Deconstructing Lolita [1 ed.] 1527581780, 9781527581784

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Deconstructing Lolita

Deconstructing Lolita By

Jacqueline Hamrit

Deconstructing Lolita By Jacqueline Hamrit This book first published 2022 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2022 by Jacqueline Hamrit All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-8178-0 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-8178-4

To Raphaël

CONTENTS

Foreword ......................................................................................... ix Dates and Places of Publications ..................................................... xi Part One Introduction ...................................................................................... 3 Chapter One ...................................................................................... 9 Structure in Lolita Chapter Two ................................................................................... 19 Putting Lolita to the Test of the Theory of Literary Genres Chapter Three ................................................................................. 37 The Ordeal of Undecidability in Lolita Chapter Four ................................................................................... 47 Lolita’s Subjectivity Chapter Five ................................................................................... 59 Trauma and Free Will in Lolita Chapter Six ..................................................................................... 69 Generic Glidings and Endless Writing from The Enchanter to Lolita through Lolita, A Screenplay Chapter Seven................................................................................. 83 Teaching Lolita: Some Remarks

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Contents

Part Two Chapter Eight .................................................................................. 89 “Play! Invent the World! Invent Reality!”: Nabokov/Derrida Chapter Nine................................................................................. 111 “Sois sage, ô ma douleur …”: Psychical Suffering in Some of Nabokov’s Works Chapter Ten .................................................................................. 121 Sartre, Lacan, Derrida, and Nabokov

FOREWORD

How to read literature with Derrida? How to teach literature with Derrida? Such is the problematic explored by the present work which is an assemblage of articles written on Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita between 2003 and 2017. They have all been published in various places and journals, except the one titled “Sartre, Lacan, Derrida, and Nabokov” which was read at the Nabokov et la France International Conference in May 2013 in Paris, France. All the essays resort to French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s works as a basis for the analysis of different literary issues such as structure, genre, or interpretation. The book is divided into two parts, the first composed of articles dealing solely with the novel, the second of articles covering reflections about other Nabokov works, with only a fragment on Lolita. The introduction should be read as a general summary of the articles. The book addresses both Nabokovian specialists and students of Nabokov’s works. It thereby can be used as a teaching guide by those interested in not only Lolita but also deconstruction. Marcq-en-Baroeul November 11, 2021

DATES AND PLACES OF PUBLICATIONS

Introduction My translation from the French: Lolita, Guide de la littérature américaine des origines à nos jours, edited by Jean Pouvelle and Jean-Pierre Demarche (Paris: কditions Ellipses, 2008), 195–8. Chapter One: Structure in Lolita Zembla. http.www.libraries.psu.edu/Nabokov/zembla htm (September 19, 2008). Chapter Two: Putting Lolita to the Test of the Theory of Literary Genres My translation from the French of “Lolita à l’épreuve de la théorie des genres littéraires” Lolita, roman de Vladimir Nabokov (1955) et film de Stanley Kubrick (1962), edited by Didier Machu and Taïna Tukhunen (Paris: Ellipses, 2009), 43–54. Chapter Three: The Ordeal of Undecidability in Lolita Kaleidoscopic Nabokov: Perspectives Françaises, edited by Lara Delage-Toriel and Monica Manolescu (Paris: Michel Oudiart éditeur, 2009), 85–92. Chapter Four: Lolita’s Subjectivity Zembla. http.www.libraries.psu.edu/Nabokov/zembla htm (March 11, 2009). Chapter Five: Trauma and Free Will in Lolita LATCH (A Journal for the Study of the Literary Artifact in Theory, Culture, or History) (November 2009). www.openlatch.com.

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Dates and Places of Publications

Chapter Six: Generic Glidings and Endless Writing from The Enchanter to Lolita Through Lolita: A Screenplay The Proceedings in the International Nabokov Conference “Revising Nabokov Revising” (March 24–27, 2010), 27–32. Chapter Seven: Teaching Lolita Unpublished. Chapter Eight: “Play! Invent the World! Invent Reality!”: Nabokov/Derrida The Oxford Literary Review 25 (2003): 157–77. Chapter Nine: “Sois sage, ô ma douleur …”: Psychical Suffering in Some of Nabokov’s Works Nabokov Studies (International Vladimir Nabokov Society and Davidson College) 15 (2017) (online). Chapter Ten: Sartre, Lacan, Derrida, and Nabokov Nabokov et la France International Conference, Paris IV-La Sorbonne/ENS, Ulm (May 2013), unpublished.

PART ONE

INTRODUCTION

Summary Lolita narrates the story of a middle-aged man, Humbert Humbert, a European emigrant in the United States, who falls in love with the twelve-year-old American Dolores Haze, nicknamed Lolita. In order to approach Lolita, Humbert marries her mother, Charlotte Haze. The latter dies in an accident a few months after the wedding, just when she was about to unmask Humbert after finding his diary. Humbert then leaves to pick up Lolita from the camp she is holidaying at and, after having sex for the first time in a hotel, they embark on a long journey across the United States. Lolita eventually runs away with the paedophile playwright, Clare Quilty, who subsequently abandons her, after which she does not rejoin Humbert. After many years of searching, Humbert finds Quilty, kills him, and then dies some weeks later in prison.

Analysis Transgressive, subversive, both grave and comical, this novel breaks taboos, destabilises certitudes, embarrasses and fascinates at the same time. It is situated on the razor’s edge between the aesthetic pleasure it brings about – it is a masterpiece of twentieth-century international literature – and the ethical question it problematises. It deals with evil and abjection through the anatomy of a sexual criminal perversion: paedophilia. Its generic status is nevertheless hybrid and multiform. Is it a study of a psychiatric case? Is it a love story, a police investigation, a travelogue? Nabokov plays on these generic codes by resorting to parody, satire, irony, and humour. But he knows how to tell stories. He masters the art of narration and succeeds in creating suspense, surprises, and reversals of situations.

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Introduction

Some salient episodes – such as the unsuccessful first sexual experience of Humbert when a teenager, or the first apparition of Lolita – punctuate the narrative, the first part of which culminates with the night when they have sex for the first time. As the novel opens and closes with the absence of Lolita, it presents two antagonistic movements: one progressive, directed towards the future, hope, and desire; the other regressive, which is characterised by the spatial and temporal return and stages memory, regret, or remorse. Whether it is a question of genre, structure, or writing, play prevails in the novel. Nabokov is indeed a stylistic virtuoso, a magician who excels in the art of mystification and deception, and an author aware of the tricks of his art. The vocabulary is rich, varied, and specific; the syntax elaborate; and the language musical. Play on words is frequent and concerns several foreign languages at times. The text is fraught with intertextual allusions to anglophone writers such as Poe, Joyce, Shakespeare, and Sterne; to French authors such as Flaubert, Mérimée, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud; and eventually to Russian novelists such as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Pushkin. It is also a metafictional text as it offers a mise en abyme of the very process of writing with the insertion of letters, poems, a play, Humbert’s diary, and even a fictive preface. But one should not forget that this masterpiece deals with a criminal perversion and so with the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in art. Thus should, or can, literature simply condemn evil and consequently propose norms in ethics? In this case, Lolita would denounce a sexual deviation by showing what one must not do. Humbert would be an immoral pervert who is punished at the end. The novel would offer a moral lesson. One would adopt there the position of the editor of the fictive preface, John Ray, who considers that the novel should incite us to be vigilant so as to improve our generation. Now, Nabokov himself has refuted this argument in the postface he added to the novel in 1956, one year after its first publication, where he revolts against any didactic literature. An interpretation of the

Deconstructing Lolita

5

novel is thereby not straightforward, or is even undecidable, as the preface and the postface present two contradictory viewpoints: one insists on the moral aspect of the book, the other categorically refuses this judgement. Should we therefore consider the novel as a scandalous, immoral text, which seems to justify an ethical abjection as the story is told by the paedophile, the reader feeling empathy for him, sharing his desire or even his passion? This would support a puritan conformist position and pretend that there are limits to the freedom of art and literature. Should we therefore, as some advocate, mainly appreciate the aesthetic dimension of the novel and affirm the superiority of art over justice? This would justify Humbert’s viewpoint where he tries to vindicate himself with the poetry of his text. Now, Lolita is not only a pleasure text (texte de plaisir), as Roland Barthes would say, but a text situated at the limit in an unstable position because one should not overestimate nor underestimate either dimension, whether it be aesthetic or ethical. It is indeed neither strictly moralising nor tolerant, or even over-obliging. It resists any fixed and final conclusion because it maintains the reader in a double-bind situation; that is to say a paradoxical position, a dilemma which consists in identifying with the pervert and rejecting him by feeling indignation at his cruelty. Nabokov manages to denounce a sexual criminal perversion without merely applying the simplistic doxa because he has succeeded in writing a nuanced literary text fraught with tensions and contradictions. The novel succeeds in transforming the reader, who must go through an ordeal of indecision before attaining a real ethical choice and a conscious stand in the criticism of evil.

Commentaries Lolita was published in 1955 when Nabokov was fifty-six years old, having already written eleven novels (nine in Russian and two in English). Being at the height of his powers, he was offering a masterpiece which was to be followed by others such as Pale Fire (1962) and Ada (1969). The novel was an enormous commercial

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Introduction

success, partly due to the scandal it provoked. Nabokov became a well-known writer worldwide, which allowed him to retreat to Switzerland and devote himself to literature. It is generally admitted that this work is situated at the crossroads of modernism and postmodernism. It blends narrative techniques linked to certain conventional codes (plot, linearity, causality, temporality) and the subversion of these codes through attention to detail, the meaningful presence of coincidences, forking, and sometimes a fragmented form reminiscent of writing devices of anglophone writers such as Sterne in the eighteenth century and John Barth in the twentieth. The novel mainly takes place in America in the 1940s and 50s. It stages the American middle class with its motels, cinemas, culture, and gains by being read through this angle, and it therefore appears as a sociological document. Anchored in reality (one of the words which, according to Nabokov, mean nothing without quotes), the novel questions the mimetic dimension of art through invention rather than the imitative representation of worlds which thereby become spectral. A political spectre, moreover, seems to hover over the novel, written a few years after the publication of Bend Sinister (1947) which, as a dystopia, is a denunciation of totalitarian regimes. Is it therefore possible to claim that Lolita gives an account of a political monstrosity – Nazism – with a sexual monstrosity – paedophilia? Does the novel attempt to represent the unrepresentable? Even cinema has hesitated to give concrete and specific expression to the nymphet as, in the two cinematographic adaptations of the novel (Stanley Kubrick’s in 1962 and Adrian Lyne’s in 1997), Lolita appears older than she is in the novel, as if the fantastical representation produced by the act of reading resists the representation entailed by the image. Lolita has remained topical thanks not only to the films but also the recent scandalous affairs related to paedophilia which prove that Nabokov wrote a bold text, ahead of his time, or even a visionary one. Readers of today sometimes forget that he created a neologism

Deconstructing Lolita

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since he transformed a proper name (Lolita) into a common name (we may speak now of “a Lolita”). Nabokov created a work of lasting importance as he wrote a text which, despite the endless readings it permits or even necessitates, keeps its secret.

CHAPTER ONE STRUCTURE IN LOLITA

In an article that appeared in the Oxford Literary Review in 2003, I asked how one might proceed to read and teach literature with Jacques Derrida. I suggested consulting Derrida’s texts on literary concepts such as structure, genre, or interpretation and problematising them in the light of a literary text, thereby demonstrating how Derrida renewed them. In applying this strategy to Nabokov’s work, I came to the conclusion that Derrida’s notions of play in structure, impurity in genre, and undecidability allow a richer reading of some of the texts, and that they could be useful in the analysis of other literary texts as well. In this paper I will extend my research by showing evidence of play in the structure of not only Bend Sinister and Speak, Memory but also one of Nabokov’s masterpieces, Lolita. To do so, after first describing Derrida’s position on the issue of structure, I will apply a formalist approach to Lolita and then attempt to take into account Derrida’s perspective. Derrida raised the issue of structure in two essays, “Force et signification” [“Force and Signification”] and “La structure, le signe et le jeu dans les sciences humaines” [“Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”], both of which appeared in L’Ecriture et la différence [Writing and Difference], published in 1967. His main point in “Force and Signification” is that structuralist literary criticism, though at times both brilliant and fascinating, excludes the force of literature since the mere analysis of structure, based on the whole of relations and configurations, is exceeded by the living energy of meaning: the structure of the book becomes a skeleton, a town haunted by meaning which is characterised by reserve and excess. Derrida founds his analysis mainly on Forme et

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Chapter One

Signification [Form and Signification], a book published in 1962 by French literary critic Jean Rousset, who argues that a reader finds meaning through forms that they detect in a literary text’s nodes (“noeuds”), figures (“figures”), and reliefs (“relièfs”), which signal the simultaneous operation of a lived experience and its implementation.1 Although Derrida does not deny the strength of such structuralist criticism, he believes that structuralism corresponds historically to a period of crisis and should be denounced because the detection of structure has become, in his view, no longer a means, a tool, an instrument for working out meaning, but an end in itself. Moreover, structuralism favours spatial configurations, geometry, and form at the expense of time, becoming, and movement, and subordinates certain parts of a text which thus become secondary, incidental, or minor. To counteract this tendency, I shall try to expatiate on what is marginal and accidental in the second stage of my analysis of the novel. In “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Derrida insists that structure is based on the notion of a centre that is supposed to organise it, but whose effect is mainly to limit the play within it. Although he concedes that a centre may open play within the structure, he states that it chiefly prevents play and forbids substitution. Only a de-centring process like the ones employed by Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, or by anthropologist Claude Lévy-Strauss, can allow play into a system, since this play is due to the presence of an insufficiency or incompleteness of meaning which longs for supplementation. My intent here, therefore, is to give evidence of play in the structure of Lolita. Before attempting to analyse the book from a Derridean perspective, I will adopt a formalist approach, first enumerating the different 1

Jean Rousset, Forme et signification. Essais sur les structures littéraires de Corneille à Claudel (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1962): “Ce livre a-t-il besoin d’une longue signification? Rien de plus normal, semble-t-il, que son propos: saisir des significations à travers des formes, dégager des ordonnances et des présentations révélatrices, déceler dans les textures littéraires ces nœuds, ces figures, ces reliefs inédits qui signalent l’opération simultanée d’une expérience vécue et d’une mise en œuvre” (I).

Structure in Lolita

11

possible structures that can be extracted from the various organising principles. First, an outline of the book: preceded by a foreword written by a fictitious editor, John Ray, Jr. Ph.D., the novel is composed of two parts. The first consists of thirty-three chapters and can be divided into three subparts: ten chapters corresponding to a movement from discussion of Annabel, Humbert’s first love, to Lolita; twelve chapters tackling the transition from Charlotte Haze, Lolita’s mother, to Lolita; and a final group of eleven chapters culminating in Humbert’s having sex with Lolita. Two events stand out in this first part: the Annabel episode situated temporally in the summer of 1923 – when Humbert and Annabel’s first sexual experience on the beach is interrupted by two bathers coming out of the sea – and Humbert’s encounter with Lolita in the spring of 1947. As can be seen, female figures punctuate the unfolding of events and create a pattern of oppositions and substitutions as Lolita appears as the reincarnation of Annabel. Time is either condensed or expanded. The more Lolita is present, the more detailed and apparently accurate the narrative becomes. Days become as long as weeks in terms of the length of the corresponding parts of text. Thus, whereas the first twenty-four chapters cover twenty-four years, the final nine (twenty-five to thirtythree) cover only two days, or rather two nights, when Humbert and Lolita have sex for the first and second times. Spatially, in part one, we move from France to America and witness the beginning of a wandering across the United States. The second part of the novel, on the other hand, is characterised by spatial expansion; composed of thirty-six chapters, it culminates in the murder of Lolita’s lover, Clare Quilty, in the penultimate chapter. As in the first part, climactic events appear at regular intervals in the action, such as Lolita’s escape from the hospital on the fourth of July 1949 or Quilty’s murder in September 1952. In this light, the structure of the novel seems to be characterised by the rhythmic pattern of climaxes and a general movement towards the end of the novel, a linear evolution towards the dénouement.

