Subject
Dieter Zimmer on the 56 Conundrum and Lolita Chronology
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Date
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A Chronology of Lolita by Dieter E. Zimmer March 3, 2008
Lolita, USA - Trip Two
www.dezimmer.net/LolitaUSA/Trip2.htm
"...A detailed inner chronology of 'Lolita' is largely a matter of inference. There are few explicit exact dates in Humbert's account, but there are a number of relative ones, and there are time spans. Some of them are only approximate or plainly wrong. Yet the novel's temporal order is absolutely sound. In fact it is so sound that it is tempting to take the few inconsistencies one can find not as the authorial lapses they could well be but as deliberate. This temporal order can be deduced by checking Humbert's casual remarks on dates and durations against a perpetual calendar. .."
"...End of September to mid-November: Facing his trial, Humbert writes Lolita, first in a psychiatric ward, then in jail (p.308). In the third to last paragraph he says that he started to write Lolita "fifty-six days ago" (p.308). As he probably died right after finishing his memoir, he must have written this on the day of his death, that is on November 16. Counting back 56 days brings us to September 21, the day before he received Lolita's letter. If he had begun writing the day after his arrest on September 26, he would have had only 51 days at his disposal. Several critics have understood this to imply that he never went to Coalmont but instead began penning his memoir, at home or in a psychiatric clinic or in jail or anywhere ? and that hence all the events after September 21 must be fictional in the second degree, an invention inside the invention. However, considering Humbert's demonstrated laxness in summing up time, it would seem much more parsimonious to take his "56 days" as simply one of several similar mistakes he makes." ***
*** I don't care to open up another revisionist front, but it does seem to me that the real temporal problem of the novel is a more basic one than the missing five days (or three, as some contend). The problem is that it is very unlikely Humbert could have written his memoir in so short a time, whether it was 51 or 56 days. It is even more unlikely in view of the fact that for Humbert it was hardly a time of leisure. ...It took Nabokov almost three years of hard work to write the book and he was surely aware that he was imposing an impossible task on Humbert when he made him write it about forty times as fast... I personally find it tempting to believe that he "really" is "in legal captivity" and that he "really" didn't have more than 51 days to complete his book, but that most of it had been written before his arrest, during the three years after Lolita's disappearance. In this case all he had to do in prison was to go over the whole of it once more..."
.............................................................................................................................................................................
btw: This is certainly a coincidence worth noting: 52 is the atomic number of "Tellurium".
D.Zimmer writes: "In his 1956 postcript to Lolita, Nabokov described as one of the nerves of the novel "the tinkling sounds of the valley town coming up the mountain trail (on which I could the first known female of Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov)." This identifies Telluride, Colorado as the place of Humbert's final epiphany. Nabokov went to Telluride in the summer of 1951 expressly to find that special little blue butterfly."
(and it bothers me enormously having to admit that this episode represents the author's rendering of HH's epiphany )
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Lolita, USA - Trip Two
www.dezimmer.net/LolitaUSA/Trip2.htm
"...A detailed inner chronology of 'Lolita' is largely a matter of inference. There are few explicit exact dates in Humbert's account, but there are a number of relative ones, and there are time spans. Some of them are only approximate or plainly wrong. Yet the novel's temporal order is absolutely sound. In fact it is so sound that it is tempting to take the few inconsistencies one can find not as the authorial lapses they could well be but as deliberate. This temporal order can be deduced by checking Humbert's casual remarks on dates and durations against a perpetual calendar. .."
"...End of September to mid-November: Facing his trial, Humbert writes Lolita, first in a psychiatric ward, then in jail (p.308). In the third to last paragraph he says that he started to write Lolita "fifty-six days ago" (p.308). As he probably died right after finishing his memoir, he must have written this on the day of his death, that is on November 16. Counting back 56 days brings us to September 21, the day before he received Lolita's letter. If he had begun writing the day after his arrest on September 26, he would have had only 51 days at his disposal. Several critics have understood this to imply that he never went to Coalmont but instead began penning his memoir, at home or in a psychiatric clinic or in jail or anywhere ? and that hence all the events after September 21 must be fictional in the second degree, an invention inside the invention. However, considering Humbert's demonstrated laxness in summing up time, it would seem much more parsimonious to take his "56 days" as simply one of several similar mistakes he makes." ***
*** I don't care to open up another revisionist front, but it does seem to me that the real temporal problem of the novel is a more basic one than the missing five days (or three, as some contend). The problem is that it is very unlikely Humbert could have written his memoir in so short a time, whether it was 51 or 56 days. It is even more unlikely in view of the fact that for Humbert it was hardly a time of leisure. ...It took Nabokov almost three years of hard work to write the book and he was surely aware that he was imposing an impossible task on Humbert when he made him write it about forty times as fast... I personally find it tempting to believe that he "really" is "in legal captivity" and that he "really" didn't have more than 51 days to complete his book, but that most of it had been written before his arrest, during the three years after Lolita's disappearance. In this case all he had to do in prison was to go over the whole of it once more..."
.............................................................................................................................................................................
btw: This is certainly a coincidence worth noting: 52 is the atomic number of "Tellurium".
D.Zimmer writes: "In his 1956 postcript to Lolita, Nabokov described as one of the nerves of the novel "the tinkling sounds of the valley town coming up the mountain trail (on which I could the first known female of Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov)." This identifies Telluride, Colorado as the place of Humbert's final epiphany. Nabokov went to Telluride in the summer of 1951 expressly to find that special little blue butterfly."
(and it bothers me enormously having to admit that this episode represents the author's rendering of HH's epiphany )
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/