WhyWeReadFiction

by Theory of Mind

  Here is another of those instances of the reader's "independent" testi

  11: Nabokov's Lolita

  mony to Humbert's goodness. Having finally checked into that coveted hotel, having in fact gotten to Lolita's bed, lying next to her and not daring, yet, to touch her, Humbert apostrophizes thus:

  Please, reader: no matter your exasperation with the tenderhearted, morbidly sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these essential pages! Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling. For instance (I almost wrote "frinstance"), I had no place to rest my head, and a fit of heartburn . . . was added to my discomfort. (129)

  To make us feel Humbert's (but not Lolita's!) pain in this passage, Nabokov has to manipulate us into not fully comprehending what kind of reader (or readers) his rhetoric implies here. For isn't it true that only a hardened pedophile would respond with "exasperation" to Humbert's lack of decisive action in the bed of his stepdaughter?11 And isn't it only in contrast to this kind of reader/rapist that Humbert may appear "tenderhearted, morbidly sensitive, [and] infinitely circumspect"? To prevent us from facing squarely that reader (for how trustworthy can such an utterly repugnant source of the sympathetic representation of Humbert really be?), Nabokov has to distract our attention. He accomplishes it by suddenly ratcheting up the emotional intensity of the scene. Immediately upon introducing the flattering image of his "tenderhearted" self, Humbert turns to us with the desperate—and really rather unwarranted in its urgency—cry of "Imagine me! .. . I shall not exist if you do not imagine me!" The interactive drama of the moment engrosses our attention. It might be a bit incoherent—"let's smile a little . . . there is no harm in smiling .. . I had no place to rest my head .. . [I had] a fit of heartburn"—but it is still gripping. We emerge from this flailing emotional rollercoaster with the vague vision of Humbert as a "trembling doe," a lost soul whose childlike innocence is underscored by his use of teenage parlance ("frinstance"), and rarely do we turn back to examine more closely the reader implied by the opening of the paragraph.

  My last example (though not the novel's!) of Nabokov's using the implied reader to promote a positive view of the protagonist comes from the later part of the story. Having just lost Lolita to the yet-unknown rival, Humbert tries to trace him through the registers of various hotels in which the "fiend" stayed as he followed Humbert and Lolita on their last car journey across America. "Imagine me," implores Humbert, turning to us

  once more in an apparent overflow of emotions:

  Imagine me, reader, with my shyness,—my distaste for any ostentation, my inherent sense of the comme ilfaut, imagine me masking the frenzy of my grief with a trembling ingratiating smile while devising some casual pretext to flip through the hotel register . . . (247)

  Again, understood in practical cognitive terms, Humbert's present plea "Imagine me!" is nothing less than a "prompt" for the reader to perceive herself-—and not, that is, Humbert—as the source of her positive representation of the protagonist. And given that the novel does manage to lull many of us into a kindly view of Humbert—such a shy foreigner, such a tortured soul, such a man comme il faut—this strategy of implied minds/distributed sources must be working. It must be working in spite of our knowing all the while that since Humbert tells us the story, every representation within the story originates with him and not with other minds that he lines up for us. Apparently, our tendency to register possible sources of representations and to subconsciously keep track of them overrides our conscious awareness that all of those sources are spurious, nonexistent, fabricated by the crafty narrator who wants to win us over to his side.

  More attempts to "outsource" his flattering representation of himself take place during Humbert's last encounter with Lolita, when summoned by her unexpected letter he comes to visit her in "Coalmont," where she lives with her husband, "Dick Schiller." As Humbert sits on the divan in the Schillers' squalid parlor, we get a glimpse of him, presumably through Lolita's eyes:

  She considered me as if grasping all at once the incredible—and somehow tedious, confusing and unnecessary—fact that the distant, elegant, slender, forty-year old valetudinarian in velvet coat sitting beside her had known and adored every pore and follicle of her pubescent body. (272)