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Chapter One

But another formal pattern can be discerned, a kind of mirror structure. The symmetry of the novel’s two parts is reinforced by devices of repetition, duplication, inversion, and reversion. Thus, the prologue (chapter one) echoes the epilogue (chapter thirty-six). The subdivisions of each part stand in an inverted (mirror-like) relationship to each other. The first ten chapters of the first part, for instance, reflect the last ten chapters of the second. In both sections, Humbert is without Lolita: he sees Lolita for the first time in chapter ten and loses her when she escapes in chapter twenty-two of part two, approximately ten chapters before the end of the book. Rita, the woman Humbert meets and lives with in the second subdivision of part two, is a reflection of Humbert’s wives, with whom he lives in part one. Moreover, the progressive movement tending towards dénouement mentioned above is counteracted by a regressive one as characters in part two tend to go backwards, to return in space and time. Thus, Humbert goes back to Beardsley from Elphinstone on his quest to locate the escaped Lolita. Similarly, just as Humbert was first pursued by Quilty, it is he who hunts Quilty in part two. Reminiscence eventually characterises the temporal trend as Humbert projects himself and his story towards the past, trying to recapture, in his experience of the encounter with Lolita in 1947, the memory of his relationship with Annabel in 1923 when he was thirteen. There is thus evidence of at least two different structural patterns in the novel, the first characterised by a linear series of climaxes, and the second by reflection, repetition, and inversion. There is, in addition, a third structural principle, the mise en abyme, which problematises the notions of centre and centrality and which first appears in the form of chess metaphors. As Edmond Bernhard has shown in an article published in L’Arc2, the metaphor of the chessboard is used several times in the text: America, for example, is compared to a “crazy quilt of forty-eight states”3 and Humbert’s 2

Edmond Bernhard, “La thématique échiquéenne de Lolita,” L’Arc 99 (1985): 37–45. 3 Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 152.

Structure in Lolita

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travelling to successful or failed “moves.” Centrality is further called into question by the mise en abyme proper which proceeds from play in the temporal and spatial markers. Twenty-four years pass between Humbert’s affair with Annabel and Lolita’s first appearance, and five years pass between the first time Humbert sees Lolita (May 1947) and the last time he sees her (September 1952). This first lapse of time corresponds to the difference in ages that must separate, according to Humbert, a nymphet and a nympholept (Humbert is thirty-seven when he meets Lolita, who is then twelve), whereas the second lapse of time (five years) corresponds to the lifespan of a nymphet (between the ages of nine and fourteen). The effect is one of enclosing this typical period of time within the general secondary one of a nympholept’s life. In addition, the temporal gap is then transposed into spatial terms by Humbert who, propounding the characteristics of nymphets in chapter five, declares: It will be marked that I substitute time terms for spatial ones. In fact, I would have the reader see “nine” and “fourteen” as the boundaries – the mirrory beaches and rosy rocks – of an enchanted island haunted by those nymphets of mine and surrounded by a vast, misty sea.4

Likewise, one notices the presence of enclosed spaces in the novel: the prison where Humbert writes his confession, the psychiatric hospital, the hospital at Elphinstone, etc. These enclosed spaces stand in contrast to the open roads along which Humbert flees with Lolita or later pursues Quilty. Between the enclosed and the boundless, there is the automobile, which is at once closed and mobile and represents a wandering centre surrounded by concentric circles. The mise en abyme structure is further reinforced by the presence of other moving centres or points of view, such as Humbert’s consciousness, editor John Ray’s commentary encircling Humbert’s confession, the author’s indirect intervention, and even Lolita’s inaudible voice. A listing of the structural patterns described above – only three of an obviously more extensive list – demonstrates the relevance of a structuralist approach in the elaboration of meaning. But the structuralist 4

Ibid., 16.

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Chapter One

method essentially rests on the discovery of oppositions, between prominent events and secondary ones in the pattern of climaxes, between the two parts of a symmetrical pairing in mirrored patterns, and finally between smaller elements and the larger ones in a mise en abyme structure. Although the latter gives evidence of the undermining of centrality, I would like to study in greater detail what Derrida refers to as play in a structure; play which creates a sense of incompleteness due to the lack in meaning longing for supplementation. To do so, I will examine what may seem marginal, accidental, or secondary in the novel, but which is, to my mind, of paramount importance: coincidence and narrative metalepses. In order to better understand their role and function, I will turn to two theoretical works: Derrida’s essay on chance and Genette’s analysis of metalepses. In October 1982 Derrida delivered a lecture entitled “My Chances / Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies”5 at the Forum on Psychiatry and the Humanities. In it he addresses the issue of chance as it relates to psychoanalysis and literature. By alluding to Epicurus’s concept of the clinamen – the small deviation of atoms from a straight line in the course of their fall in the void – Derrida insists on the presence in nature of chance, which entails surprise and unpredictability, as opposed to the determinism of fate and necessity. Genette, in the fifth chapter of Figures III dealing with narrative voice, introduces the figure of speech known as metalepsis6 and defines what he calls “a narrative metalepsis,” a figure that allows a narrator to indulge in switching between narrative levels – the level of the diegesis and the level of narration, for example – one classic instance being the request of the narrator in Tristram Shandy that the reader shut the door. In a more recent book, Metalepse: de la figure à la fiction (2004), Genette notes that the device can also be found in works of cinema, one example being Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo. 5 Later published in Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (eds.), Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). 6 Gérard Genette, Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 243–5.

Structure in Lolita

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In Lolita, coincidences correspond first of all to the role of chance in the novel. In his preface to The Annotated Lolita, Alfred Appel, Jr. notes the importance of coincidence, pointing out that, “Humbert goes to live in Charlotte Haze’s house at 342 Lawn Street, he and Lolita inaugurate their illicit cross-country tour in room 342 of the Enchanted Hunters hotel, and in one year on the road they register in 342 motels and hotels.”7 Although one may object that coincidences do not really occur in fiction, dependent as they are on authorial intervention, I would like to show how their presence serves to question the issue of causality in the novel.8 Humbert is supposedly writing a confession of his affair with the nymphet Lolita addressed to members of the jury who are going to judge him for the murder of Lolita’s lover, Clare Quilty. He pretends therefore to wonder about the reasons for the affair and the cause of his attraction to young girls. At the very beginning of his confession, he declares: “in point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child.”9 He wishes thereby to imply that his propensity for nymphets is due to the trauma of his failed first sexual relationship with Annabel. Yet he later admits: I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity? When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect

7

Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita, edited by Alfred Appel, Jr. New York: Vintage Books, 1991, xxviii. 8 To study in more depth the notion of causality in fiction, one may refer to Roy Jay Nelson’s Causality and Narrative in French Fiction from Zola to Robbe-Grillet (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990) and Brian Richardson’s Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997). 9 Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, 9.

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Chapter One

of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel.10

He thus shifts from one viewpoint to its opposite, assigning responsibility either to himself or to mere fate, either to some inherent trait or to past events. By doing so, he justifies his actions with external reasons, freeing himself from the feeling of guilt. Yet Nabokov, by building other coincidences into the story, complicates this too-simple interpretation by interspersing allusions in the text which tend to imply that not only the reasons for Humbert’s actions may be numerous and varied but the course of one’s life can fork and re-fork, branching in several directions. The first such coincidence appears in part one, chapter eight, when Humbert describes how, while in prison, i.e. in 1952, he comes upon a magazine entitled Who’s Who in the Limelight, a listing of actors, producers, and playwrights dating from 1946, one year before he sees Lolita for the first time. Two significant names appear in the magazine, the first being Clare Quilty, the dramatist with whom Lolita will later run off, and the second being Dolores Quine, Dolores being Lolita’s real given name. Thus, Lolita and Quilty are brought together. Nabokov is playing here on two narrative levels or in two distinct worlds: the world and time of narration (1952) and the world and time of the events recounted (1946–7).11 The two worlds overlap as in the narrative metalepsis which appears some lines later when Humbert, addressing his lawyer Clarence Choate Clark, adds in a parenthesis: “I notice the slip of my pen in the preceding paragraph, but please do not correct it, Clarence.”12 This sort-crossing – to use a phrase applied to metaphors by Colin Murray Turbayne in The Myth of Metaphor13 – leads to a “sort-trespassing” which undermines linear temporality and causal logic. Indeed, the teleological trend maintained until this point in the text is shattered by this device, which 10

Ibid., 13–14. For more on the significance of time lags in Lolita see Tadashi Wakashima, “Double Exposure: On the Vertigo of Translating Lolita,” Zembla (2007). 12 Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, 32. 13 Paul Ricoeur mentions Turbayne’s lexicon in La Métaphore vive (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 316. 11

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destabilises the entire structure of the novel, throwing it off balance, inducing a gap in meaning as the coincidence corresponds to a rift in the novel which traverses it slantwise. Another coincidence worthy of analysis relates to the narrative function of letters, and more particularly those that Charlotte writes after she discovers the diary in which Humbert confesses his desire for her daughter, Lolita (part one, chapter twenty-two). She writes three letters, one to Lolita, one to the manager of a boarding school, and the last to Humbert. Before she can drop them into the mailbox, thereby disclosing the secret of Humbert’s perversion, she is struck by a passing automobile and dies, giving Humbert the opportunity to intercept them. Her sudden accidental death disrupts the straight line of Humbert’s destiny; the interruption of the programmed flow of events makes his life’s course deviate and branch in a new direction. Derrida may be useful here in explaining the significance of the narrative device. In his article, he insists that chance may be linked to the issue of destiny and destination as it causes the possible detour of a clinamen. The metaphor Derrida employs is a letter which, he notes, might not arrive at its intended destination because of randomness – it may be erring, or rather, as he says, destinerring. This he declares in refutation of Lacan’s claim that a letter always arrives at its destination. Chance may have no role in the unconscious as interpreted by psychoanalysis or in literature given that the author pulls the strings, but it might be argued that the themes of chance and coincidence in fiction can metaphorically represent breaks in the straight line of the narrative, the disjunctive detours that allow often significant events to emerge. A branching in a narrative may therefore entail surprise, suspense and the expectation of a new horizon. Chance occurs not only within the narrative sequence, but also plays a role in the act of reading, as Derrida implies by alluding, in the process of his argumentation, to “his strokes of chance” [“ses coups de chance”]. A final example from the novel, again involving a letter, will demonstrate the importance of the reader.

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Chapter One

Lolita, now married, sends Humbert a letter on September 18, 1952. Ironically addressing it to her “dear dad,” and admitting that it is “a hard latter to write,” she asks for money because, being pregnant, she finds herself in financial need. The reader is struck by the suffering that Lolita seems to have experienced and is filled with both pity for Lolita and anger at Humbert for his cruelty. Although addressed to Humbert, the letter is in one sense directed at the reader, who must therefore react to it as he or she chooses. The reader is free to play with the text by relying on his or her own “strokes of luck”: the play inherent in the structure permits, through the reader’s responses to it, the emergence of new interpretations of the text. This is why I would like to conclude with Derrida’s gloss on a statement by Freud which he cites in his article on chance: “[W]e are all too ready to forget that in fact everything to do with our life is chance [Zufall], from our origin out of the meeting of a spermatozoon and ovum onwards,” to which Derrida adds in square brackets: “this is also that which I name, in my language, dissemination.”14

14

Smith and Kerrigan, Taking Chances, 30.

CHAPTER TWO PUTTING LOLITA TO THE TEST OF THE THEORY OF LITERARY GENRES

“Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male” – this is how Nabokov’s novel begins, thereby launching the issue of the literary genre that characterises Lolita. Indeed, even if such is the proposed title – or titles – by the narrator/author Humbert Humbert, the fact of naming the manuscript “a confession” from the start integrates the document into the tradition of the personal novel. One can therefore wonder about the validity of this categorization, and more generally about the generic status of the novel. Is it indeed possible to identify and define the genre of the novel? To answer this question, I intend to study first the theoretical issue of genericity, then the generic issue in Lolita. As far as the theoretical essays of literary genres are concerned, I will resort to the work of, primo, Gérard Genette and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, secondo, Jacques Derrida, and tertio, Antoine Compagnon and Laurent Jenny. It was in 1977 that Genette published in the French journal Poétique a seminal article, “Genres, ‘Types,’ Modes,” which he was to complete and republish as “Introduction à l’architexte” [“Introduction to the Architex”], in the book Théorie des genres [Theory of Genres], composed of a set of articles dealing with the subject and published in 1986. There was indeed, in the 1970s, with the resurgence of studies on rhetoric, an increasing interest in literary genres. In his article, Genette offers a new analysis of the history of the theories of genres. He considers that there has been, from the romantic period, a misunderstanding resulting from a confusion between the modes – coming from the enunciative situation – such as the narrative or the

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dramatic and the genres such as drama, epic, or poetry, which are, for their part, historical and fluctuating objects. He adds then that a “genre” such as the novel or comedy can also be subdivided into more determined “species” – chivalry novel, picaresque novel, etc.; character comedy, farce, slapstick comedy, etc. – without an a priori limit being fixed to this series of inclusions: one well knows, for example, that the species “detective novel” can be subdivided into various nominations (enigmatic story, thriller, “realistic” detective story in the manner of Simenon, etc.).1 By proposing a classification, Genette points out one of the characteristics of the literary genres – that is multiplicity. He adds in the supplement to Introduction à l’architexte that: “Le mélange ou le mépris des genres est un genre parmi d’autres”2 [“the mingling or the scorn of genres is a genre among others”]. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, the author of Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? [What is a Literary Genre?] (1989), had wondered several years earlier about the relation that binds texts to genres. He wrote: “tout texte modifie ‘son’genre”3 [“any text modifies ‘its’ genre”], and added that, as far as large sections of contemporary literature are concerned, “il est très difficile d’établir des classifications génériques, alors même qu’ils se prêtent bien à l’étude de la généricité”4 [“it is very difficult to establish generic classifications, while they lend themselves easily to the study of genericity”]. So both Genette and Schaeffer assert the plurality of genres, and even their mingling. What now of philosopher Jacques Derrida’s contribution? I would like now to tackle the essay published in Parages in 1986, “La loi du genre” [“The Law of the Genre”]. This essay is the transcription of a lecture given in July 1979 during an international conference on the issue of genre in Strasbourg. Derrida quotes Genette’s previously mentioned text and refers to Philippe Lacoue1

Gérard Genette, “Genres, ‘Types,’ Modes,” Poétique 32 (1977): 418–19. Gérard Genette, “Introduction à l’architexte,” in Théorie des genres, eds. Gérard Genette et Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 158. 3 Jean-Marie Schaeffer, “Du texte au genre,” in Théorie des genres, eds. Gérard Genette et Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 197. 4 Ibid., 202. 2

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Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s book L’Absolu littéraire, which deals with the issue of genre in the German Romantic epoch, with – so it seems – Maurice Blanchot’s texts on “a-genericity” [“agénéricité”]. Responding indirectly to those texts, Derrida wonders about the relevancy of genres and puts forward the following argument. For him, nothing escapes the law of the genre: “Dès qu’on entend le mot ‘genre’ … une limite se dessine. Et quand une limite vient à s’assigner, la norme et l’interdit ne se font pas attendre: ‘il faut,’ ‘il ne faut pas,’ dit le genre”5 [“As soon as one hears the word ‘genre’ … a limit stands out. And when a limit is set, the norm and the prohibition are not long to come: ‘one must,’ ‘one mustn’t,’ says the genre”]. The genre is a prescription (“it must” fill certain criteria; a sonnet, for example, must necessarily be composed of fourteen lines, etc.) It is therefore connected with the norm, and this norm can be transgressed, as one transgresses a prohibition. Yet, Derrida specified at the very beginning of his essay, one should not “mingle the genres” [“mêler les genres”]. There exists indeed a desire for purity of the genre, and he says, “cette pureté … c’est une loi de la loi du genre” [“this purity … is a law of the law of the genre”] (1986, 254). One must not risk impurity, anomalies, monstrosities, he says. But then, he wonders: “Et s’il y avait, logée, logée au coeur de la loi même, une loi d’impureté ou un principe de contamination?” [“What about, lodged within the law itself, a law of impurity or a principle of contamination”] (1986, 254). It seems therefore that there exist disruptive “anomalies” engendered by repetition: corruption, contamination, decomposition, perversion, deformation, proliferation, degeneration. This would explain why a text partakes [participle] of a genre but belongs [appartient] to no genre. It is as if there was participation without belonging. Derrida develops the idea as follows: “L’hypothèse que je soumets à votre discussion serait la suivante: un texte ne saurait appartenir à aucun genre. Tout texte participe d’un ou plusieurs genres, il n’y aurait pas de texte sans genre, il y aurait du genre et des genres mais cette participation n’est pas une appartenance” [“The hypothesis I submit to your discussion would be the following one: a text belongs to no genre. Any text partakes of one or several genres, it is as if there is some genre and 5

Jacques Derrida, “La loi du genre,” in Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 252.

