Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0022516, Wed, 29 Feb 2012 23:38:18 -0500

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Re: Fw: [NABOKV-L] Nabokov and Twelve-Year-Old Girls ...
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"I failed to mention that Humbert Humbert's "Quilty" may be a figment of
his imagination, one which he creates to represent in his eyes (as characters
are usually able to think, imagine, hallucinate...) his sensation of being
chased by "a fiend". Nabokov is not the repulsive Quilty, as I seemed to have
implied, but he is certainly HH's fiend (rather unlike the corrupt evil
Clare Quilty of HH's hallucinations)."

RSGwynn: If one accepts that CQ may be merely a figment of HH's
imagination, why not go whole hog and assume that all of the events of the novel, which
we know only from the pov of the perhaps less than reliable first-person
narrator, are part of the delusion? Why not just assume that Lolita herself
is the hallucination of a mad pedophile? There's no way to disprove this
theoretical reading, of course, just as there is no way to "prove" that HH has
some kind of "reality," given the usual conventions of the novel. I think
of Krug in BS in this regard, who the author ("VN") constantly reminds us is
nothing more that a fictional character subject to the god-like author's
"whims and megrims." But Lolita, as a first-person narrative, does not allow
this degree of authorial intrusion (though surely it is there, in a subtler
way); we are stuck with Humbert's version of events, unreliable or not,
though we do know that he "confesses" his absolute inability to know Lo's mind.
My feeling is that we should trust (more or less) the "truth" of his
confession. If we believe that his narration is no more than an inventive trope, a
mere literary conceit orchestrated by VN, then the whole novel dissolves
into the irrelevance of a madman's fantasy life and an author's playing tricks
on us that we have failed to comprehend.

RSG

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