  Note the rhetorical sleight-of-hand promulgated by this passage. Both the reader and Lolita are ostensibly asked to grasp the "incredible . . . fact" that Humbert once knew and adored every pore of Lolita's body. While we obligingly consider this fact, weighing it this way and that, Humbert manages to slide by us as the casual given that Lolita perceives Humbert as "the distant [and] slender . . . valetudinarian." Now, this is indeed the image of himself that Humbert wants to cultivate on the last pages of his narrative: his purported elegance and slenderness would soon provide the most use

  11: Nabokov's Lolita

  ful contrast to the swinish appearance of Quilty whom Humbert murders. Similarly, the intimation of Humbert's failing health could garner extra sympathy for the murderer. However, when we look at this scene closely, there is no evidence at all that Lolita indeed sees Humbert as distant, slender, and ailing. Given, however, that our attention is distracted (for, remember, we are still busy "grasping" the incredible fact, etc.), we hardly pause to realize that we are presented with yet another fake source of our sympathetic image of Humbert.

  Immediately after, Humbert brings up the same image again—now using as its source the mind of Lolita's husband and that of his friend, Bill, who enter the parlor and thus have to be introduced to Lolita's "dad": "The men looked at her fragile, frileux, diminutive, old-world, youngish but sickly, father in velvet coat and beige vest, maybe a viscount" (273). The representation of Humbert as a refined, vaguely aristocratic valetudinarian acquires more and more validity as it is presented to us as originating in three different minds (Lolita's, Dick's, and Bill's) almost simultaneously.

  The novel closes with the protagonist feeling that his "slippery self [is] eluding [him], gliding into deeper and darker waters than [he cares] to probe" (309). Still, he is trying desperately to extort the last appealing image of that elusive self from the minds of his readers. Wishing to "make [Lolita] live in the minds of later generations," and thus "thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art," Humbert quietly upstages his "immortal love" in those notyet-born minds with his assertion that "this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita" (309). In other words, when future readers remember Humbert, they will not think of sexual enslavement, emotional abuse, rape, and murder; instead they will think of angels and of sonnets, and of the miraculous endurance of love and art. And the strangest thing about this last manipulative sentiment of Humbert's is that he is right—at least in so far as Lolita is considered to be "the only convincing love story of our century." (I am quoting now from a book blurb on the cover of the Vintage International edition of Lolita and attributed to Vanity Fair.)

  (b) "Distributed" Mind Reading II: An "immortal daemon disguised as a female child"

  Throughout the novel, Humbert promotes our view of the heroine as a nymphet, a sexually precocious little girl, a demon who seduces men without even trying—a view that effectively absolves Humbert and turns him into her victim. To convince the reader of the truth of this perspective, Humbert uses the same strategy that he used to convince us that he is a sensitive, noble, kindhearted, if a bit naive, man: he obliterates himself as the source of our representations of Lolita and presents us instead with snapshots of other minds (including Lolita's own) that support his interpretation of events.

  Consider one early instance of Humbert's assured mind-attributing strategically aimed at confirming Lolita's oversexed nature. When Lolita comes to visit Humbert in his room at her mother's house and, "studying somewhat shortsightedly, the piece of paper [from his desk] innocently [sinks]
to a half-sitting position upon [his] knee," Humbert reports Lolita's thoughts as follows:

  All at once I knew I could kiss her throat or the wick of her mouth with perfect impunity. I knew she would let me do so, and even close her eyes as Hollywood teaches. A double vanilla with hot fudge—hardly more unusual than that. I cannot tell my learned reader . . . how the knowledge came to me; perhaps my ape-ear had unconsciously caught some slight change in the rhythm of her respiration—for now she was not really looking at my scribble, but waiting with curiosity and composure—oh, my limpid nymphet!—for the glamorous lodger to do what he was dying to do. (48)

  The plausibility of Humbert's claim that Lolita is waiting for him to kiss her is bolstered by the pounding repetition of the words "knew" and "knowledge." Imagine substituting these particular words with their close correlatives, for example, "all at once I thought I could kiss her throat . . . I thought she would let me do so .. . I cannot tell my reader how the idea came to me." The wimpy "I thought" would strongly imply Humbert as the source of our representation of Lolita's mind, whereas "I knew" works toward obliterating this source, especially this early in the novel, when we do not yet have a good reason to doubt every one of Humbert's claims to knowledge. And so we go along with Humbert's elucidation of Lolita's thoughts, an elucidation that, on this particular occasion, could be correct but (a possibility that, lulled by Humbert's rhetoric, we do not consider!) could also be completely wrong.