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genres but this participation is not a belonging”] (1986, 264). Classification becomes possible but unlimited, or even impossible because the genre is characterised by the fact that it is open and gaping. Derrida specifies: “La remarque d’appartenance n’appartient pas. Elle appartient sans appartenir et le ‘sans’ qui rapporte l’appartenance à la non-appartenance ne paraît que le temps sans temps d’un clin d’œil” [“The remark of belonging does not belong. It belongs without belonging and the ‘without’ which links belonging to non-belonging appears only the time without time of the twinkling of an eye”] (1986, 264). It is as if there are therefore apparitions and disappearances with eclipses, generic sporadic intervals, a gaping punctuated by generic traces rather than rigid presences. The generic feature does not completely close the generic identity and Derrida insists on the way the clause of the genre – meaning both the legal term and the closure – evokes the locked gate (l’écluse) of the genre: its unceasing opening and closure. There is therefore, for Derrida, a law of the genre, but his analysis of Blanchot’s La Folie du jour shows how this law can be mad. It will be necessary to take account of this nuance in our analysis of Lolita. Now, it is at the beginning of the 2000s that two professors of French literature, Antoine Compagnon6 of the university of Paris-Sorbonne and Laurent Jenny7 from Geneva, published lectures on the notion of the genre, the first with Fabula and the second through the university of Geneva. In his lecture composed of eighteen sessions, Compagnon begins, in the continuation of Genette, with a survey of the theories of the genres by proposing analyses of what he calls the fundamental texts: Aristotle’s, Plato’s, and Hegel’s, as well as contemporary texts by Genette and Schaeffer. He shows an interest in the previously mentioned thematics, such as the law of the genre and the purity of the genre. For him, the genre is also prescriptive. It imposes a norm and conventions, or more specifically constraints. These conventions 6

Antoine Compagnon, elected in April 2006 to the Collège de France, is the author of many books on literary theory, for example La Seconde main ou le travail de la citation (1979) and Le Démon de la théorie (1998). 7 Laurent Jenny is the author of La Parole singulière (1990), with a preface by Jean Starobinski.

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induce an expectation, what Hans Robert Jauss calls “an expectation horizon” [“un horizon d’attente”].8 These criteria allow a recognition through their “family likeness” [“air de famille”] – using one of Wittgenstein’s concepts – a set of macro-and micro-structural features. Thus, echoing what Derrida says about the law of the genre, Compagnon writes: “Un texte hors genres n’est pas concevable” [“a text without a genre is not conceivable”], or “Aucun texte n’est hors de toute norme générique”9 [“No text is without a generic norm”]. There seems to have been in the twentieth century a utopia, that is an ideal of the abolition of genres, which was best represented by Blanchot,10 but the genre is, according to Compagnon, little 8

In Le Genre littéraire (2004), Marielle Macé defines “l’horizon d’attente” [“the expectation horizon”] as follows: “L’ ensemble de règles qui guide les lecteurs dans l’appréhension de l’oeuvre, la construction d’une interprétation, et la ‘concrétisation’ du sens à partir des intentions contenues dans l’oeuvre elle-même” [“The set of rules that guides the readers in the apprehension of the work, the construction of an interpretation, and the ‘materialization’ of meaning from the intentions contained in the work itself”] (2004, 235). She follows this by saying: “Jauss décline les lieux très divers où s’actualise cette dialectique entre attente et expérience, en définissant l’horizon comme ‘le système de références objectivement formulable qui, pour chaque œuvre au moment de l’histoire où elle apparaît, résulte de trois facteurs principaux: l’expérience préalable que le public a du genre dont elle relève, la forme et la thématique dont elle présuppose la connaissance, et l’opposition entre langage poétique et langage pratique, monde imaginaire et réalité quotidienne” [“Jauss mentions the varied scenes where there exists this dialectic between expectation and experience, by defining the horizon as ‘the objectively formulated system of references which, for each work at the historical time it appears, is the result of three main factors: the prior experience of the public as regards its genre, the form and the thematic it presupposes the knowledge of, and the opposition between poetic language and practical language, imaginary world and everyday reality”] (2004, 236). 9 Session two of February 24, 2001, “Norme, essence ou structure” [“Norm, Essence or Structure”]. 10 Maurice Blanchot in Le livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959): “Seul importe le livre, tel qu’il est, loin des genres, en dehors des rubriques, prose, poésie, roman, témoignage, sous lesquelles il refuse de se ranger et auxquelles il dénie le pouvoir de lui fixer sa place et de déterminer sa forme. Un livre n’appartient plus à un genre, tout livre relève de la seule littérature

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questionable. For him, generic purity is utopian, just as is the ideal of the abolition of genres. He writes: “La transgression générique est devenue un poncif de la modernité”11 [“Generic transgression has become a commonplace of modernity”]. He adds: “le mélange, l’intertextualité, l’hybridité, le métissage deviennent les valeurs et non plus la pureté” and “Toutes les œuvres modernes sont impures”12 [“Mingling, intertextuality, hybridity, mixing become the values and purity is no longer one. All the modern works are impure”]. Yet, Compagnon mentioned in session twelve of May 18, 2001 one of the most important elements on the relation between genre and meaning: “Le genre a une valeur heuristique, cela veut dire qu’il sert à la découverte du sens. Il se situe alors du côté de l’interprétation, il permet de l’unifier. C’est une hypothèse sur le tout (sur le sens d’ensemble du texte) qui est confronté aux parties, aux traits du texte” [“The genre has a heuristic value, this means that it is used for the discovery of meaning. It is therefore on the side of interpretation. It allows its unification. It is a hypothesis on the whole (on the overall meaning of the text) which is facing the parts, the features of the text”]. Compagnon rightly says that the genre is generating meaning, but to assert that it unifies it may be questionable because its comme si celle-ci détenait par avance, dans leur généralité, les secrets et les formules qui permettent seuls de donner à ce qui s’écrit réalité du livre. Tout se passerait donc comme si, les genres s’étant dissipés, la littérature s’affirmait seule, brillait seule dans la clarté mystérieuse qu’elle propage et que chaque création littéraire lui renvoie en la multipliant – comme s’il y avait donc une ‘essence’ de la littérature” [“All that matters is the Book, as it is, far from the genres, outside the headings prose, poetry, novel, testimony, it refuses to abide by and denies the power to fix its place and determine its form. A book no longer belongs to a genre, any book is only the concern of literature as if the latter had in advance, in their generalities, the secrets and methods that are the only ones able to give to what is written the reality of a book. It is therefore as if, the genres having vanished, literature asserted by itself alone, shone alone in the mysterious brightness it propagates and as if each literary creation reflected it by multiplying it – as if there was therefore an ‘essence’ of literature”]. 11 Session thirteen of May 25, 2001, “Conclusions: modernité et violation des genres.” 12 Same session, conclusion.

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multiplicity may, on the contrary, make meaning explode with an endless dissemination. As for Laurent Jenny, after resuming the statements linked to the expectation horizon and the heuristic value of the genre, he refines the argument by declaring: “Il n’existe pas de signaux discursifs propres à la littérature en général, mais seulement des signaux de genre” [“There exist no discursive signs specific to literature in general but only signs of genres”]. For him, there is therefore necessarily some genre, and the genre positions the interpretation of the work. He concludes by saying: “les genres demeurent donc la mesure de toute innovation littéraire” [“Genres remain therefore what any literary innovation depends on”]. After this survey of the theoretical stakes of literary genres, it is time to put Lolita to the test of these theories and analyse the generic issues of the novel. I suggest a three-movement study where I shall try to show: (1) how the abundance of the generic and thematic conventions is a good example of what Derrida calls “the law of the genre”; (2) how the mingling of genres [le mélange des genres] testifies to the impurity of the genre(s) specific to the novel; and (3) how the divisions and the doubling [divisions et dédoublements] entail various openings and gapings [béances]. I will also try to show how Nabokov resorted to subversive devices such as satire, parody, and irony to play with the conventions of genres and free himself from them. Thus, as I mentioned, from the very beginning of the fictional preface signed by John Ray, we are faced with literary conventions such as the title of the manuscript, “Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male.” What Anglo-Saxons call “confessional literature” corresponds, according to J. A. Cuddon, to works that testify, in a very personal and subjective way, to experiences, beliefs, feelings, ideas, or states of mind, body, or soul. The famous examples are, of course, Augustine’s Confessions and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions.13 The convention creates an expectation: we expect a certain type of narration, that is the narration in the singular first 13

J. A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 151.

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person, and also a focused thematic, that of the avowal. Other conventions are present. Thus, John Ray tells us that he received the manuscript he edited from the lawyer of its author. Through this device, Nabokov includes the novel in the tradition of the manuscript or the object that has been found, echoing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter or Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. What’s more, Nabokov knows the generic codes of prefaces and does not forget to mention – in what he calls the “foreword” – the date (August 5, 1955), the place of composition (Widworth, Mass.), the signature (John Ray), as well as the author’s title (Ph.D.). Even the term “convention” appears in the following sentence of the preface: “True, not a single obscene word is to be found in the whole work; indeed, the robust philistine who is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms a lavish array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by their absence here” (my emphasis). The term “convention” pops up again when the editor tries to characterise the genre of the novel, here, by what it is not: a pornographic novel. He tries then to identify it by presenting it as a “case history,” which is supposed to become a classic in psychiatric circles. It may be the reason why the editor flaunts himself as a specialist in perversions. This is a rather common feature: it is the expert who presents the case and is, thanks to his/her competencies, able to evaluate the scientific value of the document. Nabokov treats conventions as norms, but has peppered Humbert’s text with conventions which are no longer generic but thematic, and this gives him the opportunity to mock them thanks to the device of satire. Let us remind ourselves that satire is aimed at ridiculing certain aspects of one’s behaviour. There are numerous examples in the novel. Humbert’s favourite targets are Valeria, his first wife, Charlotte Haze, Lolita’s mother, and Miss Pratt, the head of Lolita’s school at Beardsley. Through each, Humbert mocks the conventions and clichés of a certain American middle class, with its mediocre aspirations and way of life, or, with Miss Pratt, at the supposedly modern stereotypes of the education of young girls. So he mocks the magazines Charlotte usually reads and the starchy way she peppers her conversation with French words. He ridicules Miss Pratt’s discourse and her educational principles and makes fun of the woman’s remarks, as in the following example: “What we are

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concerned with is the adjustment of the child to group life. This is why we stress the four D’s: Dramatics, Dance, Debating and Dating” (177/200). Who makes us laugh here? The narrator (Humbert) or the author (Nabokov)? Even if Humbert pretends to be an artist and a writer, it is indeed the author’s mastery of the device of satire which is here presented. Yet, Nabokov never ceased to assert his reluctance as regards satire. In Strong Opinions he wrote: “I have neither the intent nor the temperament of a moral or social satirist” (1973, 22). He added: “Satire is a lesson, parody is a game” (75). And it is indeed parody that Nabokov excels at and resorts to when showing how Lolita’s genre is impure and multiform. Yet, the question remains: what is Lolita’s generic status? Is it a confession? A memoir? A selfdefence? A plea for a trial? A detective story? A case history? A fairy tale? A travelogue? A picaresque novel? A love story? A work of art? It nevertheless seems that these hypotheses may be classified with two criteria: theme, or narration. These generic specificities are indeed linked to either the problematic of thematics (if we classify Lolita in the group of love stories, we insist on Humbert’s lovepassion for Lolita) or that of narration (the novel corresponds, in that case, to the generic codes of the detective story with quest, investigation, and murder.) When Lolita appeared, it was perceived by some critics as a love story, in particular by Denis de Rougemont, the author of L’Amour et l’Occident (1939) who wrote in the French magazine L’Express on June 8, 1959: “C’est d’abord et surtout le scandale évident, le caractère profanateur de l’amour de H. H. pour Lolita qui trahit la présence du mythe”14 [“It is first of all and chiefly the obvious scandal, the profaning characteristic of H. H.’s love for Lolita which betrays the presence of the myth”]. But is it really a love story or the parody of a love story? Whereas satire ridicules, parody is an imitation (of a style, an author, a genre, etc.) which is characterised by its dissonance, its false sonorities. Genette, in Palimpsestes, defines parody as: “D’abord l’étymologie: ôdè, c’est le chant; para: ‘le long de,’ ‘à côté,’ parôdien, d’où parôdia, ce serait (donc?) le fait de chanter faux, ou dans une autre voix, en contre chant – en contrepoint – ou encore de chanter dans un autre ton: 14

Quoted in Christine Raguet-Bouvard, Lolita, un royaume au-delà des mers (Talence: PU de Bordeaux, 1996), 231.

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déformer, donc, ou transposer une mélodie”15[“First the etymology: ôdè means singing; para: ‘along,’ ‘beside,’ parôdien, hence parôdia, this would (therefore?) be the fact of singing out of tune, or in another voice, in descant – in counterpoint – or even singing in another tone: distorting, therefore, or transposing a melody”]. And it is true that Lolita is a very strange detective story, as the codes are reversed in that the murderer is not searched for but is the victim who is wondered about; it is not the murderer who leaves clues but Quilty, the victim, who peppers his itinerary with deceiving signs. Likewise Humbert’s confession is questioned by the lack of reliability of the narrator who, so it seems, does not abide by the contract of truthfulness and sincerity that The Confessions are supposed to convey. Moreover, in a mise en abyme structure, Nabokov parodies Humbert’s confession by including another comical parody, Charlotte’s confession. When Charlotte makes her declaration of love to Humbert, she begins her letter with “This is a confession: I love you” (67/74). Her letter is a pastiche (an imitation) of a love letter and a parody (an imitation which transforms the genre) which evokes the title given by Humbert to his manuscript, and in doing so discredits the genre of the confession. The murder scene is also a mixture of burlesque and pathos where the genre is criticised by grandiloquence.16 Thus, genres are presented; they are numerous, plural, and different, but they cancel each other out through their multiplicity. It is with satire and parody that Nabokov creates “a play” between the different genres – a play which is at the origin of openings and gapings in the text. Now, I wish to recall how, for Derrida, the generic feature – for example, the mentioned “novel” – be it included in or excluded from 15

Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 17. To prolong the reflection on the presence of parody in the novel, one can resort to Thomas R. Frosch’s article “Parody and Authenticity in Lolita” (1982), republished in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook, ed. Ellen Pifer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 39–56. See also Alfred Appel, Jr.’s: “Lolita: The Springboard of Parody,” in Nabokov: The Man and his Work, ed. L. S. Dembo (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 106–43. 16

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the work, prevents it from closing up.17 Thus, the term “confession” appears outside the main text of the novel – in the fictional preface – and inside this very text, with Charlotte’s “confession.” The inclusion and exclusion certainly create a mise en abyme – what Alfred Appel, Jr. calls “involution” in his outstanding introduction in The Annotated Lolita (1970) – but chiefly a sporadic opening, a sort of twinkling of the eye (a metaphor Derrida used), a flickering, an apparition by eclipses. This gaping also appears in the structure of the work which is composed of a fictional preface – the one signed by John Ray; a main text – which corresponds to Humbert’s manuscript: and a postface – signed by Nabokov, written in 1956 but added to the later editions of Lolita. The consequence of the break in these various units is that the text opens and unfolds because the paratext – the text which is beside the main text – creates connections but also separates, dislodges, and breaks the continuous linearity with an intrinsic discontinuity. This gaping appears in the various splittings within the structure and the text. Thus, Nabokov accumulates and piles up the incipits. The novel begins with Lolita, in the preface (“Lolita, or the confession …” [3/1]) and the main text (“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins” [9/7]), this creating a sort of yawning [bégaiement], to 17

Derrida explains the phenomenon as follows: “Prenons l’exemple de la mention ‘roman.’ Elle doit être marquée d’une manière ou d’une autre, même si ce n’est pas sous la forme explicite de la mention sous-titrante et même si elle est trompeuse ou ironique. Cette mention n’est pas romanesque, elle ne fait pas, de part en part, partie du corpus qu’elle désigne. Elle ne lui est pas non plus étrangère. Mais ce singulier topos situe dans l’œuvre et hors d’elle, une inclusion et une exclusion au regard du genre en général, d’une classe identifiable en général. Il rassemble le corpus et du même coup, du même clin d’œil il l’empêche de se fermer, de s’identifier à lui-même” [“Let’s take the example of the mention ‘novel.’ It must be marked in one way or another, even if it is not under the explicit form of a subheading and even if it is deceitful or ironical. This mention is not novelistic, it is not completely part of the corpus it designates, nor is it extraneous to it. But this singular topos situates in the work and outside of it, an inclusion and an exclusion as regards the genre in general, or an identifiable class in general. It assembles the corpus and, with the same action, the same twinkling of an eye, it prevents it from closing up, from identifying itself”] (1986, 264–5).

