WhyWeReadFiction

by Theory of Mind

  Thus we may completely miss one level of Lovelace's manipulation of his reality or add another level, one that Richardson never intended. You may vehemently disagree with my interpretation of what Lovelace thinks, or of what he thinks that he thinks, or of what he wants Clarissa to believe, or of what Dorcas thinks MacDonald knows, and so on. We may profitably historicize Lovelace's mind processes, arguing, for example, that his lack of empathy with Clarissa and her middle-class kin is symptomatic of the general crisis of the aristocratic worldview during the Industrial Revolution, or that Richardson's particular interest in "sentiments" (i.e., feelings and their bodily and verbal expressions) was predicated upon certain developments in eighteenth-century natural philosophy. Every single one of our interpretations, honest mistakes, willful inventions, disagreements, and historical groundings will be imperceptibly but inescapably enmeshed with our ability to keep track of who in this novel thinks what and when. (If you doubt it, try making a single argument interpreting Clarissa within any framework of your choice without implicitly relying on such source-monitoring!) Because of its obsessive, unrelenting focus on people's representations of other people's mental states, Clarissa continues to structure our interpretations in this particular way (which is not to say that it renders them predictable—quite the opposite!).

  By the same token, our ongoing arguments over historical, aesthetic, and personal meanings of Clarissa themselves expand the range of the novel's engagement with our metarepresentational ability. As we take in any given innovative reading of Richardson's magnum opus, it latches onto our individual metarepresentational ecology in a myriad of unpredictable ways. Clarissa thus reenters culture with every new interpretation because it is peculiarly geared to its exclusive environment: the responsive, dynamic, learning, and changing, but always metarepresenting, human mind.

  NABOKOV'S LOLITA: THE DEADLY DEMON MEETS AND DESTROYS THE TENDERHEARTED BOY

  he writer who creates an unreliable narrator runs an exciting and ter

  rible risk: his or her readers may wind up believing the narrator's version of events. That is what happened to the author of Clarissa when he depicted Lovelace as apparently losing track of himself as the source of his fantasies. For most of the novel, Lovelace speaks of Clarissa not as his victim whom he hounds into depression and drives to suicide, but rather as his Juliet, his Beatrice, and his intended. If Richardson hoped that his discerning readers would mentally supply the source tags that Lovelace was shedding (e.g., "Lovelace claims that Clarissa is his intended"), he was

  11: Nabokov's Lolita

  quite mistaken. To his surprise and disappointment, eighteenth-century audiences (particularly the novel's target audience, women) bought Lovelace's version of reality. They fell in love with the rake and started demanding of the author that he end the story with a happy marriage between the angelic Clarissa and the man whom Richardson saw as a consummate stalker and rapist. In response to such demands Richardson prepared a revised edition of Clarissa (1751). It contained new scenes and pointed editorial notes, all of them tending to the same end—"blackening" the image of Lovelace1 so that no future readers would be so naive as to see him as a misguided, wretched, star-crossed but still romantic and desirable lover.

  To see how much these efforts availed Richardson, take a look at the back cover of the most popular modern edition of the novel (Penguin, 1985).2 It describes Lovelace as "easily the most charming villain in English literature" and claims that in this "fatally attracted pair, Richardson created lovers that haunt the imagination as Romeo and Juliet do, or Tristran and Isolde." Lovelace would have certainly been happy with this blurb. Didn't he strive mightily to persuade his audience that he is a new Romeo or Tristan even if his Isolde is occasionally unwilling to live up to her part?

