I respectfully disagree with this
conclusion. While it is true that Humbert’s first person narrative does create
an illusory Lolita, the intricate patternings and images underlying that prose,
reveal quite a bit about Dolores Haze, her real relationship with her mother, the
loss of her brother and father, her teenage dreams and her adult difficulties. This
seems to me Nabokov’s extraordinary achievement in Lolita--- and one that
is often overlooked.
Suellen Stringer-Hye
From:
Sent: Tuesday, April 15, 2008 8:22
AM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] QUERY:
Lolita's subjectivity and
MR: Most of the
criticism I have encountered focuses on Humbert's "solipsizing" of
Lolita. She has no subjectivity that we can access, since the Lolita we
are given is, as Humbert says, "not she, but my own creation,
another, fanciful Lolita--perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing
her; floating between me and her, and having no will, no consciousness--indeed,
no life of her own" (62 AnL). Leland de la Durantaye, in
his excellent, very readable book Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov,
does a great job unpacking all of the repercussions (for Humbert and for us) of
this deeply flawed imaginative act. As he puts it, Humbert "can only
'enjoy in peace' his vicious circle of paradise if the real little girl he is
do desperately mistreating does not too violently interpose herself--and so he
decides to 'firmly ignore' her in favor of the 'phantasm' first formed on this
fateful Sunday [the davenport scene]" ( 72-73). I do not think it is
possible to know or to guess who the actual (fictional) Dolores Haze might be,
though we know that she is not the girl Humbert gives himself and, by
extension, us.
Matt Roth