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use Gilles Deleuze’s metaphor. The title and the subtitle of the manuscript also present a gaping through the opening due to the use of the word “or.” This propensity for divisions and forking often appears within the main text. Thus, Humbert wonders if he is “man or monster”; he describes the days as if they were “divided tidily into ample light and narrow shade” (32/34). He perceives his existence “as if life’s course constantly branched” (163/184). Nabokov plays on the ambiguity in the title of the manuscript between the singular and the plural of the word “confession.” The title specifies that it is a confession – in the singular – but it evokes titles of works where the author presents the errors and misdeeds of his/her life, such as Rousseau’s Confessions. The generic feature opens up because it is dividing. Moreover, let us recall how Antoine Compagnon underlined the fact that the genre had a heuristic value and helped the discovery of meaning. Now, the interpretation of the novel is most problematic, and is characterised by its undecidability. Is it, indeed, a love story or a psychiatric case? Is it possible to consider the pathological feeling experienced by Humbert as an example of love? Is it possible to fix the demarcation line between authentic love and deviant desire? Meaning appears as something not fixed and unique; it is fluctuating, and so is the generic status of the text. To show that the genre is not pure, Nabokov resorts to parody, a subversive device he claimed to prefer to satire. Yet, there is a device he handles with even more mastery, which is irony. Indeed, whereas parody only reinforces the status of the parodied element, through the recognition given by the process, irony creates a distance and allows the author to free him/her-self from the generic constraints. Whereas, for Compagnon, the genre raises the question of the reader and is on the side of reception – with expectation horizon, recognition, or frustration – it is possible to reverse the point of view and to take the side of the author. How does he/she react as regards the necessities of a genre? How does he/she act? What does he/she do? My hypothesis is that he/she frees him/herself from it because, contrary to appearances, literature is not only linked to submissions to constraints but it is an activity which is connected to freedom: freedom of writing and of thought. And it is irony which is capable of letting this freedom blossom. The minimal form of irony is contrary to what one really thinks. There is therefore a gap (un écart),

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or, in other words, a gaping (une béance), between the utterance and meaning, which testifies to the author’s position as regards enunciation. Now, ironic effects are numerous in Nabokov’s novel. Irony is manifest in its mirror structure. It is composed of two parts, with the first chapter of the first part, the prologue, facing the last chapter of the second part, the epilogue. The first third of the first part – before Lolita’s apparition in chapter ten – and the final third of the second part – after Lolita’s disappearance – are in an inverted relation through their symmetry due to Lolita’s absence. Likewise, the fictional preface and the postface are in a mirror position and this creates a textual irony all the more so as the codes of authentication of the postface (place, date, signature) echo those of the preface, and, paradoxically, fictionalise the postface. Numerous other ironies are integrated in the novel. Thus, Charlotte’s “confession” is all the more comical as her blindness (when she alludes to the relationship Humbert could entertain with Lolita) shows the distance that exists between the character and the narrator, but also between the character and the reader. In the same way, when, in the preface, John Ray mentions the name of “Mrs. Richard F. Schiller” we do not yet know that he refers to Lolita, and Nabokov plays on the register of dissimulation of clues followed by revelations. It is obvious that it is the author who pulls the strings and asserts himself. However, when Nabokov introduces himself in the postface, he writes: After doing my impersonation of suave John Ray, the character in Lolita who pens the foreword, any comments coming straight from me may strike one – may strike me, in fact – as an impersonation of Vladimir Nabokov talking about his own book. (311/353)

By using the term “impersonation,” Nabokov tries to describe how strange the experience of authorship is. The first translator of Lolita into French, Eric H. Kahane, translated both occurrences with the word “pastiche.”18As for Maurice Couturier, he translated the expression, “After doing my impersonation of suave John Ray” as, “Après avoir usurpé l’identité du suave John Ray,” and, “an impersonation of Vladimir Nabokov” as, “un pastiche de Vladimir 18

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, trans. Eric H. Kahane (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1981), 493.

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Nabokov.”19 In 1994, Danièle Roth-Souton underlined the fact that the term “impersonation” was full of nuances and polysemic: A cette faculté remarquable de composer des variantes à son propre personnage, il [Nabokov] donne le nom d’impersonation: un terme ne suffit pas à le traduire, il y faut toutes les propositions du dictionnaire: de personnification, incarnation, création, interprétation de l’acteur, charge de l’imitateur; l’acception juridique, enfin, d’usurpation de nom ou de position accrédite déjà mon hypothèse du sapement parodique de l’Etat Civil.20 [To this remarkable ability to compose variations on his own character, he [Nabokov] gives the name of impersonation: one term is not enough to translate it, the propositions of the dictionary are all necessary: personification, incarnation, creation, the actor’s interpretation, the force of the imitator; eventually, the juridical meaning of name or position usurpation substantiates my hypothesis of parodic undermining of the Civic Status.]

Thus, to imitate, to play a role, to be a stand-by, to usurp an identity – Nabokov wishes to do all these things at the same time, and this results in ironic effects but entails a derealisation of his own identity. A stand-by, a pastiche, an extra or a figurine, Nabokov hides behind his names and pseudonyms, in life or in his fiction – he is often dissimulated behind his anagram Vivian Darkbloom.21 He disappears and reappears intermittently, coming and going like a magician to whom he willingly compares himself, repeating and multiplying his subjectivity in a series of real or fictional selves: a ghostly presence which is almost fictionalised. He describes himself as an author who has little to say on his books and who has no precise goal when he undertakes to write a novel, and chiefly no message.22 He disparagingly 19

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, trans. Maurice Couturier (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 2001), 541. 20 Danièle Roth-Souton, Vladimir Nabokov, L’Enchantement de l’exil (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994), 8. 21 This anagram appears in a great number of his works, such as Lolita. He uses the name to sign the fictional notes at the end of his novel Ada. 22 He writes: “I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no other purpose than to get rid of that book” (311/353).

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talks about teachers who wonder about the author’s purpose and about what he meant. Nabokov is against the idea of an author keeping a unique and final meaning. He “becomes absent” and lets the reader “disentangle” the text. Yet, his attitude is double and contradictory. Indeed, after having offered his text to his readers, he appropriates it again, notably here in the postface, in an effort of mastery and control of his work. This effort of mastery nevertheless remains illusory as he is being overflowed by his own writing. He gives, takes back, but gives again in an attitude of “mastery without mastery” – what Derrida calls “exappropriation,” which is a term composed of appropriation and expropriation and refers to any kind of mastery without mastery.23 Present and absent at the same time, he is a ghost that the reader perceives in the figure of the author. However, as a conclusion, it might be relevant to give the author the last word and see how Nabokov himself comments on the interpretation of Lolita, and thereby its generic status. At the end of the postface, he writes: After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution “English language” for “romantic novel” would make this elegant formula more correct. (316/360–1)

Thus, it may indeed be a love story. It is all the more ironical as the love Humbert feels for Lolita is, as seen beforehand, problematic. But here, it would be a love story with a genre: the romantic novel. But, Genette wonders in Figures V (2002): “Peut-on aimer un genre”24 [“Is it possible to love a genre?”]. It seems that Nabokov has rather freed himself from the issue of genres and prefers to acknowledge his love for language, style, and therefore writing. From the problematic of the genre, we are now facing that of the text 23

Derrida writes: “The choice does not choose between control and noncontrol, mastery and non-mastery, propriety and expropriation. It is rather – and the ‘logic’ is different – a ‘choice’ between several configurations of mastery without mastery (what I suggested to call ‘exappropriation’),” Echographies de la television (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 46. 24 Gérard Genette, Figures V (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 39.

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and Blanchot’s affirmation, who wrote: “L’essence de la littérature, c’est d’échapper à toute détermination essentielle, à toute affirmation qui la déstabilise ou même la réalise: elle n’est jamais déjà là, elle est toujours à retrouver ou à inventer”25 [“The essence of literature is to escape any essential determination, any affirmation which destabilises or even achieves it: it is never already here, it is always something to find again or invent”]. Now, that is exactly what Nabokov meant to do as he said that, with Lolita, he had “to invent America.”26

Bibliography Blanchot, Maurice. Le Livre à venir. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. Compagnon, Antoine. “La notion de genre.” http://www.fabula.org/compagnon/genre. Cuddon J. A. A Dictionary of Literary Terms. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Derrida, Jacques. “La loi du genre.” In Parages. Paris: Galilée, 1986. —. Echographies de la télévision. Paris: Galilée, 1996. Genette, Gérard. “Genres, ‘Types,’ Modes.” Poétique 32 (1977): 389–421. —. Palimpsestes. Paris: Seuil, 1982. —. “Introduction à l’architexte.” In Théorie des genres, edited by Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov. Paris: Seuil, 1982. —. Figures V. Paris: Seuil, 2002. Laurent, Jenny. “Les genres littéraires.” In Méthodes et problems (Genève: Dpt de Français moderne, 2003). http://www.unige.ch/lettres/framo/enseignements/méthodes/genr es. Macé, Marielle. Le Genre littéraire. Paris: Flammarion, 2004. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. Translated by Eric H. Kahane. Paris: Gallimard, “Folio,” 1981. —. The Annotated Lolita, ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

25

Blanchot, Le livre à venir, 254. He writes: “It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced by the task of inventing America” (312/354).

26

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—. Lolita. Translated by Maurice Couturier. Paris: Gallimard, “Folio,” 2002. —. Lolita. Harmondsworth: Penguin Red Classic, 2006. —. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw Hill, 1973. Raguet-Bouvard, Christine. Lolita, un royaume au-delà des mers. Talence: PU de Bordeaux, 1996. Roth-Souton, Danièle. Vladimir Nabokov; L’Enchantement de l’exil. Paris: Editions l’Harmattan, 1994. Schaeffer Jean-Marie. “Du texte au genre.” In Théorie des genres, edited by Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov. Paris: Seuil, 1986.

CHAPTER THREE THE ORDEAL OF UNDECIDABILITY IN LOLITA

In the afterword “On a Book Entitled Lolita” written in 1956, one year after the initial publication of Lolita in Paris, Nabokov insisted that Lolita does not teach anything and should be appreciated for its artistry. He wrote: There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray’s assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me, a work of fiction exists only in so far as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss … (1991, 314).

By saying so, he was contradicting the fictional editor John Ray who, in the foreword, declares: As a work of art, it [Lolita] transcends its expiatory aspects; and still more important to us than scientific significance and literary worth, is the ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader; for in this poignant personal study, there lurks a general lesson; the wayward child, the egoistic mother, the panting maniac – these are not only vivid characters in a unique story; they warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils. (1991, 5–6)

According to John Ray, Lolita is a moral novel because it denounces evil through Humbert’s “abject” attitude, whose counterexample pleads for good and safety. These two contradictory assertions illustrate what is still an important issue in the interpretation of Lolita, i.e. the opposition between the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of the novel. As this issue is still unresolved, I suggest resorting to Derrida’s key notion of undecidability – the inability to choose between two opposite or even

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contradictory meanings – to help understand the impasse which has characterised the history of the interpretation of Lolita.1 I therefore intend to first give evidence of this impasse through a survey of the critical history of Lolita, then present and develop the definition of the concept of undecidability, and end by trying to show its relevance to the novel. The oscillation between the two contradictory positions appears clearly in the two collections of articles that were gathered by, first, Norman Page in The Critical Heritage (1982) and then Christine Clegg in Lolita: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (2000). Although Page mostly selected articles that appeared between 1956 and 1959 and dealt with the comic dimension of the book as John Hollander considered, for example, that it was “the funniest book” (1982, 83), two articles concerned the issue of the link between ethics and aesthetics. Lionel Trilling mentioned Lolita’s ambiguity (102), and Howard Nemerov wrote: “Nabokov’s own artistic concern … has no more to do with morality than with sex; with either or both only incidentally …” (91–2). As for Christine Clegg, she offers a complete survey of the literary criticism of Lolita and distinguishes the main trends in the various decades following its publication. She immediately formulates the problematic by declaring in the introduction that the novel was, from the beginning, the object of controversies about its status. Was it literature or pornography? Was it “morally uplifting or obscene?” (2000, 6). Whereas the 1950s were mostly interested in the question of the genre of the novel, as critics wondered if it was “a love story, a parody, a psychological study of obsessional behaviour, an evocation of certain aspects of American life, a book that makes for morality or immorality” (2000, 16), the 1960s and 1970s were mainly concerned with the aesthetic dimension of the book, as Page Stegner published Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov (1966) and Carl Proffer Keys to Lolita (1968), analysing its formal, textual, and literary 1 I am here developing a hypothesis I adumbrated in a previous article entitled “Play! Invent the World! Invent Reality! Nabokov/Derrida,” published in The Oxford Literary Review 25 (2003): 157–77.

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qualities. Alfred Appel, Jr. proved his fascination with the stylistic mastery of Nabokov when he edited The Annotated Lolita in 1970. What characterises the critics highly (or excessively) estimating the aesthetics of the novel is their empathy or identification with the narrator, even if he is unreliable. Stegner wrote: “But readers who are able … to suspend for the time being their moral repugnance for pederasts and nympholepts find in Humbert’s story something that is touching …” (Clegg 2000, 44; Stegner 1966, 108). The 1980s and 1990s showed, however, a definite turn in the appreciation of the novel which shifted towards its ethical dimension with Ellen Pifer’s reading, Richard Rorty’s analysis of cruelty, and the feminist critic Linda Kaufman who asserted that, “Lolita is not about love, but about incest …” (Clegg 2000, 105). These critics initiated a trend which emphasized an interest in Lolita rather than Humbert. The British critic Michael Wood eventually summed up the critical history of Lolita as follows: “after the outrage, the lazy tolerance – and after that, the vigilantes again” (Clegg 2000, 115; Wood 1994, 140). Norman Page and Christine Clegg therefore highlighted the swinging movement which characterises the interpretation of Lolita and through which critics overestimated either the ethical dimension or the aesthetic one, being forced therefore to underestimate the alternative reading. Yet, the reader’s uneasiness is not satisfied with the definite choices such criticism entails. They are indeed facing a paradoxical experience which is in keeping with what I consider to be the undecidable interpretation of the novel. What do “undecidable” and “undecidability” mean, exactly? It was in “La Double séance” [“The Double Session”] in La Dissémination [Dissemination] (1972) that Derrida gave a clear and accurate definition of the term “undecidable”: “Une proposition indécidable, Gödel en a démontré la possibilité en 1931, est une proposition qui, étant donné un système d’axiomes qui domine une multiplicité, n’est ni une conséquence analytique ou déductive des axiomes, ni en contradiction avec eux, ni vraie ni fausse au regard de ces axiomes. Tertium datur, sans synthèse” [“An undecidable proposition, as Gödel demonstrated in 1931, is a proposition which, given a system of axioms governing a multiplicity, is neither an analytical nor

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deductive consequence of those axioms, nor in contradiction with them, neither true nor false with respect to those axioms. Tertium datur, without synthesis”] (1972, 219). Derrida alludes to the famous Austrian-American mathematician Kurt Gödel, who proved in 1931 that in mathematics there exist propositions that are neither true nor false, neither demonstrable nor refutable, and without a third possibility. According to the French physicist David Ruelle, Gödel showed that it is therefore impossible to systematically decide about all the assertions concerning whole numbers if they are true or false, and that there exist assertions that cannot be proved either false or true (1991, 191). As for the French philosopher Christian Godin, he defines the undecidable proposition as one about which one cannot establish as either contradictory or non-contradictory with the whole theory it is part of (2004, 642). These definitions apply to the science of logic, but Derrida has clearly specified that he was calling the operation “undecidable” only “by analogy” (1972, 219). What interested him in the concept was the fact that there is no synthesis, no dialectical reconciliation of two opposites. He explained: “L’’indécidabilité’ ne tient pas ici à quelque équivocité énigmatique, à quelque ambiguïté ‘historiale,’ au mystère poétique du mot hymen, à l’ambivalence inépuisable d’un mot de la langue ‘naturelle’ …” [“‘Undecidability’ is not caused here by some enigmatic equivocality, some inexhaustible ambivalence of a word in a ‘natural’ language …” (1972, 220). Derrida therefore differentiates undecidability from notions that have variously been employed by critics about Lolita, such as ambiguity, for example, which was used by Trilling in 1957. Undecidability does not unite and mingle two or several meanings. Derrida wrote: “Ce qui compte ici, ce n’est pas la richesse lexicale, l’infinité sémantique d’un mot ou d’un concept, sa profondeur ou son épaisseur, la sédimentation en lui de deux significations contradictoires … Ce qui compte ici, c’est la pratique formelle ou syntaxique qui le compose et le décompose” [“What counts here is not the lexical richness, the semantic infiniteness of a word or a concept, its depth or breadth, the sedimentation that has produced inside it two contradictory layers of signification … What counts here is the formal or syntactical praxis that composes and decomposes it”] (1972, 220). One may remark here that one of the particular effects in Lolita comes from the two contradictory

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assertions about the book, i.e. in the foreword and the postscript, that is the beginning and the end of the novel. To show, at this point, to what extent the concept is relevant to the interpretation of Lolita, I would like to first trace it back to notions or expressions used in the past by critics who generally mentioned the presence of oppositions in the novel, such as art and pornography, love and sex, morality and immorality, America and Europe, etc., but varied the way they defined or characterised the relationship that existed between the opposites. At the beginning, in the 1950s, they wondered whether the novel was moral or immoral, literature or pornography, sex or love, and finally aesthetic or ethical. Then, some considered that it was both moral and aesthetic. According to Clegg, Martin Green asserted that it was “both great art and a work of morality” (2000, 62). More recently, critics have insisted not so much on the reconciliation of contraries than on the unresolved tensions between moral outrage and aesthetic pleasure. Considering that the interpretation of Lolita is undecidable does not mean that one rejects the previous criticisms. The concept may, on the contrary, integrate and complicate them as it corresponds to what is “neither one nor the other, and both at the same time.” This was how Derrida defined a term which for him characterised Mallarmé’ s work – the fold. He wrote: “Le pli … n’étant ni l’un ni l’autre et les deux à la fois, indécidable …” [“ The fold … being neither one nor the other and both at once, undecidable”] (1972, 259). What comes closest to the notion of undecidability is, in Lolita, the reader’s experience of a double bind. The French Nabokovian critic Maurice Couturier resorted to this notion in a monograph on Lolita published in 1995: “Voilà bien la double contrainte à laquelle nous condamne ce merveilleux roman: haïr le pervers mais admirer le poète” [“Such is the double bind this marvellous novel condemns us to: hating the pervert but admiring the poet”] (1995, 13–14). As the experience of a double bind in the reader’s reaction concerns the impossible demand of two contradictory responses at the same time, it is in keeping with the undecidability which characterises the interpretation of the novel. One cannot indeed choose between the two contradictory meanings of the novel without reducing its strength.