  Much of Humbert's unflinching mind-reading is aimed at construing a world responsive in numerous subtle ways to the demonic presence of nymphets. Here is Humbert reporting his solitary trip to the department

  11: Nabokov's Lolita

  store where, newly initiated in the intricacies of teenage pret-a-porter, he buys a new wardrobe for Lolita. As Humbert moves from counter to counter, accumulating "bright cottons, frills, puffed-out short sleeves, soft pleats, snug-fitting bodices and generously full skirts" (107), "an only shopper in that rather eerie place," he senses "strange thoughts form in the minds of the languid ladies" (108) who assist him in his enchanted shopping quest. Readers rarely pause at this mention of Humbert's "sensing" the salesgirls' thoughts, for we easily guess what thoughts Humbert is intuiting. "Oddly impressed by [his] knowledge of junior fashions" (108), the salesgirls must be wondering about his relationship with the person for whom he is buying all this stuff, perhaps even guessing at some unwholesome sexual inclinations lurking behind the "elegant" (108) facade that this customer presents to the world. And yet, just as in Humbert's earlier report of Lolita's feelings when she sits on his lap in his study presumably waiting for him to kiss her, we have absolutely no evidence for the salesgirls' "strange thoughts" other than Humbert's barefaced assertion. For all that we know, they may be admiring the caring father who has to shop for his teenage child on his own (a widower, perhaps?). So taken, however, are we by Humbert's confident tone—for who could argue with the visceral authority of "sensing"?12—that we do not consider this alternative possibility.

  Humbert's quick, casual, and, as it turns out on the second reading, groundless attributions of mental states to strangers are ubiquitous. On a different occasion, he mentions in passing that during his and Lolita's journey across the United States they are regularly accosted by "inquisitive parents," who, "in order to pump Lo about [him], would suggest her going to a movie with their children" (164). If we append this sentence with the simplest of the agent-specifying source tags, such as, "Humbert thinks that. . .," we would easily recognize this piece of mind-reading for what it is—plain paranoia and inability to imagine a state of mind not centered on Humbert's august persona and his enviable possession of a nymphet. The idea that the only reason one parent after another would invite a girl clearly starved for the company of her peers to go to a movie with his or her own child is to "pump" her about her father is ridiculous once we restore the missing source tag. We do not, however, realize that the tag is missing when we first read the book and thus unwittingly acquiesce to the Humbertian vision of the world.

  And in that world, the snooping parents are followed by sexually frustrated policemen. Stopped for speeding in a small town, Humbert notices that the patrolmen peer at Lolita and him with "malevolent curiosity."

  However, once Lolita smiles at them "sweetly," the officers turn "kind"

  (171) and let them go, apparently gratified by the little sexpot's homage to their uniformed masculinity. Or so Humbert makes us imagine, for unless we consciously supply the missing source tag, "Humbert thinks that . . ," we indeed believe there is something "malevolent" and darkly intrusive in the patrolmen's rather ordinary act of reconnaissance.

  In fact, no male can come in contact, however fleeting, with Lolita's "special languorous glow" without falling under her nymphetic spell. Humbert easily penetrates the minds of various "garage fellows, hotel pages, vacationists, goons in luxurious cars, [and] maroon morons near blue pools" and informs us matter-of-factly that they were all thrown into "fits of concupiscence" (159) at the mere sight of the sexy girlie. Losing track of the source tag pointing back to Humbert, we actually buy this mass attribution of mental states.

