Throughout Lolita the reader has little choice but play the game (interpret the story) as Humbert (Nabokov) sees it fit. And in doing this, the reader often finds him or herself raising their eyebrows or scoffing at the rules to which we as observers are subjected to. A prime example of this is illustrated at the beginning of chapter 11, when we learn about the secret journal that H.H. kept while staying at the Haze's residence.
Humbert presents the journal to us as such:
"Exhibit number two is a pocket diary bound in black imitation leather, with a golden year, 1947, en escalier, in its upper left-hand corner. I speak of this neat product of the Blank Blank Co., Blankton, Mass., as if it were really before me. Actually, it was destroyed five years ago and what we examine now (by courtesy of a photographic memory) is but its brief materialization, a puny unfledged phoenix." (42, Nabokov)
This passage is pure literary alchemy; summoning up a long ago cremated journal through the sparse parenthetical sculpting of giving H.H. of photographic memory and giving the reader no choice but to take the following journalistic passages as actual and real, while at their core, they are no better than the machinations of a man obsessed--a magician with the utmost perfect form.
But even in his mastery, Nabokov still challenges the reader by blatantly giving the name of the journal and the company (Blank Blank, Blankton) an absolute zero of a title and subsequent actuality, and turning the game from the reader vs. H.H., to the reader vs. him or herself. Can we even continue reading? Is anything true about any of what is and has been said? It doesn't matter. H.H. has the reader hook line and sinker, and our brow-raised school of fish have all swallowed the hook.
No comments:
Post a Comment