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But this impossibility of choosing does not preclude real Choice and Decision. On the contrary, in Force de loi [Force of Law], Derrida explains how undecidability is the necessary ordeal which opens up the way to real choice and decision as it concerns justice and ethics. Distinguishing justice from the mere Law [“le Droit”], he considers that: Le droit n’est pas la justice. Le droit est l’élément du calcul, et il est juste qu’il y ait du droit, mais la justice est incalculable, elle exige qu’on calcule avec de l’incalculable; et les expériences aporétiques sont des expériences aussi improbables que nécessaires de la justice, c’est-à-dire de moments où la décision entre le juste et l’injuste n’est jamais assurée par une règle. Law is not justice. Law is the element of calculation, and it is just that there be law, but justice is incalculable, it demands that one calculate with the incalculable; and aporetic experiences are the experiences, as improbable as they are necessary, of justice, that is to say of moments in which the decision between just and unjust is never insured by a rule. (2002, 244)

Law is indeed necessary for Derrida but it may be deconstructed and can thereby change, progress, or be at the origin of a history of the law, although justice is undeconstructible. One must always tend towards justice. Undecidability is a necessary step for justice and it acts as a ghost in the decision-making. Derrida added: “Une décision qui ne ferait pas l’épreuve de l’indécidable ne serait pas une décision libre … Elle serait peut-être légale, elle ne serait pas juste” [“A decision that would not go through the test and ordeal of undecidability would not be a free decision … It might perhaps be legal; it would not be just”] (2002, 252). To be free, just, and responsible, a decision must previously and paradoxically go through undecidability. This is the reason why undecidability can apply to Lolita. The reader, the student, the critic must choose and take position without necessarily be considered as a puritan or a monstrous reader. He or she must go beyond this mere alternative and take into account both positions before choosing his or her own, and thereby endorse responsibility. Justice is not indeed a “question of attitude,” to use

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Humbert’s phrase (1991, 19), but a real value contrasting with Humbert’s ratiocination with the law. Humbert writes: Let me remind my reader that in England, with the passage of the Children and Young Persons Act in 1933, the term “girl-child” is defined as “a girl who is over eight but under fourteen years” (after that from fourteen to seventeen, the statutory definition is “young person”). In Massachusetts, US, on the other hand, a “wayward” child is, technically, one “between seven and seventeen years of age” (who, moreover, habitually associates with vicious or immoral persons). Hugh Broughton, a writer of controversy in the reign of James I, has proved that Rahab was a harlot at ten years of age. (1991, 19)

With this he tries to absolve himself from responsibility and relativize his fault by questioning the legal age of sexuality. He plays on the variability of the threshold between legal and illegal age. But, whereas the law may be relative and change, justice goes beyond legality because it concerns absolute evil. Nabokov choses to insist on Lolita’s fragility when, for example, she cries out to Humbert approaching her: “Pulease, leave me alone, will you … for Christ’s sake leave me alone” (1991, 192–3). Such is the way Nabokov indirectly pleads for man’s freedom, dignity, and rights. Undecidability also applies to the novel because Nabokov resorts to expressions or concepts which may be referred to as “undecidables.” The word “undecidable” can be either an adjective applying to a text or a noun. In that case, “undecidables” correspond to unsettled concepts which resist binary oppositions. For Derrida, a “hymen” is one of these as it unites (in marriage) and separates (as a membrane) at the same time; Plato’s “pharmakon” is another example since it is both a poison and a remedy. Such destabilising concepts create differences within a text. In Lolita, one of them may be the fork. As Humbert writes: When I try to analyse my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. (1991, 13)

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Thus, the endless forking of Humbert’s life symbolises the reader’s inexhaustible quest for meaning and justice. Another undecidable which Derrida pointed out in his analysis of Mallarmé’s work is the word “entre” [“between”], which also appears in Lolita at a judicious place when Humbert says: Every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty – between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock. (1991, 59, my emphasis)

The word expresses Humbert’s uneasiness in front of his crime as the “between” problematises the opposition between Beauty and the Beast, joy and horror, bliss and abjection. Another and final undecidable appears when Lolita eventually gives away the name of the man she ran away with. Humbert cries out: “Waterproof … I, too, had known it without knowing it, all along” (1991, 272). By saying so, he affirms that he knew (had guessed) the name and did not know (realise) it at the same time. This may of course mean that he unconsciously knew the name or that he refused to admit the truth, but in any case he links the two occurrences of the verb “to know” as if they were two contradictory opposites within it, thereby creating differences within the concept. This implies that the meaning of words – here, knowledge – is not only not unique but mainly questionable. One may therefore transpose the expression and wonder if the reader, for example, does not identify with the narrator without identifying with him, if the novel is ethical without being ethical. Nabokov has succeeded in denouncing incest and paedophilia without being merely didactic or moralising, without simply asserting the doxa, because he has managed, by deconstructing concepts such as ethics or aesthetics, to write a literary text which endlessly plays “a double scene” to use Derrida’s phrase (1972, 221), i.e. a text which admits contradiction and undecidability. According to Derrida, there exist literary texts which are characterised by their inexhaustible power to generate meaning. This is the reason why Lolita is and will continue to be a novel that will resist all arrested, fixed, and final interpretations.

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Works Cited Clegg, Christine (ed.). Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita. A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. Cambridge: Icon Books, 2000. Couturier, Maurice. Lolita. Paris: Didier-Erudition, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. London: The Athlone Press, 1981. Translation of La Dissémination. Paris: Seuil, 1972. —. Force of Law. Translated by Mary Quaintance. In Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar. New York: Routledge, 2002. [Translation of Force de loi. Paris: Galilée, 1994.] Godin, Christian. Dictionnaire de philosophie. Paris: Fayard/Editions du Temps, 2004. Nabokov, Vladimir, The Annotated Lolita. Edited by Alfred Appel, Jr. New York: Vintage International, 1991. Page, Norman (ed.). Nabokov: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. Ruelle, David. Hasard et chaos. Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1991. Stegner, Page. Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Dial Press, 1966. Wood, Michael. The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994.

CHAPTER FOUR LOLITA’S SUBJECTIVITY

Since the beginning of this century, a question has haunted certain literary circles, namely the future of theory in literary criticism. Thus in 2003 the Whither Theory? symposium was organised at Nanterre, France, with some of its contributions being published in 2004 in issue twelve of Tropismes. Since then, it has been agreed that theory will be necessary but unpredictable. That issue of Tropismes was a counterpart of another published in 2003 by The Oxford Literary Review titled “Angles on Derrida. Jacques Derrida and Anglophone Literature,” which raised the question of the history and future of Derridean deconstruction in literature. Now that is exactly that point I would like to look into, from recent texts by Anglo-Saxon literary critics, such as Travelling Concepts in the Humanities by Mieke Bal (2002), The Singularity of Literature by Derek Attridge (2004), and The Literary in Theory by Jonathan Culler (2007). It appears that, in these three authors, the same concern arises: the problematics of performance and agency. The importance assumed by performance in the language has been well known since Austin and his book How to Do Things with Words. The concept of agency is more recent and Mieke Bal explains it as follows: “From an originating, founding act performed by a willing, intentional subject, performativity becomes the instance of an endless process of repetition; a repetition involving similarity and differences, and therefore relativizing and enabling social change and subjects’ interventions, in other words, agency” (2002, 179). No wonder that Attridge, who in 1992 edited the interview with Derrida titled “This Strange Institution Called Literature” in Acts of Literature, devotes a whole chapter in The Singularity of Literature to what he calls “performance,” where he maintains: “The literary work exists only in performance” (2004, 95). Jonathan Culler for his part states: “the fundamental problem of what today we call

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‘agency’ in English: how far and under what conditions can I be a responsible subject who chooses my acts?” (2007, 161). So Bal and Culler notice the fact that whatever the importance granted to the act, to action, to performance, there is necessarily the presence of a subject, and this remark echoes the question asked in 1989 by JeanLuc Nancy to contemporary philosophers: “after the subject, who comes next?” The answers – from such philosophers as Alain Badiou, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Henry – were published in Confrontation no. 20. I will, from that rich abundance of reflections, keep in mind the question asked by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen: “Car à y bien réfléchir, comment interpréter ce resurgissement inattendu du sujet au beau milieu d’un discours pourtant voué à la critique de l’autorité de la conscience et des illusions du moi?” [“For if we consider things seriously, how should we interpret that unexpected reappearance of the subject in the very middle of a discourse yet devoted to the criticism of the authority of consciousness and the illusions of the ego?”] (1989, 56). Although it alludes to the discourse of psychoanalysis, it is possible to extend the interrogation to other fields and then wonder with Derrida what is behind the notion of the subject. In “Il faut bien manger ou le calcul du sujet” [“We can't do without eating or the subject's calculation”] (1989, 91–114), Derrida considers the subject as pure invention. Therefore, from the very start, Derrida is critical as regards the illusion of subjectivity. However, he was to devote several works to that issue. He published in 1993 three short essays on the proper name, “Sauf le nom,” “Passion,” and “Khora,” after having dealt in 1975 with the problem of signature in “Signéponge.” So Derrida invites us to consider the question of the subject from two key concepts: the name, and the signature to which the concept of the voice must be added. How, in fact, should we consider the subject after the time of postcolonial studies and gender studies which all emphasized the issue of identity. How can the redefinition of the subject contribute to the re-evaluation of the status of literary categories such as the author, the narrator, the reader, and mainly the character. I wish in fact to put forward the hypothesis of a resurgence of the interest focused on the character and the question of who? Who is Lolita, for

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instance? How does the character become what he or she is? To what extent do action and repetition play a part? I will try to answer these questions by studying how Lolita, in the eponymous novel by Nabokov, is revealed not only by her name, her words, and acts, but also by her writings, in which I will analyse the importance of not only the signature and style but also of the voice, which is almost inaudible but always unpredictable. So who is Lolita? That question could be asked about many characters to be found in literary history, such as Hamlet, Antigone, Emma Bovary, and Alice. First, Lolita is a name, the term by which a person is designated. Moreover, Lolita, being the first and last word of the novel, highlights the problematics of identity. Even the fictitious foreword, signed by John Ray, begins with the title given by the narrator Humbert Humbert to his manuscript, namely “Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed male.” But the name in Nabokov’s novel acquires a particular value. Thus, the very famous incipit of Humbert’s narrative not only insists on the obsessive power of the pronunciation of the first name but also presents the very varied list of the first names attributed to Lolita: “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita” (1970, 9). So Lolita is designated differently according to the relationship she keeps up with the other characters. She is Lo at home (her mother calls her Lo); she is Lola in the family; she is Dolly with her schoolmates; she is Dolores for the registry office. Humbert reserves the name of Lolita, or more precisely “my Lolita,” when she appears in his fantasies or memories. He calls her “Lolita” aloud only three times. Lolita is also called Carmen by Humbert, as well as “the child,” “the brat,” and even “die Kleine.” Lolita’s identity arises from this summary of interpersonal relations, of social parts working in a network. Nabokov, through his narrator Humbert, amuses himself by playing with the signifier of the first names when he shifts from “Charlotte” – Lolita's mother whom he marries to get nearer to her daughter – to Lolita along the following chain: Charlotte, Lotte, Lottelita, Lolitchen, Lolita (1970, 76). But what Humbert is most interested in is the substitutive shift from the women who have preceded the nymphet to Lolita. Thus, his

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first experiences with Monique the prostitute, his wife Valeria, and mainly his first youthful love Annabel make Lolita appear as the one who comes to oust, supplant, make up for these prototypes. Humbert exclaims when he sees Lolita for the first time: “I find it most difficult to express with adequate force that flash, that shiver, that impact of passionate recognition” (1970, 39). The character of Lolita takes Annabel’s place who, Humbert says, is incarnating in another (“I broke her >Annabel’s@ spell by incarnating her in another”) (1970, 15). Lolita appears only progressively and indirectly. She is dissimulated in the foreword, behind her married name Mrs Richard F. Schiller. We do not know at that stage of the reading that Lolita is her name. In the same manner, when Humbert hears Charlotte Haze pronounce the name of Lo, Humbert thinks she is referring to the maid (“Lo being presumably the maid” [1970, 38]). Lolita is just a remembrance throughout the first nine chapters of the novel, and she appears in her full physical splendour in chapter ten. She shifts from a single idea to an incarnated image. The evolution is still more striking when Humbert calls her by a new hybrid name with a surprising juxtaposition, namely “Dolly Schiller.” There is thus in the act of naming the fact of giving and receiving, the fact of making someone come into existence. Now, this evolution is also visible in the style of the person or the character, in his or her words and acts. That’s what Jonathan Culler suggests when he writes: “Characters, we say, discover who they are, not by learning something about their past but by acting in such a way that they become what then turns out, in some sense, to have been their ‘nature’” (2007, 34). I would like now to start the analysis of the verbal and behavioural style of the character of Lolita, showing how it reveals to what extent Lolita is, first of all, essentially a teenager who, through her desire of emancipation, is a constantly evolving subject. Thus the first words she pronounces are found in chapter eleven of the first part: “The McCoo girl? Ginny McCoo? Oh, she is a fright and mean. And lame. Nearly died of polio” (1970, 41). The sentences are short, the vocabulary is comparatively limited, and the tone is informal. She frequently uses slang to express herself. So, “you dope,” “super,” “goon,” and “drip” spangle her conversations, showing thereby she is really a teenager. But her acts even further

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reveal she belongs to her age bracket - which, by the way, corresponds to one of the criteria of the nymphet for Humbert Humbert. Thus Lolita mainly shouts, moves, laughs, and reads magazines in the first part of the novel. In the second part, after Lolita and Humbert have become lovers, Lolita shows a desire to free herself from Humbert’s power. The novel then offers a set of oppositions between Humbert’s manipulation when attached to Lolita as prey and Lolita’s emancipation, between the strength of action in Humbert the predator and the suffering of subjection in Lolita. Humbert’s hold shows itself in priority in the perversity of his gaze. As early as the foreword, John Ray refers to Humbert’s name as a mask “through which two hypnotic eyes seem to glow” (1970, 3). When, in the fifth chapter, Humbert gives a definition of a nymphet, the look of the nympholept on her is the main criterion. The nymphet does not realise her power, and a unilateral relation is firmly established between the nympholept and the nymphet, the latter becoming an object in the hands of the pervert. Besides, Humbert specifies: “It is a question of focal adjustment, of a certain distance that the inner eye thrills to surmount and a certain contrast that the mind perceives with a gasp of perverse delight” (1970, 17). The look shapes, fashions, and captures the character. Again, Humbert’s look on Lolita's body will enable the narrator to describe Lolita who becomes a moving body. Indeed, when Lolita appears to Humbert for the first time, he describes her skin, her hair, her ankle, the down on her forearm, her eyes. A little later, he wonders: “why does the way she walks … excite me so abominably?” (1970, 41). Even the way Humbert takes over Lolita’s name, adding a simplistic determination such as “the Eternal Lolita,” “that Lolita,” and “my Lolita,” shows to what extent Humbert’s ascendancy is powerful. Lolita is doubly reified. She is turned into Humbert’s fantasy who exclaims after the masturbation scene on the sofa: “What I have madly possessed was 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” (1970, 62). Deprived of any will, not conscious of herself, Lolita no longer exists to Humbert’s eyes. She does not act, she is subjected. Besides, Humbert uses the passive voice when he considers that “Lolita had been safely solipsized”