  An eerily similar fate (down to the phrasing of the cover blurb) awaited Nabokov's Lolita, another novel that challenged its readers' metarepresentational capacity with its figure of the unreliable narrator. Lolita features a sexual predator who tells the story of his "relationship" with a twelve-yearold girl by portraying himself as an ultimate star-crossed lover, doomed both by the social unacceptability of his love and by the stubborn unwillingness of the underage object of his passion to rise up to his transcendent feelings. "Betrayed" and "abandoned" by her—for, like Clarissa, Lolita manages to escape her jailer—he discovers new depths of feeling. He is ready to "shout [his] poor truth" to the cruel world until he is "gagged and half-throttled" by philistines, for he insists "the world know how much [he] loved [his] Lolita," even when she outgrew the tender age which made her attractive to pedophiles and turned into a seventeen-year-old woman, "pale and polluted, and big with another's child" (278).

  Many readers swallowed Humbert Humbert's "poor truth" hook, line, and sinker. As Brian Boyd reports, one early reviewer saw the book's theme not as "the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child."3 Another admitted that he had "come virtually to condone the violation . . . [for he] was plainly not able to muster up the tone of moral outrage. . . . Humbert is perfectly willing to say that he is a monster; we find ourselves less and less eager to agree with him."4 Peter Rabinowitz highlights critical reactions to Lolita that strike me as particularly reminiscent of responses to Clarissa. He cites one distinguished critic who characterized Lolita and Humbert as "lovers" and their relationship as a "love affair," and another who saw Lolita as Humbert's "Juliet" (a "trivial" and "complicit" one, but still a Juliet).5

  Like Richardson before him, Nabokov felt compelled to correct his readers' misperception. He pointed out that Humbert Humbert is a "vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear touching" (Strong Opinions, 94). Also like Richardson, Nabokov did not altogether succeed in his corrective endeavor.

  I know that he did not, based on my own first experience of reading Lolita in my early twenties. I was profoundly touched by this story of Humbert's "impossible love." I felt deeply sorry (I say it now without any irony) for the witty, imaginative, and sensitive protagonist. As I was moving deeper and deeper into the novel, and Humbert was offering for my consideration one highly suspect supposition after another—that is, that some adolescent girls are demonic "nymphets" and that, though unaware of her special powers, one such "demon child" enchants the vulnerable Humbert into a mistimed and misplaced but poignant love affair—I ought to have started questioning the truth of such suppositions. I ought to have contemplated the possibility that Humbert is, as Nabokov righteously puts it, "a vain and cruel wretch," a ruthless pedophile, who exploits and victimizes the twelve-year-old orphan girl. Yet I did not.

  Looking back at my first impression of the novel, I realize, to quote Boyd again, that I had "accepted only Humbert's version of himself." I responded to "Humbert's eloquence, not Nabokov's evidence." Boyd observes perceptively that by "making it possible to see Humbert's story so much from Humbert's point of view, Nabokov warns us to recognize the power of the mind to rationalize away the harm it can cause: the more powerful the mind, the stronger our guard needs to be" (232; emphasis added).

  Understood within the context of a cognitive-evolutionary discourse, Boyd's notion of the "strong guard" corresponds, of course, to the concept of strong source-monitoring. In order not to be duped by liars, such as Lovelace and Humbert, who regularly lose—or seem to lose!—track of themselves as sources of their lies, we need to keep reapplying a very strong source tag, "Lovelace claims that" or "Humbert claims that," to every, however innocent and casual, observation such characters make and thus store it under the highest degree of advisement.

  The trouble with this ideal stance of readerly vigilance is that it presupposes a constant state of suspicion that is difficult to maintain both in

  11: Nabokov's Lolita

  real life and in our engagement with the literary narrative. Note that there is a genre built around the hypertrophied readerly mistrust—the detective story—but it deploys a particular set of markers to signal to us earl
y on that certain—by no means all!—information within it has to be stored with a high degree of metarepresentational framing. (I return to this issue again in Part III, dedicated to the detective novel.) By contrast, Lolita (although it can be read as a kind of a detective story) offers us little in the way of such markers. We do not realize until well into the novel, and sometimes not even then, that no information offered, however casually, by Humbert was safe from his manipulation and misrepresentation.

