Dragunoiu, Dana. Making History from the Future: Lolita and Proust’s Cahier 36. 2021

Dana Dragunoiu (Carleton University) poses a question in her “Making History from the Future: Lolita and Proust’s Cahier 36”: What happens when history refuses to explain a tantalizing literary coincidence? In Proust’s exercise book 36, the description of a character who never made it into the definitive text of À la recherche du temps perdu bears a striking resemblance to Nabokov’s most famous literary creation. Yet in spite of his circulation among the literary networks of Paris in the late 1930s, Nabokov is unlikely to have been privy to Proust’s description of « le fameux faux savant Humberger, dit Humberg, dit Hum» in Cahier 36. This essay is a meditation on the critical melancholia that emerges from the failure to identify a moment in history when Nabokov might have seen Proust’s sketch of his aborted “Humberger.” By taking a “medievalist” approach to this predicament, the essay reads Lolita and Proust’s sketch as a medievalist would by treating these literary documents as analogue texts. Defined as texts that resemble each other in significant ways but cannot be considered as having been influenced by a common source or one another, analogue texts can be said to produce a rhetorical occasion for finding meaning even if such meaning cannot be located in a straight trajectory of historical influence. By reading Nabokov’s Lolita and Proust’s sketch as if from the vantage point of the future, the essay reflects upon these two literary giants’ views on love, loyalty, eloquence, and human destiny.