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(1970, 60). How can one exist when one is torn, like Lolita, between a pervert and an all-but affectionate mother who considers her “aggressive, boisterous, critical, distrustful, impatient, irritable, inquisitive, listless, negativistic and obstinate” (1970, 81). How can one find a certain amount of liberty? Lolita says, at one moment, without realising how ironical the situation is: “This is a free country” (1970, 46). Just before they became lovers, Lolita made a move to free herself symbolically from Humbert’s hold, who recounts what followed: “For a second, I held her. She freed herself from the shadow of my embrace.” But Lolita is soon subjected to cuddles and promises, but also threats. She shows resistance by her bad mood, squabbles, and even insults. So Humbert describes what he calls her “wild words,” namely “stinker … you can’t boss me … I despise you …” (1970, 171). Insult is, with Lolita, a way of distancing herself, a burst of revolt facing bondage, a desire of freedom. The very moment she frees herself – although only to some extent, as she leaves with another paedophile, Quilty – is the moment when she runs away. She is not subjected any more, she acts. Besides, she becomes conscious of herself and her power when, for instance, during the tennis match, she feels herself watched by Quilty. Humbert describes that exchange of looks: “and I also knew that the child, my child, knew he was looking, enjoyed the lechery of his look and was putting on a show of gambol and glee” (1970, 237). Unlike the hold of Humbert’s look, Lolita here reacts to Quilty’s. She then plays a part as she learned to do when she practised putting on an act in a literal as well as figurative meaning. Humbert then exclaims: “I seemed to myself as implausible a father as she seemed to be a daughter. Was, perhaps, guilty locomotion instrumental in vitiating our powers of impersonation?” (1970, 174). Lolita then becomes what she is, as Culler expresses, referring to Judith Butler: “You become a man or woman by playing a role” (2007, 157); or, “A man is not what one is but something one does, a condition one enacts. Identity is an effect” (2007, 157). Thus Lolita establishes her identity through her acts, and one of the ways she has her voice heard is to write letters. She writes two in the novel. The first is the one she sends to her mother when she is at the holiday camp. It consists of only four lines and is addressed to her mother and Humbert. The play on words she makes by calling them “Dear Mummy and Hummy”

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shows she is perfectly conscious of the part of father that Humbert intends to play. The tone is conventional: “Hope you are fine. Thank you very much for the candy.” The ending (“Love”) becomes ironical. But what prevails is her signature. Lolita signs “Dolly,” referring to herself as neither her mother’s daughter, who calls her “Lo,” nor as the object of Humbert’s desire, who calls her “Lolita,” but as a teenager who goes to school or stays at a holiday camp. She also signs her second letter, sent to Humbert after three years’ separation, “Dolly.” But she also adds her marital name in parentheses (“Mrs Richard F. Schiller”), thus revealing the enigma of her name mentioned in the foreword and disclosing the change of her civil status. The head word (“Dear Dad”) and the letter ending (“Yours expecting”) are evidence of the ironical charge of her letter. But in each of the two letters, it seems difficult for Lolita to be a subject – to express herself. Indeed in the second letter she writes: “This is a hard letter to write” (1970, 266). She announces she is married and pregnant, and so asks urgently for money. In the first letter she writes the following sentence: “I >crossed out and rewritten again@ lost my new sweater” (1970, 81). The “I” sign of her subjectivity is crossed out as if Lolita has stepped back, destroying before reconstructing herself, parting with herself before regaining her self-control. Maurice Blanchot describes this double move: “Dans l’espace neutre du récit, les porteurs de paroles, les sujets d’action – ceux qui tenaient lieu de personages – tombent dans un rapport de non-identification avec eux-mêmes: quelque chose leur arrive qu’ils ne peuvent ressaisir qu’en se dessaisissant de leur pouvoir de dire ‘je’” [“In the narrative neutral space, the mouth pieces of messages, the acting subjects – those who took the place of characters – fall in relation of non-identification with themselves: something occurs to them they can only catch up again by giving up then power to say ‘I’”] (1969, 564). One could also say, referring to Derrida, that Lolita is in a relation of ex-appropriation with herself for, deprived of herself, she catches up to her subjectivity in a double gesture of appropriation and expropriation, of mastery without mastery. That is perhaps the reason why Humbert can at last hear Lolita’s little voice when he receives the second letter: “The other

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letter began talking to me in a small matter-of-fact-voice” (1970, 266). It is indeed a voice Humbert could not hear. Blinded and deaf, he did not listen to the suffering sustained by Lolita. However, before they became lovers, Lolita’s voice was characterised by its shrillness. So the adjectives which describe it are either “harsh” (1970, 41), “high” (41), “sharp” (50), or “strident” (65, 154, 166). It is a cry or a moan. Lolita is aching; she weeps. “Her sobs in the night – every night, every night – the moment I feigned sleep,” Humbert says (1970, 176). Lolita implores at one moment to let her talk to the McCrystal family she catches sight of in one of their peregrinations. Humbert writes that she says, “in a hot, happy, wild, intense, hopeful, hopeless whisper – ‘Look, the McCrystals, please, let’s talk to them, please … please, I'll do anything you want, oh please’” (157). Lolita entreats him to leave her alone: “Oh, no, not again. Please, leave me alone, will you” (192). But, very often, her voice is censored, smothered by Humbert's. Thus when he finds her again at last and she tells him about her life spent with Quilty, Humbert reports her own words: “‘Oh, I – really I’ – she uttered the ‘I’ as a subdued cry …” (276). It is not accidental that Nabokov stops twice – the first corresponding to the mention of the “I” crossed out in the letter sent by Lolita to her mother – on the way Lolita says or writes “I,” for we are in fact in the core of the symbolism of her subjectivity. Who is Lolita, behind this “I” either crossed out or smothered so much as she learns to lie to free herself from her predator's yoke? She lies for instance about the identity of the author of the theatre play in which she takes part when Humbert asks her who wrote the play: “some old woman, Clare something, I guess,” she replies (209), whereas the author is actually Clare Quilty, the stage director with whom she is going to run away. Faced with Humbert’s cruelty and jealousy, Lolita’s dissimulation appears as a survival strategy. However, beyond the lie, the unpredictable truth arises when Lolita surprises Humbert and the reader with her very clear-mindedness. Thus while Humbert admires his nymphet riding a bicycle, Lolita cries out: “Can you remember … What was the name of that hotel … the hotel where you raped me?” (202) A short time before the night when they had their first sexual intercourse, Lolita had told him: “you revolting creature. I was

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a daisy-fresh girl, and look what you have done to me. I ought to call the police and tell them you raped me. Oh you dirty, dirty old man” (141). Lolita’s actual unpredictability makes Humbert realise he is confronted with a subject who escapes his hold. Thus when Charlotte Haze dies and Humbert decides to collect Lolita at her holiday camp, he is suspicious, he says, of the nymphet’s reaction and therefore calls her “unpredictable” (101). Lolita’s personality arises through the strangeness and otherness of her voice. Humbert reports thus the way Lolita introduces him to her husband: “Dick, this is Dad, cried Dolly in a resounding violent voice that struck me as totally strange, and new, and cheerful and old, and sad” (273). Likewise, Humbert manages to imagine Lolita’s real and secret personality only after losing her. It seems then he opens to her only at that moment: “It struck me … that I simply didn’t know a thing about my darling’s mind and, that, quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, a palace gate – dim and adorable visions” (284). The subject, Jean-Luc Nancy says, is what is coming, it is always to come. It is therefore not only what is said or what is done but what happens in its unpredictability and unexpectedness. That’s what Derrida calls “the event”: “La force de l’événement est toujours plus forte que la force d’un performatif. Devant ce qui m’arrive et même dans ce que je décide (cela [devant] comporter une certaine passivité, ma décision étant toujours décision de l’autre) devant l’autre qui arrive et m’arrive, toute force performative est débordée, excédée, exposée” [“The strength of an event is always greater than the strength of a performative scheme. Confronted with what happens to me and ever in the decision I take (that including a certain passivity, my decision always being the decision of the other) before the other who is coming and is coming to me, any performative force is overflown, exceeded, exposed”] (2001, 75–6). Besides, Derrida specifies: “L’autre appelle à venir et cela n’arrive qu’à plusieurs voix” [“The other invites to come and it needs several voices”] (1987, 61). Humbert does realise this at the end of the novel when, after killing Quilty, he remembers how, one day, he had found himself on the brink of a mountain precipice and heard a harmony of sounds coming up from the town in the Valley. He explains it was the melody made by children playing and then comes a revelation: “I stood listening to that musical vibration from

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my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord” (1970, 308). Because he can’t hear Lolita’s voice among those of the other children, he realises his cruelty. Lolita’s voice can be heard only in relation to others as the otherness can only arise in the multiplicity of voices. Humbert has not been able, has not wanted to hear Lolita’s voice, that is what she was trying to express of herself. Likewise, the reader subjected to the manipulation of a not very reliable narrator must want to endeavour to hear her voice, often made inaudible by the censorship of the perverse narrator. To study Lolita’s character, one has to go beyond the text surface which basically deals with Humbert’s fantasies; to slide between the rifts of that same text. One must not hear Lolita but listen to her. It is then almost a militant commitment requiring an attentive receptivity. We can thus conclude our study with a compendium of what characters represent in a novel. First, a character is a proper noun, a name given by the author and received by what is in expectation in the making up of the character, what is in expectation of the story. The name content, its signified, fills out along the narrative and it seems then that the character gives something back to the writer and the reader. The author plays a part in the construction of the character, as the latter is equally a fictional creation, an invention of this same author. The character is shaped indirectly and almost subliminally – by the environment, the clues – thanks to a sort of undertext which accounts for their past, their motives, their projects, the consequences of their acts – yet what identifies the character, according to Nabokov, is their stability, just as for a real person. So, Nabokov writes through his narrator for Humbert: “I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind” (1970, 265) There would therefore exist permanent features in the character’s identity, due to the repetition of their acts in accordance with our expectations. This would correspond to the idem-identity of a subject for Paul Ricoeur, and an evolution due to

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the repeated differences of these same actions comparatively to these norms, that would be Ricoeur’s ipse-identity. In both cases, a character’s identity is apprehended by the reader’s receptivity. That is the reason why the character is therefore, in the third place, a mental representation. Contrary to a theatre character who onstage has an actual body and actual voice, it is a fictional being and as such is almost disembodied: a ghost. So, Maurice Blanchot asserts: “La voix narrative … ne peut s’incarner: elle peut emprunter la voix d’un personnage … Appelons-là (par fantaisie) spectrale, fantomatique” [“The narrative voice … cannot be embodied: it can borrow a character’s voice … let’s call it (in a fanciful way) spectral, ghostly”] (1969, 565). Likewise, J. Hillis Miller writes: “we as readers invoke, convoke, call up, conjure, the ghosts of all characters when we pick up the novel and read. Reading a novel is like the conjuring of ghosts” (2003, 132). The character becomes the reader’s imaginary construction. Besides, Humbert writes: “Please reader … Imagine me, I shall not exist if you do not imagine me” (1970, 129). This remark is all the more ironical as Humbert’s character is not difficult to imagine since the narrator enforces his vision of things, whereas Lolita is concealed behind that biased vision and must be the object of a voluntary act of the reader to exist. Finally, the character is a face, in the sense meant by Levinas; that is, the encounter with alterity. In fact, when Humbert endeavours to remember Annabel and Lolita he sees their faces again. He explains: “I remember … >Annabel’s@ features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skilfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with eyes open (and then I see Annabel); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes … the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita)” (1970, 11). So, the two faces are superimposed upon each other. One, Annabel’s, withdraws, fades away, and Lolita appears. Of course, it is only a remembrance, an image with that part of deception and delusion it can include. Lolita’s face suddenly appears essentially at the end of the novel, when the reader is authorised to imagine her look and

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moreover her smile. So Humbert admits at the end of his manuscript: “Now, I do not remember if I have mentioned that Lolita had an absolutely enchanting smile for strangers, a tender furry slitting of the eyes, a dreamy sweet radiance of all her features …” (285). There exists in Lolita an opening up towards others, a capacity for welcoming people. Lolita’s smile is in accordance with the ethical dimension of the novel. Derrida considers that, for Levinas, the face “marque la limite de tout pouvoir, de toute violence, et l’origine de l’éthique” [“marks the limit of any power, of any violence and the origin of ethics”] (1967, 154). That is the very place where Humbert has failed. As a subject responsible for his acts, he has chosen to refuse any face to face with Lolita; he has not recognised her look, her speech, her voice, her smile she reserved only for strangers, according to his own words. Thus he has known no gift, either given or received.

Bibliography Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge, 2004. Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Blanchot, Maurice. L’Entretien Infini. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. Borch-Jakobsen, Mikkel. “Le sujet freudien, du politique à l’éthique.” Cahiers Confrontations 20 (Hiver, 1989). Culler, Jonathan. The Literary in Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Derrida, Jacques. “Il faut bien manger ou le calcul du sujet.” Cahiers Confrontations 20 (Hiver, 1989). —. L’Ecriture et la Différence. Paris: Seuil, 1967. —. Psyché. Inventions de l’autre. Paris: Galilée, 1987. —. L’Université sans Condition. Paris: Galilée, 2001. Miller, J. Hillis. “The ‘Quasi-Turn-of-Screw Effect’: How to Raise a Ghost with Words.” The Oxford Literary Review 25 (2003). Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita, edited by Alfred Appel, Jr. New York: Vintage Books, 1970. Ricoeur, Paul. Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Seuil, 1990.

CHAPTER FIVE TRAUMA AND FREE WILL IN LOLITA

In this paper I would like to consider the eventual role of trauma in Humbert’s sexual deviation, i.e. paedophilia. I will therefore first analyse the Freudian theory of traumatism, as expressed in Emma’s case and that of the Wolfman, where Freud advances that traumatism supposes the existence of two events as it is the memory of the first scene which produces the deferred traumatism. I then wish to test this theory on Humbert’s narrative where we are also confronted with two scenes we shall expand on. Yet, as we know that Humbert mainly tries to justify his criminal deeds and thereby vindicate himself, I will finally wonder to what extent Humbert may be held responsible for his acts. Was he eventually free of his choices and decisions? I will finally conclude by asking whether one can free oneself from the deterministic forces of trauma. Before turning to Freud’s theory on traumatism, I intend to first sketch the different defining characteristics of trauma. Trauma is first a wound whether it be physical or not. From a psychic perspective, it is an unexpected shock of great intensity which entails fright and suffering and which reappears in the subject’s mind in repetitive nightmares and uncontrollable re-enactments. For the Hungarian psychoanalyst of the early twentieth century Sandor Ferenczi, a subject faced with a traumatic event is first submerged by fright, anguish, and suffering. They are then cleft between a part of themselves that feels displeasure but does not understand it and a part which understands but feels almost nothing. They are then forced to re-enact the event and, for Ferenczi, this repetition of the event is necessary and even useful as it helps to transform the trauma from a passive, unresolved experience to an active, mastered one, and this is

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done through abreaction.1 Cathy Caruth, in her book devoted to trauma, published in 1996, explains how trauma is an event experienced too soon and too unexpectedly to be fully understood.2 It is therefore a missed experience – Lacan talked of a “missed encounter”3 – which entails a belated understanding. It is precisely this notion of belatedness or, to use the Freudian concept, Nachträglichkeit that is at the core of traumatism for Freud, who, to explain his theory, resorted to two case studies: Emma and the 1

Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, in the French original version of Vocabulary of Psychoanalysis [Vocabulaire de la Psychanalyse], define the word as follows: “décharge émotionnelle par laquelle un sujet se libère de l’affect attaché au souvenir d’un événement traumatique, lui permettant ainsi de ne pas devenir ou rester pathogène. L’abréaction, qui peut être provoquée au cours de la psychothérapie, notamment sous hypnose, et produire un effet de catharsis, peut aussi survenir de manière spontanée, séparée du traumatisme initial par un intervalle plus ou moins long [“an emotional discharge through which a subject frees him/herself from the affect related to the memory of a traumatic event, enabling it thereby to not become or remain pathogenic. Abreaction, which may be provoked during psychotherapy, notably under hypnosis, and then produce an effect of catharsis, can also occur in a spontaneous way and be separated from the initial traumatism by a more or less long interval”] (2006, 1; my translation). 2 She writes: “The breach in the mind – the conscious awareness of the threat to life – is not caused by a pure quantity of stimulus, Freud suggests, but by ‘fright,’ the lack of preparedness to take in a stimulus that comes too quickly. It is not simply, that is, the literal threatening of bodily life, but the fact that the threat is recognized as such by the mind one moment too late. The shock of the mind’s relation to the threat of death is thus not the direct experience of the threat, but precisely the missing of this experience, the fact that, not being experienced in time, it has not yet been fully known” (1996, 62). 3 He writes: “La fonction de la tuché, du réel comme rencontre – la rencontre en tant qu’elle peut être manquée, qu’essentiellement elle est la rencontre manquée – s’est d’abord présentée dans l’histoire de la psychanalyse sous une forme qui, à elle seule, suffit déjà à éveiller notre attention – celle du traumatisme” [“the function of tuché, of the real as an encounter – the encounter as it can be missed, as it is essentially the missed encounter – was first presented in the history of psychoanalysis under a form which is by itself sufficient to arouse our attention – that of traumatism”] (1973, 54; my translation).

