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Re: QUERY: Lolita's subjectivity and America
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Dear All,
Thanks for this very inspiring discussion. I also agree with Suellen that one of the achievements of Nabokov in the novel is to have encoded Lolita’s sufferings (in accordance with her actual name Dolores, i.e. pains) within Humbert’s first-person narration. And I also feel this aspect has been overlooked by criticism (Suellen and I had agreed on that point at the ALA 2005 Boston Conference).
The fact that the narrator attempts to drown Lolita’s voice within his own logorrhea is an essential point in the book. I relate this to the notion of secrecy, which I find to be at the core of the novel. The secret of Lolita’s feelings and suffering is carefully woven into the fabric of the narrative, offering an echo to Humbert’s paradoxical strategy: throughout his confessions, Humbert explains how, throughout his life, he endeavoured to keep his desire for nymphets (i.e. his paedophilia) secret. Yet, the point of his narrative is to expose that secret: as Pierre Boutang explained in his Ontologie du Secret, the very ambivalence at the core of secrecy is that a secret is something that must not be told, but is also something that has no other sense but in being disclosed (Boutang, 129). Similarly, Nabokov played on the double bind of concealment and revelation defining secrecy to encode Lolita’s subjectivity within Humbert’s confessions. Actually an article of mine is to about to be published on that topic (“Lolita, the Secret of/in Lolita. Poerotics of Secrecy”) in a forthcoming publication on American Secrets.
I would only like to stress two other points:
As pointed out by Christine Raguet (Lolita : Un royaume au-delà des mers, Bordeaux, Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1996, 45), the protagonist’s names rehearsed in the first page (Lo, Lola, Dolly, Dolorès, Lolita) are associated to a situation (home, outside, school, official, desire/sex), and these associations are very consistently used (sometimes ironically, once the patterns are established) throughout the novel. Hence “Lolita”, the nymphet-name, is repeatedly resorted to in contexts of desire, and is especially coupled with the possessive adjective “my”, in keeping with the solipsization process.
Humbert’s multiplies attempts at possessing Lolita (not only sexually, but also objectifying her), notably from a symbolic/mock-psychoanalytical point of view. Many examples could be given, and I am sure many quotes come to your mind. I’d like to focus on clothes, because they work as substitutes for the nymphet’s body, and even have the status of fetishes: for instance, once Lolita is gone, HH cherishes “a pair of old sneakers, a boy’s shirt she had worn, and some ancient blue jeans” (255). Hence, his buying clothes for her in Parkington announces the sexual possession about to take place in room 342 of the Enchanted Hunters; garments work as synecdoches/substitutes for Lolita’s body, and by being the dress provider, Humbert establishes himself as the rightful owner of this body. Or at least he tries to do so: indeed despite all the measurements he has of her (107), all the clothes he bought are either too small or too big, and in the end Lolita chooses to wear the dress she had on the day before (138). This shows that Lolita’s body is not so easily captured and mastered by Humbert, but it also discloses another facet of her subjectivity: to me, through her rejection of his gifts (cloth-prisons of sorts) on the very morning of the first sexual intercourse, she refuses to be his.
Marie C. Bouchet
University of Toulouse, France
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:27:29 -0500
From: suellen.stringer-hye@VANDERBILT.EDU
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] QUERY: Lolita's subjectivity and America
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Hi Matt,
I think this is the line from your
original post that I differ with
I do not think it is possible to know or to guess who the
actual (fictional) Dolores Haze might be, though we know that she is not the
girl Humbert gives himself and, by extension, us.
It is not just Humbert but rather Nabokov who gives us a
hidden but quite vivid portrait of Dolores Haze. With every successive reading
of the book, increasingly more of her character is revealed and again not just
in the narrative but in interweavings of language and theme, so that now I feel
she stands on her own and I DO know who the actual (fictional) Dolores Haze is
or at least as well as I know who the fictional HH is. I don’t think we
glimpse her for a moment; she seems ever present to me. Nabokov was able to
accomplish all this without providing direct access to her inner life but
pointing to it in many subtle ways. Is the pang of sorrow that you speak of
perhaps because we know so much about her rather than that we know so little?
---Suellen
From: Vladimir
Nabokov Forum [mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU] On Behalf Of Matthew Roth
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2008
12:54 PM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] QUERY:
Lolita's subjectivity and America
Suellen,
I don't disagree
with your thoughts below. The very fact--as Vera pointed out--that
Dolores seems daily to be in tears (or on the verge of them) is
enough--along with the other details you mention--to help us see that
there is another girl beneath Humbert's mannequin. My response was
to the question of whether we are able to access her subjectivity. It
seems to me that the pang of sorrow that throbs through the book is largely
produced by the realization that there is a Dolores in there whom we will never
be able to reach. We glimpse her for a moment, but she is gone, replaced,
before we can save her.
Best,
Matt
>>> On 4/15/2008 at 12:21 PM, in message
<63566160FBD1BE43873B5A100A4222DF047597C1@mailbe17.email.Vanderbilt.edu>,
"Stringer-Hye, Suellen" <suellen.stringer-hye@VANDERBILT.EDU>
wrote:
I
respectfully disagree with this conclusion. While it is true that Humbert's
first person narrative does create an illusory Lolita, the intricate
patternings and images underlying that prose, reveal quite a bit about Dolores
Haze, her real relationship with her mother, the loss of her brother and
father, her teenage dreams and her adult difficulties. This seems to me
Nabokov's extraordinary achievement in Lolita--- and one that is often
overlooked.
Suellen
Stringer-Hye
From: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
[mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU] On Behalf
Of Matthew Roth
Sent: Tuesday, April 15, 2008 8:22
AM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] QUERY:
Lolita's subjectivity and America
Barrie asked:
"What are the best writings, if any, on what it's like to be Lolita, or
how someone becomes Lolita? Whose imagination imagines what Lolita is
really like -- her subjectivity?"
MR: Most
of the criticism I have encountered focuses on Humbert's
"solipsizing" of Lolita. She has no subjectivity that we can
access, since the Lolita we are given is, as Humbert says, "not she,
but my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita--perhaps, more real than Lolita;
overlapping, encasing her; floating between me and her, and having no will, no
consciousness--indeed, no life of her own" (62 AnL). Leland de la
Durantaye, in his excellent, very readable book Style is Matter: The Moral Art of
Vladimir Nabokov, does a great job unpacking all of the
repercussions (for Humbert and for us) of this deeply flawed imaginative
act. As he puts it, Humbert "can only 'enjoy in peace' his vicious
circle of paradise if the real little girl he is do desperately mistreating
does not too violently interpose herself--and so he decides to 'firmly ignore'
her in favor of the 'phantasm' first formed on this fateful Sunday [the
davenport scene]" ( 72-73). I do not think it is possible to know or
to guess who the actual (fictional) Dolores Haze might be, though we know that
she is not the girl Humbert gives himself and, by extension, us.
Matt Roth
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