My own experience was very similar.

It occurs to me that Appel's note on Bill Brown might serve as a kind of useful parable. In it, he gets something significant "wrong" (the name of the private detective) and yet his conclusions are largely "right." It's plausible to suggest that the same is true of the work of those (we) inclusive-tallying Nabokovians, but yes, the problem is most sensibly approached if we allow for the ambiguity in the evidence, and the possibility of disagreement. I think these latter points should be obvious.

Unlike Appel's error, the phrase "days ago" isn't so easily reduced to a simple "fact" of the narrative, for the reasons our moderator glosses. Just to amplify a bit:

In the first place, the text itelf invites the inclusive calculation, the self-referential slide back into the text. This is the very method of Lolita's artistry, its elaborate (and sublime) patterning. The inclusive calculation yields a particularly high fidelity to, and on this point privileges, the textual surface. The non-inclusive calculation leans more heavily on comparative marginalia (the 52 motif) in order to deposit us in the relative oblivion of 9/21, a leap off the board of the text that is anything but literal-minded. The text might well invite and reward this reading. This doesn't mean that the alternative is "wrong," or less motivated and justified by the text.

And the invocation of "common usage" is an especially weak leg of the non-inclusive argument. First, because H uses the phrase 56 days ago, he seems to have already broken with those norms. As a rule, the phrase applies when the day is the relevant increment of time; when that period lengthens beyond what is calculated in days (say, weeks or months), we usually opt for the larger unit of measure and rounder figures. The lovely passage from The Defense that Jansy has cited is a good example: the precision is the marker of Luzhin's abnormality (probably an inclusive total, absent the word "ago"?). It's at least plausible to argue that the unusual, ultra-specific measure here signals precisely the attempt to mark the days inclusively, and thus trigger a chain of discoveries in the book. (And because H is in jail, he seems to be in the realm of inclusive scorekeeping, when the day is over before it's begun.) And besides, in a text so thoroughly parodic, in which artifice so persistently and diabolically trumps "reality," I don't see that it's prudent or possible to argue that the literalist reading is exclusively "right." But it is possible to pursue the consquences of that literalist reading.

If the non-inclusive reading attaches a lot of significance to the number 52, particularly as it manifests in those license plates, please forgive me if I assent while stifling a yawn. If this is the key to the decryption of those license plates (to say nothing of the calendar problem), I don't find it especially scintillating. Obviously, there are more ways to decode those numbers, one of which is of course that they are "nonsense data," a pattern that isn't a pattern. And if the 52 motif links the number of weeks in a year to the number of lines in a poem, it's evident that there's a lot of work to be done to deal with the incongruities in these associations. That is, I'm confident that this reading too will have to navigate the pervasive ambiguities and indeterminacy of the text. Such an inflexible position on the matter of the dates doesn't bode well, in my opinion, for the success of this reading. But it's possible that this reading would seem more compelling without the insistence that it is the only "right" reading.

Great art gives us not "only," but "also." I would think that we could all agree on that point.

Bruce

> Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2012 16:36:32 -0400
> From: nabokv-l@UTK.EDU
> Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] The "56 days" conundrum in "Lolita"
> To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
>
> To toss in a moderator's two cents--
>
> I too had counted, some years ago, the exact number of days, and
> remember noticing that there was some room for ambiguity or confusion
> once one actually starts counting and adding the segments of days from
> each month. I vaguely remember sensing that someone, including Humbert,
> might count it the non-standard way (counting all 16 days in November,
> e.g., and get 31+16+9=56=Sept 22 (the day HH receives the letter),
> rather than 31+14+10=56=Sept. 21. I never went further with it, and at
> the time, I paid no attention to the fact that counting from Nov 16,
> Sept. 25 should be "52 days ago." But it does seem that the 52 is
> suggestive, and yes, the 52s in the "paper chase" are strong
> Shakespearian markers, signs of what Humbert later calls "the ingenious
> play staged for me by Quilty." In fact, when Quilty has died, Humbert
> precedes these words with: "This, I said to myself, was the end of
> .....". One way, among many, to read the latent 52 is as a sign that
> the murder was not, in fact, the end of the "ingenious play." But I'm
> sure there are other possible and tempting ways to read it.
> ~SB
>
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