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Wolfman. In the Project for a Scientific Psychology, published in 1895, Freud relates the case of Emma: Emma is subject at the present time to a compulsion of not being able to go to shops alone. As a reason for this, [she produced] a memory from the time when she was twelve years old (shortly after puberty). She went into a shop to buy something, saw the two shop-assistants (one of whom she can remember) laughing together, and ran away in some kind of affect of fright … Further investigation now revealed a second memory … On two occasions when she was a child of eight she had gone into a small shop to buy some sweets, and the shopkeeper had grabbed her at her genitals through her clothes.4

Freud sums up the situation, saying there are indeed two scenes, Scene 1 being the one with the shop assistant, Scene 2 the one with the shopkeeper, a connecting link between the two scenes being laughter. The other common point is that the girl was alone. Freud continues: Together with the shopkeeper she remembered his grabbing through her clothes; but since then she had reached puberty. The memory aroused what it was certainly not able to be at the time, a sexual release, which was transformed into anxiety. With this anxiety, she was afraid that the shop-assistants might repeat the assault, and she ran away … Now this is typical of repression in hysteria. We invariably find that a memory is repressed which has only become a trauma by deferred action. The cause of this state of things is the retardation of puberty as compared with the rest of the individual’s development. (1966, 356)

Thus, it is the memory which turns into traumatism as it arouses an affect which had not been prompted by the incident. Moreover, puberty makes possible a new understanding of the recollected facts.

4

Sigmund Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology I (1895), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 1 (1886–1899) (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966), 353–4.

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The author of the Vocabulary of Psychoanalysis Jean Laplanche comments on this in a volume published in 2006 and dedicated to the notion of Nachträglichkeit, translated into French by Lacan as L’après-coup. He points out the presence of what he calls “une théorie du trauma en deux temps”5 [“a theory of trauma in two stages”]. He also underlines the fact that, when Freud says the memory becomes a trauma by deferred action, it is the only passage of the text where the word nachträglich is used. For something to happen by a deferred action, a connection between the two scenes is necessary. Scene 2, when Emma is eight, is premature: the child is not mature enough to experience sexual excitation. Scene 1, when she is thirteen, awakens the remembrance of Scene 2 which is reactivated. The biological maturation gives the child the ability to understand what has happened. We also notice that Freud numbers the scenes in reverse chronological order as his temporal landmark is that of the treatment. When the term of nachträglich reappears in the Wolfman,6 it is also associated to the notion of traumatism and the presence of two or even three scenes. First, there is the primitive scene (when he is oneand-a-half years old), then the dream (on Christmas Eve when he is four) and the time of therapy. The first “deferred action” (he is four) corresponds to the understanding and elaboration of the primitive scene. The second “deferred action” (when he is twenty-four) occurs 5

Jean Laplanche, Problématiques VI; L’Après-coup (Paris: PUF, 2006), 49. When we talk of the Wolfman we refer to the account made by Freud of the analysis of one of his patients – a Russian man named Serguei PatrovPankieff, born in 1887. During his therapy, the patient talked about a famous dream which was to reappear many times. Indeed, when he was four, he had dreamt that six or seven white wolves with fox-like tails and ears pricked like those of dogs sat motionless on the branches of a walnut tree in front of the window. The wolves were staring at him. The child had then woken up in a state of great fright. According to Freud, the dream was linked to a previous scene which Serguei understood only at the age of four. The child must have experienced, at the age of one and a half, a terrifying scene as he was sleeping in his parents’ bedroom – namely “the primitive scene” of his parents making love in a particular way, i.e. having vaginal intercourse from the rear. The wolves in the dream therefore represented his parents.

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when he puts his experience into words. When one and a half, the child received an impression to which he could not react sufficiently. When four he lived the scene again, and when twenty-four became conscious. For Freud, trauma requires two periods to exist and is inseparable from the notion of “deferred action.” What comes afterwards gives meaning to what happened beforehand. Now, what about trauma in Nabokov’s novel Lolita, which stages the story of a middle-aged man Humbert Humbert who falls in love with a young preadolescent American girl, aged twelve, Dolores Haze, nicknamed Lolita? The narrative is definitely one of a sexual deviation and is made up of the written confession of the protagonist Humbert when he is in prison and expecting his trial. He tells us the story of his life and his passion for Lolita, and his text appears as an attempt to justify his criminal deeds. One of the reasons he puts forward to explain his attraction for very young girls is the relationship he had with his first love, Annabel, when he was thirteen and Annabel about the same. Would there have been a trauma? That is what Humbert seems to imply: I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity?7

Now, in Lolita, we are confronted with two scenes. The first corresponds to the interrupted first sexual experience of Humbert, who relates it as follows: I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling [Annabel] when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu. (1970, 13)

7

Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 13.

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The second episode is still more striking as it stages Lolita’s first appearance. Whereas Humbert has just looked over Charlotte Haze’s room to rent, he follows his landlady to the garden where Lolita is: I was still walking behind Mrs Haze through the dining room when, beyond it, there came a sudden burst of greenery … and then, without the least warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses. It was the same child – the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair … The twenty-five years I had lived since then, tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished … Everything between the two events was but a series of gropings and blunders, and false rudiments of joy. Everything they shared made one of them. (1970, 39–40; my emphasis)

We find here two scenes: a memory, and a connecting link between the two visions. The portrait of Lolita shows that Humbert’s eyes see beyond what he can see, in a time of recognition. Humbert remembers his childhood love, Annabel, and his vision is divided, split between past and present, superimposing in a repeated time the images of the present nymphet and those of the teenager of his past. We have already mentioned how, for Ferenczi, repetition is useful for resolution of the traumatism. For Freud, it may even be a source of pleasure (we indeed bear in mind the Fort/Da game of the child). But, for Derrida, repetition creates something new as the “iter” in “iterability,” a concept he prefers to “repetition,” meaning “other.” What about Humbert? For him, Lolita’s apparition is a sudden, unexpected experience which reminds him of Annabel (“his Riviera love”) but, instead of re-enacting a past event, of elaborating and making his past sexual drive into a new mature desire, he remains fixed to the stage of his memory and Lolita’s body is used as the reincarnation of a child he had known. Whereas, for Derrida, repetition allows a mental elaboration of an event, Humbert fails to relive it and renounce the object of his past desire. Deaf and blind to his traumatic event, he does not reach knowledge and consciousness, as he does not integrate or work through it. Lacan’s concept of

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“forclusion”8 [“foreclosure”] may help to characterise Humbert’s reaction as he refuses to speak about the traumatic event, denying it, refraining from suffering and thereby transforming his trauma into perversion. The question which arises now is: to what extent may Humbert be held responsible for his acts, as a legal entity or as a subject? Humbert has indeed transgressed the law: he has sexually abused an underage girl and has moreover not refrained from using psychological violence and menace. One must bear in mind that a paedophile who acts through seduction – as Humbert did – and even with the consent of the child is not exonerated from his acts. Humbert is therefore a genuine pervert, and he has the personality of a pervert: he ratiocinates, he manipulates, he conceals, he acts out, he considers that his jouissance is beyond the normal one, which is in fact deceptive as his jouissance is very poor. Besides, by preferring to make Lolita suffer instead of suffering himself, he has chosen evil. From a legal point of view, a criminal is held as not responsible if their judgement was compromised at the time of the crime, but punishable if their judgement was only altered. Humbert wavers in his discourse as to his responsibility. Sometimes he recognises his crime, but he also tries to vindicate himself in different ways. Firstly, he enumerates the laws concerning the age when a girl becomes a woman, questioning therefore the validity of the law. For him, his crime becomes relative, since he writes: “It was all a question of attitude.” Secondly, since a criminal might see his crime attenuated thanks to mitigating circumstances, Humbert tries to seek an alibi by 8

The French philosopher Christian Godin defines the Lacanian use of “forclusion” as follows: “Terme utilisé par J. Lacan (1901–1981) pour traduire le mot allemand Verwerfung (“rejet”) employé par Freud (1856– 1939) pour désigner l’expulsion d’un signifiant fondamental hors du champ symbolique du sujet. Distinct du déni propre au refoulement (générateur de névrose), ce mécanisme signale la psychose” [“a term used by J. Lacan (1901–1981) to translate the German word Verwerfung (“repudiation”) used by Freud (1856–1939) to refer to the throwing of a fundamental signifier out of the symbolic area of the subject. Distinct from mere denial specific to repression (at the origin of neurosis), this mechanism signals psychosis”] (Godin 2004, 515; my translation).

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presenting his attraction to young girls as the effect of an attachment to his first love, pretending thereby that his deviancy has been determined by the traumatic event of his youth. So, the question now is: was Humbert free of his choices and decisions? Could he have freed himself from the uncontrollable forces of his trauma or was he doomed to replicate the previous scene at the French Riviera, i.e. making love with a young teenager?9 The concept of freedom seems therefore to be at the core of the problematic. Derrida has often talked about his difficulty with using the word because he does not believe in the existence of “a free and responsible person,” a voluntary, intentional, conscious, and mainly autonomous subject who may say, “I do what I want to do, I decide, I choose, I am sovereign.” For him, as for Levinas, responsibility precedes freedom. I am responsible for the other and it is because I am responsible that I am free. Freedom is therefore without any limit or measure. It is a pre-subjective force which exists before mere subjectivity. This is the reason why Humbert cannot be exempted from his responsibility towards the Other that Lolita embodies. Lolita is in fact the victim: she has gone through a traumatic event and exemplifies what, in psychological terms, we call “resilience,” which is the behavioural aspect of the psychoanalytical term “sublimation.” Resilience is characterised by the fact that the subject not only copes with the unfavourable circumstances he/she meets but that he/she also knows how to benefit from them. It is therefore mostly a capacity and a process, a way to resist and react to a psychic traumatism. Although Lolita first lapses into the replication of her previous experience with Humbert by fleeing with another paedophile, Clare Quilty, she finally manages to evolve and free herself from the deterministic forces of trauma and its pessimistic, negative, destructive automatism of repetition by transforming her suffering and becoming the agent of her own identity as she gets married and 9

Fiction here is related to real life in that, sometimes, paedophiles were themselves abused when children. Separating clearly between explaining, understanding the crime, and exonerating it allows the criminal to be at the same time the object of empathy and yet be held responsible. This is indeed the only way to reach atonement and obtain curing.

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is pregnant, ready to give life. Yet, the novel refrains from a mere humanistic over excessive poetic justice. It remains indecisive and indeterminate as Lolita dies in giving birth to a stillborn girl. Even survivors die because of suffering.

Works Cited Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume 1 (1886–1899). London: The Hogarth Press, 1966. Godin, Christian. Dictionnaire de Philosophie. Paris: Fayard/Editions du Temps, 2004. Lacan, Jacques. “Tuché et automaton.” Le Séminaire Livre XI. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. Paris: Seuil, 1973. Laplanche, Jean. Problématiques VI: L’Après-coup. Paris: PUF, 2006. Laplanche, Jean, and J. B. Pontalis. Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, edited by Daniel Lagache. Paris: PUF, 1967. Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita, edited by Alfred Appel, Jr. New York: Vintage Books, 1970.

CHAPTER SIX GENERIC GLIDINGS AND ENDLESS WRITING FROM THE ENCHANTER TO LOLITA THROUGH LOLITA: A SCREENPLAY

In 1966, in the preface to his autobiography Speak, Memory, Nabokov made his own commentary on the process of revising in the following terms: “This re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place, proved to be a diabolical task” (1969, 10). The prefix “re” – which, for Webster, means “again,” “anew” as in “redo,” “retell,” or “back,” “backward” as in “recall” – is related, according to Jacques Derrida, to what has come back, of what is coming back in general, of “repetition” (1980, 339).1 Repetition and its deformations is indeed one of the issues raised by the process of revising, and it is a notion which has been studied at length by the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, along with Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida from France. In Repetition, Kierkegaard develops the idea of the Danish word Gjentagelse, whose etymology presents a double meaning with “gjen,” which means “again,” and “tagen,” which means “take.” So, although the word has been translated as “repetition” in English, the most adequate translation would have been “taking up again” which in fact has been chosen in the French translation which proposed the term “La reprise.” If we look at the French/English dictionary we find that “reprise” may be translated as “resumption,” “renewal,” “return,” “revival,” and “repeat.” In his text, Kierkegaard opposes Gjentagelse to the Hegelian concept of Aufhebung and describes it as a movement, a passage, a step, even a leap, which unites what has been – the past – and what is new, that is what is directed towards the 1

Derrida writes: “Il s’agit du re- en général, du revenu et du revenant, du revenir en général. Il s’agit de la répétition d’un couple disparition/réapparition.”

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future and therefore freedom. As for Deleuze, he subscribes to this notion of repetition as it counteracts the merely abstract and logical Hegelian dialectics. Repetition, for him, is a movement, rather than a mere repetition of the same; an act rather than a constraint, as in Freud; a leap, as for Kierkegaard, towards freedom and the future. There are, according to him, two types of repetition: one which is static, negative, ordinary, the repetition of the same, and one which is positive, dynamic, and singular, the one creating something new and being potential difference. For him, the power of repetition is difference. For Derrida, too, difference is lodged at the core of repetition. To take account of the insistence of difference in repetition he coined the word iterability, which is made up of the word “iter” from the Sanskrit “itera,” which means “other,” iterability being the characteristic of a written text which must be readable in the absence of the addressee or the addresser. Revising therefore necessitates repetition but also entails transformation, with its suppressions (i.e. destructions), additions (i.e. supplements), and renewals. Revising is the issue I wish to problematise by studying a corpus made of Lolita, with its original text The Enchanter – which Nabokov called his pre-Lolita novella – and its sequel Lolita: A Screenplay. Nabokov himself was conscious of the necessity of creating something new out of something already existing, of the oscillation between the same and the other in revising as he explained, for example, how he transformed the novella into a novel by, at the same time, keeping things while modifying others. He wrote, in the afterword he appended to Lolita: “The nymphet, with now a dash of Irish blood, was really much the same lass, and the basic marrying-her – mother idea also subsisted; but otherwise the thing was new and had grown in secret the claws and wings of a novel” (1991, 312; my emphasis). Likewise, in the Foreword to Lolita: A Screenplay, he shows how he knows how to decompose the process of revising when he recalls Kubrick’s request to prune the

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much too long screenplay he had first proposed2: “He [Kubrick] wanted several deletions and other changes, and some of these I did make, besides devising new sequences and situations, when preparing a shorter script which he got in September and said was fine” (1974, xi; my emphasis). Having by now summed up the theoretical stakes of the process of revising, I would like to show how Nabokov’s cross-generic writing – from the novella to the novel to the screenplay – allows an analysis of not only the functions and performances of literary devices, such as narrative and image-making, and the passage from telling (as in narrative) to showing (as in the cinema), but also the specificities of the three literary genres that the corpus gives examples of. I intend to conclude by wondering how the process of revising not only highlights the problematic of a hierarchical judgement on each performance, through the degree of quality, success, or failure of each, but also gives evidence of the process of writing showing how it is an endless one. When an author writes a novella, a novel, or a screenplay, he or she tells a story, and to do so generally has to create characters and their traits, and choose a plot and a way to narrate it. In the three elements of our corpus, Nabokov stages a couple, a nymphet and a nympholept, but their presentations radically differ. In the novella, for example, the protagonist Arthur, a jeweller aged forty, declares his attraction to very young girls immediately, in the very beginning, and at once raises the problematic by wondering if it is a sickness or a criminality, while this issue appears to be treated in a subterranean and indirect though continuous way in the novel, notably through the theme of trauma. But what is mainly significant in the passage from the novella to the novel to the screenplay as regards characterisation is the evolution in the way the reader feels towards the protagonists. Whereas the reader experiences empathy towards Humbert in the novel, thanks to the resort to the first-person narrative, the subtlety 2 There exist two versions of the screenplay. The first one, which Nabokov wrote from March to July 1960, of four hundred pages, is unpublished. The shortened version which Nabokov proposed to Kubrick in September was published only in 1974 by McGraw-Hill International.