  And we have already swallowed Humbert's confident prediction that two teenage boys who happen to share a pool with Lolita for a couple of minutes one afternoon will be aroused by the mere thought of "the quicksilver in the baby folds of her stomach .. . in recurrent dreams for months to come" (162). Not only does Humbert know what strangers he meets are thinking now, but he also knows what they will be dreaming about for months to come! Their dreams will naturally resemble his own, testifying once again to Lolita's irresistible, bewitching sexuality.

  (c) How Do We Know When Humbert Is Reliable?

  Like Richardson's Clarissa, Nabokov's Lolita contains episodes that imply that the narrator might have crossed over to that near-schizophrenic realm where self-awareness breaks down. For instance, when Lolita finally escapes Humbert, he spends some time in what he calls a "Quebec sanatorium" (a mental institution of some kind), where he composes a poem, featuring the following lines:

  Where are you hiding, Dolores Haze? Why are you hiding, darling? (I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze, I cannot get out said the starling). (255)

  Humbert's sentiments on the occasion are eerily reminiscent of those of

  11: Nabokov's Lolita

  Lovelace, who, when Clarissa has fled him for good, apostrophizes, "Oh return, return, my soul's fondledom, return to thy adoring Lovelace!" (1023)—a stalker and rapist apparently unaware of the fact that the overpowering vision of himself as a romantic and suffering lover and of his victim as a cruel coquette has originated in his own brain and has no support in the external reality. Like Lovelace before him, Humbert seems to be unable to comprehend why his "darling" would hide from him, though his unwavering focus on his own sufferings ("/ talk in a daze, / walk in a maze") may also imply a vague Lovelacean threat (i.e., "she is hurting me; she ought to pay for it").

  It is peculiarly appropriate that to comment on his predicament, Humbert draws on the famous sentimental emblem of the second part of the eighteenth century—an image of a trapped bird13—put into cultural circulation by the author himself particularly fond of experimenting with his readers' source-monitoring ability (for how trustworthy, for example, is a narrator who tells the story of his conception and his mother's pregnancy and labor as if he were present on all of these occasions?14). Already by the early nineteenth century, a writer could imply that a character takes herself a touch too seriously by having that character liken herself to the Sternean starling (as does Maria Bertram in Austen's Mansfield Park), but we get no indication in Lolita that Humbert is aware of this ironic tradition. His portrayal of the caged self is yet another in a series of images showing him as trapped and enslaved by his irresistible nymphet, and, on this occasion, we have no way of knowing whether he can put a critical distance between this vision of his plight and the reality of his relationship with Lolita. In Phelan's terms, Humbert misreg
ards his reality, manifesting unreliability "on the axis of ethics and evaluation."15

  Yet, scattered throughout the novel—and growing more persistent toward its end—are Humbert's apparently reliable assessments of that relationship. Their presence eventually enables us to reread Lolita not as a "love story" but as a story of a "vain and cruel wretch," who has been misleading himself and his audience about the true meaning of his actions and is now beginning to face that true meaning, albeit gradually and reluctantly. This crucial dual perspective of Lolita is possible only because it is firmly grounded in our metarepresentational capacity. Nabokov intuitively exploits this capacity both to deceive and to disabuse his readers. Here is how it works:

  I have shown already how, to convince his audience of his version of events, Humbert distributes representations testifying to his tortured virtue and Lolita's demonic sexuality via different, seemingly independent and disinterested, sources throughout the narrative. Because we register those sources (can't help doing so—metarepresenting species that ours is!), we are amenable to buying into the false perspective that they tacitly and tirelessly convey. But then something else happens, too. Nabokov splits his narrator in two—Humbert before he started writing the "Confession of a White Widowed Male" and Humbert who is writing his "Confessions" and rethinking his story-—a phenomenon that Phelan characterizes as the "dual focalization"16 of the novel. The "present-tense" Humbert is forced to see things that the "past-tense" Humbert managed/chose not to see, and this painful new "sightedness"17 renders him an increasingly, if fitfully, reliable narrator.