In a message dated 14/03/2012 02:22:16 GMT Standard Time,
bstone41@HOTMAIL.COM writes:
I'm not
sure that "56 days ago" has a "normal" meaning. I suppose it's true that
we wouldn't say "two days ago" if we mean "yesterday," but I don't think
this rule necessarily applies for longer increments of
time. And of course, we have to remember that Humbert is, in Ray's
word, "abnormal." In his poem, he refers to Lo's age as 5,300
days. He writes the line "about as many years before Lolita was born as
my age was that summer."
If in the year 1950 a newspaper had an archive column "25 years
ago", "50 years ago", "100 years ago", these columns would contain excerpts from
1925, 1900, 1850 respectively. There would not be any dispute about what was the
normal meaning of these terms. Nobody would be saying that perhaps the excerpts
should be from 1926, 1901, 1851 respectively.
Humbert is, normally, quite precise about time, as exemplified by the "5300
days". His calculation that "about as many years before Lolita was born as my
age was that summer" is accurate, too. (In the shortest chapter in the book he
gives an approximate date, 15 August, but he is clear that he is confused and
that this date is only approximate.) Hence, as others have argued, it is
striking that there is a discrepancy between his precise "56 days ago" and
the other dates given, by him and by John Ray, Jr.
Clearly, as Brian Boyd has demonstrated, Nabokov was himself capable of
miscalculation. But it is also possible that this is a deliberate error of
Nabokov's, intended to show what Freud called a motivated slip of
Humbert's. (That Nabokov accepted at least this part of Freud's thinking is
clear from elsewhere in Lolita.) We will not make sense of this if
we cling to what I insist is an abnormal, indeed simply wrong,
interpretation of what "56 days ago" means, just because Nabokov scholars have
copied each other in speaking of "3 days discrepancy". They are simply
compounding the original mistake, and making it more difficult to decide whether
the original mistake was Nabokov's or Humbert's.
The correct calculation of the discrepancy means that, if the other dates
are correct, then Humbert could have started writing his book at most 52
days ago when he claims to have started 56 days ago. And I have drawn
attention to the extraordinarily insistent hints on the significance
of the number 52 (which we are told neither Humbert nor Quilty, but only the
author, can understand) from Appel-Nabokov. Here, surely, is where the
search for the solution of the riddle should begin.
Even if you want to insist (perversely, as I see it) that "56 days ago"
might mean what I, and newspapers, and (I think) most English speakers
would call "55 days ago", you must surely acknowledge that what we mean
by "56 days ago" is one possible meaning. But this at least possible (and
in my view unique and correct) meaning has been neglected by Nabokov scholars,
as far as I know, until now.
Anthony Stadlen
Anthony
Stadlen
"Oakleigh"
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GB - London N22
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Founder (in 1996) and
convenor of the Inner Circle Seminars: an ethical, existential,
phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy
See "Existential
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