Let's not forget the volatile creativity and random humour of real-life nicknames. Most families produce a profusion of internal pet-names and diminutives, some of which carry on into school and adult usage. The names themselves do not always admit to logical scrutiny -- 'Tiny' can be obese, 'Fatty' the rake -- and who uses which name for whom and when cannot be neatly tabulated like an exercise in Samoan anthropology. Yet, when dramatists and novelists assign names to characters, we tend to expect them to have a deeper significance. A real-life Dolores would not be expected to grow up sad and soulful, but as created by Nabokov, we rush to read Latin tears into her character. Dolores happens to have an abundence of common derivatives and diminutives, one of which jumps ahead unavoidably when we buy the book! There's no reason to suppose that Lo, her mother, teachers, lovers, and school pals were unaware of all the variants. HH has his own spin on her 'name' as narrator, leaving us a few clues on how others addressed her under the strange formal and informal socio-contextual codes that govern such behaviour.

Stan Kelly-Bootle


On 15/04/2008 17:21, "Stringer-Hye, Suellen" <suellen.stringer-hye@VANDERBILT.EDU> wrote:

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: Vladimir Nabokov Forum [mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU] On Behalf Of Matthew Roth
Sent: Tuesday, April 15, 2008 8:22 AM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] QUERY: Lolita's subjectivity and America

Barrie asked: "What are the best writings, if any, on what it's like to be Lolita, or how someone becomes Lolita?  Whose imagination imagines what Lolita is really like -- her subjectivity?"

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.

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