  A novel featuring a first-person unreliable narrator thus exploits a particular niche in our cognitive makeup. Although source-monitoring is an integral part of our information management, exaggerated and unrelentingly strong source-monitoring can be rather cognitively expensive and thus not our default state of mind. It seems that we are not automatically open to incurring this large cognitive cost. Once we have bracketed the given fictional narrative as a whole as a metarepresentation par excellence stored with the perpetual source tag pointing to its author, we are not necessarily prepared to treat with suspicion the majority of representations that we encounter within it. That is, we could, but we need some reason for it. We need some indication that a given character (i.e., a source of this or that representation) is untrustworthy.

  It follows, then, that Lolita manages to trick us into accepting Humbert's perspective on his relationship with his victim not because we are such gullible, naive, undiscerning readers walking around like happy idiots with our mental guards down, but rather because Nabokov makes the most of certain regularities of our cognitive system of information management. The "powerful mind" against which Boyd warns us is really our own.6

  (a) "Distributed" Mind Reading I: A "comic, clumsy, wavering Prince Charming"

  Here is one specific strategy that Nabokov uses to turn our source-monitoring ability to Humbert's advantage as he constructs his initial account of his and Lolita's "love affair." Nabokov "distributes" Humbert's version of events through the multiple minds within the narrative.7 That is, he makes other characters indirectly tell Humbert's story the way he wants it to be told. The effect of this distributed representation is such that instead of dealing with just one source of information—Humbert, whose credibility we could have sized up pretty quickly—we are encouraged to perceive that we are dealing with multiple sources of information. Some of those sources—most of them, in fact—are introduced and removed so fast that we simply have no opportunity to evaluate their trustworthiness and even to realize that such an evaluation is necessary.

  The minds through which the story is told in such a distributed manner include the mind of the implied reader, of Lolita, of her friends and family, and of the numerous people they meet on their travels. Typically, we would get Humbert's report of what happened to him and Lolita (e.g., they were stopped for speeding), followed by a representation of participants' thoughts and feelings (e.g., what the patrolmen who stopped the couple thought of them). The representation in question is supplied by Humbert in such a calculatedly quick, casual, and assured manner that we rarely pause and attempt to separate the observed behavior (here, of patrolmen) from Humbert's interpretation of a mental stance behind that behavior. Instead of registering the information as "Humbert claims that" (one crucial source tag) "when patrolmen stopped their car they thought" (another source tag) "X" (the representation itself), we instead register it as a representation with just one agent-specifying source tag: "when patrolmen stopped their car they thought X." Even if at this point in the narrative we have good reasons to mistrust Humbert, we have no reasons to mistrust the patrolmen we have just met (so to speak). We thus swallow the false representation because it is presented to us with an apparently trustworthy or, at least, not conspicuously untrustivorthy source tag.

  And, of course, whatever patrolmen and other strangers are thus reported to think or feel, their thoughts and feelings tacitly corroborate in a broad variety of ways Humbert's tale of the oversexed little demon seducing the innocent adult. The overall effect of those accumulating snapshots of states of mind is that the "vain and cruel wretch's" version of the story imperceptibly worms its way into the reader's consciousness.

  The novel does contain several strategically chosen occasions on which we are allowed a glimpse at Humbert as the source of our representations of the characters' thoughts and feelings. The accretion of such occasions toward the end of the story finally forces us to start doubting what we have until now considered trustworthy reports of mental states. Many of these doubts, however, are never completely confirmed or cleared up. As in Clarissa, we are left with a feeling of a mental vertigo8 induced by the author's consummate manipulation of our source-monitoring ability.

