similarly, in his essay entitled "Good Readers and Good Writers," Nabokov insists that, for his own part, he "use[s] the word reader very loosely" because "[c]uriously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader." According to Nabokov, "rereading," or what Rabinowitz terms "reading against memory," is the only way that we can accurately "acquaint ourselves" with a text. Unlike visual perception, Nabokov argues,
[i]n reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. (4)
Nabokov thus overtly privileges "reading against memory" ("rereading") as the only way to comprehend and experience the inherently diachronic nature of narrative. When we read, we cannot immediately and instantaneously traverse space via perception ("take in the whole picture") and experience, appreciate, or enjoy the attendant aesthetic details. According to Nabokov, reading is a prolonged acquaintance that extends over time; "good" reading therefore entails rereading because the combination of scope and precision--the integration of the textual and the temporal--is only an eventual result of multiple moments of consideration and deliberation repeatedly experienced in the wake of a prior familiarity with the text itself. In short, for Nabokov, the value of rereading appears to reside in its capacity to teach us about the expense--and expanse--of time. (5)
As Rabinowitz has suggested, however, when "reading against memory" (or rereading) is conflated with what is commonly labelled a "first-reading"--that is, when "coherence is ... presented as if it actually were configuration"--"covert systems of value" are introduced. What is erased or suppressed is the fact that "rereading is not simply a chronological stage that comes, horizontally, after first reading. Rather, these two sets of strategies are represented vertically by two different [readers] at a given moment, two different [readers] who are inevitably in a power relationship with each other." (6) To treat coherence as if it is somehow simply configuration is thus to attempt to use a typically "horizontal" conception of chronology to disguise a vertical relationship of power; as Rabinowitz suggests, when practiced by readers who arrogate a measure of authority to themselves, it can exert a formative influence on the products and practices of interpretation. Ultimately, Nabokov's Lolita explores the temporal problems and paradoxes that arise when someone who rereads "vertically"--that is, an individual who determinedly practices "reading against memory" in order to impose a covert system of values and a definitive, retrospective coherence upon a sequence of events--becomes a writer.
In writing his confession, Humbert Humbert initially and repeatedly attempts to practice what Gary Saul Morson will identify as "backshadowing" or "foreshadowing after the fact." In Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time, Morson characterizes "back-shadowing" as a conception of temporality that insists that "the present, as the future of the past, was already immanent in the past." (7) Thus, after linguistically fondling the name of his "nymphet" in the opening paragraph of his confession, Humbert Humbert points to the shifting temporalities of her identity: "She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita" (9). Morning, noon, and night, formal, casual, and sexual, "Lolita" will name a plurivocity that Humbert then insistently backshadows:
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. (9)
Humbert's answer to the question of "when," exactly, the summer of his significant love occurs initially appears to position Lolita's own birthdate as its point of reference, but his temporal isometrics are telling: his own age that summer is nearly equal to that of the retrospectively and fictitiously named "Annabel" (and thus, as he later admits, "Annabel" is not a "nymphet" at all, so it is not in that sense that she serves as "precursor" to Lolita) and his age that summer is also nearly equivalent to the number of years antecedent to Dolores Haze's birth. Moreover, his age at that time is also equal to Dolores' age at the time of her meeting with Humbert: namely, somewhere between twelve and thirteen. Figuratively, this is the "age" of Humbert's "love"; literally, it is also the age of Annabel's death. (8)
It is thus not Annabel herself that Humbert seeks to reincarnate in Lolita--rather, he seeks to break the "spell" cast by his abrupt awareness of the fact of her mortality:
Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you loved me thus! (14)
A temporal and spiritual affinity (Humbert and Annabel share both the "same dreams" and, coincidentally, the same experiences at the same time) that is ruptured by death, "love" and sexual initiation for Humbert Humbert become associated with a perverse synchronicity that he will insist can be captured visually. Thus, Humbert's narrative frequently represents a quest for visual evidence of "retrievable time," and his confession repeatedly asserts a "vertical" chronology of predetermined simultaneity that confers retrospective coherence on the configuration of his brief interval with Dolores Haze by backshadowing it as an episode prefigured by the death of Annabel Lee. (9)
As Morson acknowledges, backshadowing represents a kind of "chronocentrism": by conferring a position of perceptual superiority on its practitioner, it conflates the "vertical" position of power occupied by the rereader with the horizontal experience of chronology and configuration characteristic of the first-time reader. (10) In Lolita, the immanence of the present in the past--its figuration as the (literally, prescribed) future--allows Humbert's inscription and interpretation of pre-pubescent girls as "nymphets" to function as a form of sexual conscription. His helpless seduction is thus always immanent (and, by extension, imminent) when a purported "nymphet" arrives on the scene.
Such arrivals mark the start of Humbert's peculiar "game": to play with "nymphets" is, in Humbert's world, to play with time. (11) "Especially susceptible to the magic of games," Humbert describes how, "[i]n my chess sessions with Gaston I saw the board as a square pool of limpid water with rare shells and strategems rosily visible upon the smooth tessellated bottom, which to my confused adversary was all ooze and squid-cloud" (233). Perception is a form of play that substitutes immediacy and simultaneity for temporal duration: this... |
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