Subject
Re: Lolita. Can you crack the code ? (fwd)
Date
Body
EDITOR'S NOTE. Brian D. Walter <bdwalter@artsci.wustl.edu> herewith
offers some thoughts on the recent discussion about Humbert's birth date.
The dates in LOLITA are a matter of long standing controversy beginning
with some observations made by Carl Proffer in his 1968 KEYS TO LOLITA.
Walter makes reference to the Proffer volume and also the important
articles in NABOKOV STUDIES #2 (the 1996 issue) addressed to the problem
of whether or not Humbert's final visit to Lolita and the murder of Quilty
actually take place or are fabricated by a mad Humbert. In NABOKOV STUDIES
#2, Alexander Dolinin and Julian Connolly present the "revisionist"
argument, that the aforesaid events do not take place. Brian Boyd presents
a rebutal to the revisionist interpretation and a defense of the
"received" interpretation. As those who have read the NABOKOV STUDIES
Forum on LOLITA chronology (and earlier essays by Bruss and Tekiner) know,
Nabokov made a number of "adjustments" in his dates in later English
editions and also in his Russian translation. In other words, researchers
must consult several versions of the text.
This discussion involves a crucial point in the understanding of
one of the major works of XXth century literature. I offer one last
thought: any serious student of LOLITA should acquaint her/him-self with
this material. Very few libraries (about ten) as yet subscribe to NABOKOV
STUDIES. If you yourself do not, you should make every effort to insure
that your institutional library does subscribe. Contact me for further
information. DBJ
------------------------------------
The recent consensus reached by various Nabokovians that Humbert's fateful
summer with Annabel must have been 1922 runs into a problem when other,
more straightforward, evidence is brought into play. Namely, Humbert tells
us that his first year of travels with Lolita -- which journey commences
directly from Camp Q at the end of his first summer in the Haze household
-- covered August 1947 to August 1948 (THE ANNOTATED LOLITA 154 and 175).
This means that he first met Lolita in June of 1947. Using now the figure
of 24 years cited by HH as the gap between Annabel and Lo, his 'Annabel
summer' occurred in 1923 -- not 1922, as our various mathematicians so
conclusively proved from the evidence cited by Yvan Chaxel.
Moreover, the 1947 starting point for Humbert's relationship with Lolita
(and hence the 1923 date of his sojourn with Annabel) is later
corroborated when Humbert speaks of the "three empty years" (253) that
passed between Lolita's escape from the Elphinstone hospital and the
arrival of her letter dated September 18, 1952. This means that she
forsakes HH for Quilty on Independence Day of 1949. Knowing as we do that
she and HH have spent two years in miserable cohabitation, we are again
brought back to 1947 as the starting point of their relationship. These
figures could be further underscored by various evidence relating to
Lolita's birthdays (evidence which, by the way, shows that she was born in
1935, not 1934; see, for instance, p. 255 for evidence that her fifteenth
birthday took place -- in absentia from HH -- on January 1, 1950).
(BTW: Those who are interested in a minute chronology of all the events in
the novel might consult with Carl Proffer's 1968 book, KEYS TO LOLITA,
specifically Appendix B entitled "A Calendar of LOLITA.")
If it is tempting to find in this discussion a sequel to the 'Three Days'
controversy that occupied the considerable attentions of Dolinin,
Connolly, and Boyd in the recent NABOKOV STUDIES #2, we might notice that,
in this case, Nabokov has covered his math with two notable ambiguities in
the passages Chaxel has cited. First, HH tells us that he was born in
1910, but not the exact birthday. This lack of preciseness makes it
possible that he might have been 12 in the summer of 1923 if, for
instance, his birthday were in November of 1910. (In other words, the
mathematical solutions worked out by various Nabokovians treat the numbers
involved as integers -- entirely whole numbers -- when in fact these
numbers, because they all refer to years (which can, at the least, be
broken up into 365 distinct parts), can never be treated as easily
manipulable integers.) Second, note that HH describes his Annabel summer
as occurring "ABOUT as many years before Lolita was born as my age was
that summer" (emphasis added). If he had used 'exactly' in said of
'about,' then we might accuse the author of slipping up in his math, but
the actual phrasing leaves him an important way out.
Finally, there is always this to help us overcome the natural temptation
to seek solutions to Nabokov's elegant riddles in the application of
seamless algebraic formulae to his plot sequences:
"In the divinely absurd world of the mind, mathematical symbols do not
thrive. Their interplay, no matter how smoothly it works, no matter how
dutifully it mimics the convolutions of our dreams and the quantums of
our mental associations, can never really express what is utterly foreign
to their nature, considering the main delight of the creative mind is the
sway of the seemingly incongruous detail over a seemingly dominant
generalization. When commonsense is ejected together with its
calculating machine, numbers cease to trouble the mind. Statistics pluck
up their skirts and sweep out in a huff. Two and two no longer make
four, because it is no longer necessary for them to make four. If they
had done so in the artificial logical world which we have left, it had
been merely a matter of habit: two and two used to make four in the same
way as guests invited to dinner expect to make an even number. But I
invite my numbers to a giddy picnic and then nobody minds whether two and
two make five or five minus some quaint fraction."
