Nabokov’s “Lolita”: Two views on how it has been misunderstood

from today’s New York Times

“Do you think any canonical books are widely misunderstood?

“Lolita. Nabokov’s job in the book is to make you like the monstrous Humbert Humbert. In the 1960s readers were too swinging to see how evil he was and now readers are too prudish to see how charming he can be."

”https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/books/review/edmund-white-by-the-book-interview.html

from post of August 6, 2015

A remarkable feature of this novel is its self-contradiction, a reflection of the author’s multiple personality and the novel’s multiple, contradictory narrators.

At the beginning of Lolita, HH spells out his fixation on “nymphets,” who are pubescent girls aged nine to fourteen. But at the end, HH wants to live forever-after with Lolita even though she is no longer a nymphet: She is too old, not to mention married and pregnant.

It is like the person who wrote the end of this novel was not the same person who wrote the beginning, and hadn’t even read the beginning.

Regarding Nabokov's multiple personality:

from August 6, 2015

Nabokov’s "Speak, Memory: An Autobiography" reports memory gaps and dissociative fugues seen in multiple personality

In the summer of 1914, when Nabokov was fifteen, a “numb fury of verse-making first came over me” (1, p. 167). It was when “my first poem began” (1, p. 168).

“…On the physical plane, my intense labors were marked by a number of dim actions or postures, such as walking, sitting, lying…Each of these broke into fragments…for instance, I might be wandering one moment in the depths of the park and the next pacing the rooms of the house. Or, to take the sitting stage, I would suddenly become aware that a plate of something I could not even remember having sampled was being removed and that my mother, her left cheek twitching as it did whenever she worried, was narrowly observing from her place at the top of the long table my moodiness and lack of appetite. I would lift my head to explain — but the table had gone, and I was sitting alone on a roadside stump, the stick of my butterfly net, in metronomic motion, drawing arc after arc on the brownish sand…

“When I was irrevocably committed to finish my poem or die, there came the most trancelike state of all. With hardly a twinge of surprise, I found myself, of all places, on a leathern couch in the cold, musty, little-used room that had been my grandfather’s study. On that couch I lay prone, in a kind of reptilian freeze, one arm dangling, so that my knuckles loosely touched the floral figures of the carpet. When next I came out of that trance, the greenish flora was still there, my arm was still dangling, but now I was prostrate on the edge of a rickety wharf, and the water lilies I touched were real…I relapsed into my private mist, and when I emerged again, the support of my extended body had become a low bench in the park…

“…when the old trance occurs nowadays, I am quite prepared to find myself, when I awaken from it, high up in a certain tree, above the dappled bench of my boyhood, my belly pressed agains a thick, comfortable branch and one arm hanging down among the leaves upon which the shadows of other leaves move” (1, pp. 172-173).

[That first poem] “was indeed a miserable concoction…In my foolish innocence, I believed that what I had written was a beautiful and wonderful thing…’How wonderful, how beautiful,’ [my mother] said, and with the tenderness in her smile still growing she passed me a hand mirror so that I might see the smear of blood on my cheekbone where at some indeterminable time I had crushed a gorged mosquito by the unconscious act of propping my cheek on my fist. But I saw more than that. Looking into my own eyes, I had the shocking sensation of finding the mere dregs of my usual self, odds and ends of an evaporated identity which it took my reason quite an effort to gather again in the glass” (1, pp. 175-177).

People with multiple personality have memory gaps because one personality has amnesia for the periods of time that another personality was out. For further discussions of that, search memory gap(s) and dissociative fugue in this blog.

1. Vladimir Nabokov. Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited [1947/1967]. Introduction by Brian Boyd. New York, Everyman’s Library, 1999.