  To begin to appreciate the range of strategies Humbert uses to erase

  11: Nabokov's Lolita

  himself as the source of every mental state reported by the novel, consider his early attempt to ascribe a certain memory to his readers. Here is Humbert telling us about his childhood on the Riviera:

  My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which . . . the sun of my infancy had set: surely you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges. (10)

  As a matter of fact, we do not know "those redolent remnants of day suspended, etc." (unless we happen to be Lewis Carroll scholars, familiar with the "summer midges, each in its own golden afternoon" from his essay "'Alice' on the Stage"). Or to be more exact, we did not know them a moment ago. Humbert is addressing us with the complete assurance of somebody who simply helps us to bring back our own personal memories, when in fact he is planting those memories in our heads, for after we have read the sentence and tried to visualize that "hedge of bloom" and maybe even imagined ourselves as that "rambler" who traverses it at the bottom of the hill, it can be said that we do know what Humbert is talking about, sort of. Since it is very early in the novel and even the most discerning reader has little reason to treat with suspicion everything that Humbert says, we do not make a particular point of storing the representation of those blooming hedges with a strong source tag such as, "Humbert claims that we all remember that. ... " Instead, we let those hedges be almost our memory, with just a whiff of a source tag pointing to the book.

  Nabokov's strategy here is the same as Richardson's, when early on in Clarissa he establishes Lovelace as a penetrating mind-reader and thus our privileged source of information. The unreliable narrator has to initially come across as not only reliable but also quite unordinary in his/her ability to see through things and to articulate his/her visions. The eloquent, intelligent, and imaginative Humbert helps us to recover the warm and golden memories that we almost had all along even if we did not know that we had them. (And if we do catch the Carroll allusion, it may make us further appreciate the distinguished literary company we are thus invited to join.) Don't we want to surrender to such a promising narrator and just go along with his story? After all, he may regale us with more reconstructions of lovely if half-forgotten representations of our past.

  But if we do surrender to such a narrator, pretty soon we find other states of mind imputed to us that are far less warm and pleasant, even if at that precise moment, we may not realize what exactly is being read "into" us. For example, when Humbert tries to come up with the best phrasing for the telegram that he has to send to a hotel to reserve a room in which he hopes to molest the drugged Lolita, he describes his difficulties as follows: "How some of my readers will laugh at me when I tell them the trouble I had with the wording of my telegram! What should I put Humbert and daughter? Humbert and small daughter?" (109). Going over these sentences quickly, one may miss Humbert's construction of "some of his readers" as cynical and experienced pedophiles.9 For, on the one hand, we can all certainly relate t
o the feeling of momentary panic and uncertainty induced by the challenge of quickly translating our messy everyday comings and goings into an informative and respectable language required by some official form.10 On the other hand, however, given the context of this particular act of translation, only a veteran pedophile would wholeheartedly "laugh" at Humbert's predicament, remembering, apparently with conscious superiority, all those occasions on which he himself (i.e., the implied reader) had to send such telegrams to hotels and knew exactly how to frame them so as not to excite the receptionists' suspicions.

  This imputation of a state of mind to the reader happens so quickly that many of us do not register its implications the first time around: I certainly did not. The effect of not fully comprehending what Humbert is really saying here is that we half-consciously acquiesce to his view of himself as a babe in the woods, a romantic soul, not knowing the ways of the world and as such deserving our compassion. Note that there are plenty of occasions in the novel on which Humbert describes himself in precisely those terms. He talks of himself as "pathetic" (63); "mawkish" (109); "unpractical" (175); "comic" and "clumsy" (109); "weak," "not wise," and held "thrall" to a "schoolgirl nymphet" (183); "guilty," but still "great" and "tenderhearted" (188); in possession of a "credulous, simple, benevolent mind" (200); and altogether a "fond fool" (229). Ubiquitous as they are, standing on their own, such epithets would have been less convincing than when complemented by characterizations issuing seemingly from the minds of his readers, such as the one discussed above. This is what I see as one striking instance of the novel's "distribution" of the sources of its representations—we certainly hear about Humbert's sweet naivete not only from him (one source of our representations) but also from some of his implied readers (a source seemingly independent from the first).