-- VN, "The Art of Literature and Commonsense"
BW
bdwalter@artsci.wustl.edu
offers some thoughts on the recent discussion about Humbert's birth date.
The dates in LOLITA are a matter of long standing controversy beginning
with some observations made by Carl Proffer in his 1968 KEYS TO LOLITA.
Walter makes reference to the Proffer volume and also the important
articles in NABOKOV STUDIES #2 (the 1996 issue) addressed to the problem
of whether or not Humbert's final visit to Lolita and the murder of Quilty
actually take place or are fabricated by a mad Humbert. In NABOKOV STUDIES
#2, Alexander Dolinin and Julian Connolly present the "revisionist"
argument, that the aforesaid events do not take place. Brian Boyd presents
a rebutal to the revisionist interpretation and a defense of the
"received" interpretation. As those who have read the NABOKOV STUDIES
Forum on LOLITA chronology (and earlier essays by Bruss and Tekiner) know,
Nabokov made a number of "adjustments" in his dates in later English
editions and also in his Russian translation. In other words, researchers
must consult several versions of the text.
This discussion involves a crucial point in the understanding of
one of the major works of XXth century literature. I offer one last
thought: any serious student of LOLITA should acquaint her/him-self with
this material. Very few libraries (about ten) as yet subscribe to NABOKOV
STUDIES. If you yourself do not, you should make every effort to insure
that your institutional library does subscribe. Contact me for further
information. DBJ
------------------------------------
The recent consensus reached by various Nabokovians that Humbert's fateful
summer with Annabel must have been 1922 runs into a problem when other,
more straightforward, evidence is brought into play. Namely, Humbert tells
us that his first year of travels with Lolita -- which journey commences
directly from Camp Q at the end of his first summer in the Haze household
-- covered August 1947 to August 1948 (THE ANNOTATED LOLITA 154 and 175).
This means that he first met Lolita in June of 1947. Using now the figure
of 24 years cited by HH as the gap between Annabel and Lo, his 'Annabel
summer' occurred in 1923 -- not 1922, as our various mathematicians so
conclusively proved from the evidence cited by Yvan Chaxel.
Moreover, the 1947 starting point for Humbert's relationship with Lolita
(and hence the 1923 date of his sojourn with Annabel) is later
corroborated when Humbert speaks of the "three empty years" (253) that
passed between Lolita's escape from the Elphinstone hospital and the
arrival of her letter dated September 18, 1952. This means that she
forsakes HH for Quilty on Independence Day of 1949. Knowing as we do that
she and HH have spent two years in miserable cohabitation, we are again
brought back to 1947 as the starting point of their relationship. These
figures could be further underscored by various evidence relating to
Lolita's birthdays (evidence which, by the way, shows that she was born in
1935, not 1934; see, for instance, p. 255 for evidence that her fifteenth
birthday took place -- in absentia from HH -- on January 1, 1950).
(BTW: Those who are interested in a minute chronology of all the events in
the novel might consult with Carl Proffer's 1968 book, KEYS TO LOLITA,
specifically Appendix B entitled "A Calendar of LOLITA.")
If it is tempting to find in this discussion a sequel to the 'Three Days'
controversy that occupied the considerable attentions of Dolinin,
Connolly, and Boyd in the recent NABOKOV STUDIES #2, we might notice that,
in this case, Nabokov has covered his math with two notable ambiguities in
the passages Chaxel has cited. First, HH tells us that he was born in
1910, but not the exact birthday. This lack of preciseness makes it
possible that he might have been 12 in the summer of 1923 if, for
instance, his birthday were in November of 1910. (In other words, the
mathematical solutions worked out by various Nabokovians treat the numbers
involved as integers -- entirely whole numbers -- when in fact these
numbers, because they all refer to years (which can, at the least, be
broken up into 365 distinct parts), can never be treated as easily
manipulable integers.) Second, note that HH describes his Annabel summer
as occurring "ABOUT as many years before Lolita was born as my age was
that summer" (emphasis added). If he had used 'exactly' in said of
'about,' then we might accuse the author of slipping up in his math, but
the actual phrasing leaves him an important way out.
Finally, there is always this to help us overcome the natural temptation
to seek solutions to Nabokov's elegant riddles in the application of
seamless algebraic formulae to his plot sequences:
"In the divinely absurd world of the mind, mathematical symbols do not
thrive. Their interplay, no matter how smoothly it works, no matter how
dutifully it mimics the convolutions of our dreams and the quantums of
our mental associations, can never really express what is utterly foreign
to their nature, considering the main delight of the creative mind is the
sway of the seemingly incongruous detail over a seemingly dominant
generalization. When commonsense is ejected together with its
calculating machine, numbers cease to trouble the mind. Statistics pluck
up their skirts and sweep out in a huff. Two and two no longer make
four, because it is no longer necessary for them to make four. If they
had done so in the artificial logical world which we have left, it had
been merely a matter of habit: two and two used to make four in the same
way as guests invited to dinner expect to make an even number. But I
invite my numbers to a giddy picnic and then nobody minds whether two and
two make five or five minus some quaint fraction."
-- VN, "The Art of Literature and Commonsense"
BW
bdwalter@artsci.wustl.edu