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of the description of his desire, and the universality of one’s love life, in the novella or the screenplay it is impossible to identify with the nympholept, whose mediocre yet monstrous banality appears all the more repellent as the author knows how to play on the clichés of paedophilia with the allusion to the nympholept’s roaming near public parks, schools, or bus stops, preferring thereby to endow the novella and the screenplay with an ironic distance while rendering the novel more complex by multiplying details instead of condensing themes with clichés. But the main evolution concerns the nymphet. From an anonymous young girl of twelve, both innocent and naïve, the nymphet gains more and more life and richness in the novel, and even more in the screenplay. Even though one might say that Lolita gradually liberates herself from the ascendancy of Humbert over her in the novel, she is even more autonomous and emancipated in the screenplay, indeed giving evidence of her awareness of her power when she, for example, addresses Humbert as such: “Delirious? Dolly-mad?” (1974, 52). Moreover, Lolita appears in the very beginning of the screenplay and is the first to be heard, being thereby rehabilitated by the author who no longer merely describes her through the filter of the nympholept’s eyes but clarifies the reader’s perception of her by granting her qualities such as intelligence and affection (notably towards animals), even though she definitely remains a typical teenager. From the novel to the screenplay, the priority shifts from Humbert, who becomes a mere character in the screenplay and no longer has the importance of character-narrator as in the novel, to Lolita, who amplifies her stature and becomes a fullyfledged subject. Sue Lyon, in Kubrick’s film, perfectly incarnates this sensuous, attractive, and smart new Lolita. As for the editor of Humbert’s manuscript, John Ray, he does not appear in the novella but gains importance in the screenplay as he frames the narrative by his interventions and indirectly plays the role of a narrator: he tells the story of Humbert’s case while facing the camera, explains the presence of the manuscript, recalls the murder which caused the imprisonment, but mainly makes note of Humbert’s sexual deviation. Even the camera itself is used in the screenplay as a pseudo-narrator as it is anthropomorphised, being said to glide and dip, to withdraw with a shudder, to ironically examine the crannies of a room. The voyeuristic role of the camera helps to narrate the story. Signs, such

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as the presence of the dog barking at cars and foreshadowing Charlotte Haze’s accident and death, are also integrated in the continuous narrative thread and the telling device. Yet, if we turn now to the narrative technique proper, the main modification appears in the choice of the person of narration which passes from the thirdperson narrator in the novella to the first-person of the novel. It has been frequently said that this shift was at the origin of the success of the novel as opposed to the relative failure of the novella, as the reader is more implied when the narration is in the first person. Yet, this should be qualified and I agree with Gennady Barabtarlo who considers that, “The Enchanter begins and ends in a direct firstperson mode, but the story unfolds in an oblique subjective narrative mode, i.e. one that, under the protective guise of third-person objectivity, tends to impose upon the reader a view as strongly biased as any intrinsic, first-person narration” (1991, 96). It is, according to him, an oblique, veiled, disguised first-person narration. And, indeed, the story begins with the description of the protagonist’s thoughts in a sort of introspective interior monologue, foreshadowing, as in a first draft, the technique Nabokov was to master in the novel. As for the screenplay, narration is performed through the dialogues and the staging directions. And it is indeed the same story, the same plot, whose permanence and familiarity produce assurance and pleasure, and whose differences may surprise but also give delight. The main difference concerns the ends of the stories. In the novella, there is no sexual consummation because of the nymphet’s terror, and the story ends with the nympholept’s accident after the night at the hotel. This episode – the night at the hotel – corresponds to the end of the first part of the novel, which is therefore developed and amplified. As for the screenplay, it seems the main modification lies in the passage from the mere technique of telling to that of showing which is at the core of cinema, or, in other words, the passage from textual narration to the process of image-making. I shall limit myself to two examples to illustrate this technique. The first appears in the beginning of the screenplay when Nabokov transforms a mere parenthesis of the novel, that is “(picnic, lightning)” (1974, 10) which, in the novel, corresponds to the explanation of Humbert’s mother’s death, into the description of an image which is

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developed in depth. Thus, we can read, after the sentence “she was killed by a bolt of lightning during a picnic” (1974, 4) the following description: A Mountain Meadow – A thunderhead advancing above sharp cliffs. Several people scramble for shelter, and the first big drops of rain strike the zinc of a lunchbox. As the poor lady in white runs toward the pavilion of a lookout, a blast of livid light fells her. Her graceful spectre floats up above the black cliffs holding a parasol and blowing kisses to her husband and child who stand below, looking up, hand in hand. (1974, 4)

The brevity of the parenthesis and its efficacy is transposed into a textual amplification which helps to specify a visual image. The information – the mother’s death – is rendered in two radical different ways, highlighting the role and the importance of imagemaking in the screenplay. The other example is given shortly after this passage, when Humbert recalls his relationship with Annabel. Nabokov resorts to a close up, showing the two young hands of Humbert and Annabel. Here is what we read: Two Young Hands – right boy’s, left girl’s – both slender, longfingered, tanned, hers with the modest star of a topaz ring, his with fine glistening hair on the back of the wrist, and a wrist watch (11:55), creeping toward each other … and now they meet like two wary sensitive insects – and suddenly separate, a pretty scene for the subtle camera as the shore-fortress gun booms noon. (1974, 5–6)

This is a new sequence in the screenplay as the image did not appear in the novel, but it is highly efficient as it corresponds to the characteristics of the medium of the cinema whose addressee is not a reader but a spectator, one who is confronted with visual images to be seen and staged. One can also realise that Nabokov not only transposed mental images into images reserved to the cinema but created new images which may correspond more adequately to the specific medium. It would therefore seem that the technique of telling applies more to prose, as in the novella or the novel, and that the process of imagemaking corresponds to the cinema and therefore the preceding text –

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the screenplay. Yet, if one compares the descriptions of the first apparitions of the nymphet, one notices the importance and effect of images in the three versions, this proving how the techniques of showing and telling exist at the same time in the different genres. Just as there exists a story in drama and the cinema, there are powerful images in the novella and the novel which play an important role. Thus, when the nymphet appears for the first time in the novella, her description is a scene (as it is preceded by the sentence, “And at this point the curtain rises” [1986, 26]) but also a sort of painting with the insistence of the description of the not-yet completely formed body (Nabokov notes indeed “the indistinct tenderness of her still narrow but already not quite flat chest” [1986, 27]). But she is then described moving, prefiguring the sequence of Lolita playing tennis in the novel or the movement of the images of the cinema: “she was clattering across the asphalt amid the others, leaning well forward and rhythmically swinging her relaxed arms, hurtling past with confident speed” (1986, 31). Nabokov keeps on describing the kinds of cinematographic images by mentioning “the compactness and perfection of her every movement (particularly when, having barely frozen motionless, she dashed off again, pumping swiftly with her prominent knees)” (1986, 31). Image-making is unsurprisingly successful for Nabokov, who once declared: “I think in images” (1990, 14). The reader is indeed confronted with a constant superposition of images. Just as the description of Lolita’s first appearance in the novel is made up of the superimposition of the memory-image of Annabel and the perception-image of Lolita, giving the impression that the second merely repeated the first, Nabokov quotes the passage from the novel when he treats Lolita’s first appearance to Humbert in the screenplay, replicating the memory-image of the novel. Through this superimposition of images – memory-images of the character, mental images and textual images of the novel, images of the nymphet in the novella, and even the image of the first apparition of Sue Lyon in Kubrick’s film – Nabokov manages to reproduce the process of thinking and the reader experiences the gliding movement of the repetition of images which proceed as in various leaps as Kierkegaard suggested, repetition inventing new representations but mainly creating a continuous link of the three performances of the same idea/plot.

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I wish to turn now to the next part of my study and see how the process of revising helps to reveal the similarities, differences, and specificities of the three literary genres the corpus gives examples of. We have already seen how the three genres all narrated a story, notably through the creation of images. But sometimes the same image reoccurs, leaving a trace in the reader’s unconscious and imagination, as if it was an obsessive, rhythmical, haunting melody. There also exist some recurrent themes or motifs, such as the journey, the car, the hotel, and the mirror in the hotel room, which produce an intertextual permanence working on the reader’s memory. Yet, sometimes, the repetition of a motif highlights, on the contrary, the differences of the performances. Thus, in the screenplay, Lolita says to Humbert: “I have nowhere to go” (1974, 120). This sentence is uttered in the novel by Humbert, who declares at the very end of the first part: “You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go” (1991, 142). Humbert’s cynicism is thereby replaced by Lolita’s distress, the contextual change giving way to a shift in meaning. The three literary genres do reveal clear differences in terms of language, destination, and representation, though, as we shall see, they sometimes contaminate each other. One of the most significant plays on the different modes of language occurs in the shift from novel to screenplay. From the poetical one of the novel characterised by its polysemic and elaborate density, we pass to a simplified, mainly communicational one, unsurprisingly used in the everyday dialogue of the interlocutors and the didascalies where Nabokov knows how to express himself in direct, unambiguous directions when, for example, he specifies the characters’ entrances or departures, explaining things instead of suggesting them, making things explicit. Yet sometimes in the screenplay Nabokov repeats exact extracts of the novel, and those quoted passages emphasize the contrast with the mere communicational language. In fact, they reveal the differences in the type of representation and destination. Those quotations, by suggesting instead of explaining, tend to reproduce an atmosphere where sense and senses intermingle. They appear mainly when the nymphet is mentioned, as if neither action nor mere images could restore the full experience of the imagined nymphet’s presence. It is as if Nabokov wished to create a shadow of a text that the film director had to reproduce. Nabokov is not the only one to resort to

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this technique. The playwright Tennessee Williams did not hesitate to write his didascalies in a poetic way which resulted in magical realism. Those quotations also show that there exist various addressees in the screenplay as it is a text to be read, to be played, and to be shot. It is therefore directed towards the reader who may find pleasure in the poetical didascalies, the spectator facing the screen, the actor and the director who must create framed images. This variety in destination is in keeping with generic contamination as dramatisation and image-making in prose – here, the novella and the novel-narration and poetic prose in the screenplay, for example, give evidence of the participation of different genres within a genre whose frontiers are consequently blurred, creating a trouble. Yet, beyond the similarities or differences, the comparison of the three literary genres allows for the detection of their mutual specificities. Thus, it becomes obvious that, whereas both novella and novel narrate a story in prose, what characterises The Enchanter is its brevity, its scarcity of characters and subplots, but mainly its lack of density, whereas density typifies the novel, whose ambiguity and undecidability between ethics and aesthetics create a polyphonic richness which entails endless commentaries and disseminating questions. As for the screenplay, it shows, while narrating a story, how it is meant to be filmed and is therefore an activity which combines technique and literature. It is indeed a type of writing composed of dialogues and didascalies which are meant to make people not only see but also hear, and Nabokov gave evidence of his awareness of the importance of the camera, which he anthropomorphised, and also the soundtrack, which he played with by resorting to a voiceover. As the screenplay is meant to be filmed, it is strongly linked to the prerogatives of the cinema, and in Lolita: A Screenplay, Nabokov proves he is conscious of them. He resorts, for example, to various types of shots: the close up (with an image of two hands), high-angle and low-angle shots (when Charlotte goes down the stairs or when Lolita rushes up to the first floor), the fade in and fade out, the still picture (when Humbert surveys the scene after Charlotte’s death), and even a still image coming to life (just after this episode). He moreover stresses the fact that the screen is essentially a frame by multiplying framed productions such as postcards, photos that

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Humbert shows at the beginning of the screenplay when he recalls his past, paintings such as the reproduction of René Prinet’s Kreutzer Sonata, and even “a painted screen of the folding type” (1974, 38) with a nymphet pictured on it. Moreover, by asking that Annabel and Lolita be incarnated in the film by the same actress, he underlines the importance of the actor/actress, his or her body, as well as his or her interpretation. But what is new in the screenplay and is particularly relevant as far as, according to Derrida, the specificity of the cinema is concerned is the permanence of and insistence on the issue of ghosts. In the novel, Clare Quilty is presented as a spectral character and, although he is given more life in the screenplay, and definitely in Kubrick’s film, phantoms are constantly referred to in the screenplay. Thus, in what Lolita calls “her song” – which is found in the screenplay, in accordance with the oral familiarity of a film – the word “ghost” is mentioned. Likewise, when Quilty introduces Vivian Darkbloom, he says: “My collaborator, my evening shadow. Her name looks like an anagram. But she’s a real woman – or anyway a real person” (1974, 146). But what is even more significant is the following conversation between Humbert and Quilty, where Quilty says, talking of recollections and premonitions: “This is a philosophic question, my dear, way above your pretty head. Ghouls of the past or phantoms of the future – which do we choose?” (146), to which Humbert replies: “Some of my best friends are phantoms” (147). Now, in the essay “Spectographies” in the book on technology and the television Echographies de la television, Bernard Stiegler asks Derrida to explain and develop his declarations about the cinema he uttered in the film in which he played himself, that is Ghostdance by Ken McMullen, filmed in 1982. In the film he utters sentences such as: “The cinema is an art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms, the art of allowing ghosts to come back,” “I believe that ghosts are part of the future,” and, “The modern technology of images like cinematography and telecommunication enhances the power of ghosts and their ability to haunt us.” It is true that, in 1981, American critic William Woodin Rowe published a book titled Nabokov’s Spectral Dimension, but I do not think he sufficiently underlines Nabokov’s intuition as regards the art of ghosts in the cinema, which proves how Nabokov was indeed aware of the specificities of the different genres

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and media he was using, and how the issue of the hierarchy of the various performances is a problematic one. Indeed, it is usually considered that both The Enchanter and Lolita: A Screenplay are relative failures in comparison to the novel. I agree that the novel is a masterpiece, but both the novella and the screenplay have their own intrinsic qualities, notably their self-reflexive, metatextual perspectives. Concerning the novella, Gennady Barabtarlo considers that it is a success, thereby following Nabokov’s own judgement on it as he considered it, “a beautiful piece of Russian prose, precise and lucid” (1986, 15), and although it does not have the density, ambiguity, and richness of the novel – qualities which, by the way, are not specific to the genre of the novella – it is indeed a beautifully written piece with the highly original theme of the novel but mainly a pervading sense of light, contrasting with the subterranean presence of darkness. Nabokov aptly qualified it as “lucid.” As for the screenplay, Julian W. Connolly thinks that it is “a fascinating work” but “no substitute for his original novel” (2009, 162). Even Nabokov admits in the screenplay’s foreword that he was by nature no dramatist, not even a “hack scenarist” (1974, ix), but it is obvious that the writing of the screenplay did bring him aesthetic pleasure, as when, for example, he intervenes in the text in the dialogue between a character named Vladimir Nabokov and Humbert, playing with the matalepsis he is producing (128). I agree that the screenplay is a “fascinating” work as it allows us scholars to make comparative theoretical studies on the process of revising, anticipating thereby the reflection on the process of creation and writing that The Original of Laura necessarily generates. The Original of Laura ends with the following list of words: “efface, expunge, erase, delete, rub out, wipe out, obliterate” (2009, 275), developing therefore the process of revising that Nabokov had already expressed in the screenplay’s foreword when he recalls how he would spend hours “using lined index cards and a Blackwing pencil, for copying and recopying, rubbing out and writing anew the scenes [he] had imagined in the morning” (1974, ix). Revising shows that writing is a rewriting activity as each text is pregnant with other possible texts which are phantoms that the author gives life too, and

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which therefore germinate among new contexts. Retelling a story is a way to make it survive, as it is a way to not only look backwards at what has been written but also forwards, to the future and what is to come, as new worlds are to emerge from the repetition and the gap inherent in language and writing. I wish now to conclude by summarizing how the activity of revising not only proves how it may be considered as the laboratory of creation, but also how it mainly gives evidence of the nature of writing, which is at the same time characterised by its fluidity and the infinity of its process. John Bryant declares in his book called The Fluid Text (2002) that, “Writing is a process and a literary work evolves through various stages of revision in the process from the earliest creative moments of mental transcription … to moments of publication and on to moments of adaptation to other media” (3). Any literary work may have more than one version, and the different versions flow into one another, making up what Bryant calls “the fluid text,” echoing the notion of flow (“flux” in French), as in the expression we find in Deleuze and Guattari’s The Anti-Oedipus: “Reality flows” [“le réel flue”]. That is the reason why we can say that Nabokov’s cross-generic writing – from the novella to the novel to the screenplay – reveals not merely a shift in the generic mode but a gliding movement as the new version keeps a vestige of the ancient one, which Derrida calls a trace. As for the infinity of the process of writing, Maurice Blanchot expressed this idea in the title of his book L’Entretien infini [The Endless Conversation]. Blanchot considers that writing literature is not meant to be useful or logical but is an experience characterised by its research, its movement, which requires a leap in repetition, a movement which endows language with a power to transform and create. In the essay “Whither Literature?” published in Le Livre à venir [The Book to Come], Blanchot writes: “We know that we write only when the leap is performed, but, to perform it, it is necessary first to write, endlessly write, write from the infinite” (1959, 283; my translation). Nabokov, indeed, by revising his story again and again, followed the endless thread of the infinite movement of writing.

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Bibliography Barabtarlo, Gennady. “Those Who Favor Fire. (On The Enchanter).” Russian Literature Triquarterly 24 (1991): 89–112. Blanchot, Maurice. L’Entretien infini. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. —. Le Livre à venir. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. Bryant, John. The Fluid Text; A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen. Ann Arbor: the University of Michigan Press, 2002. Connolly, Julian W. A Reader’s Guide to Nabokov’s Lolita. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2009. Deleuze, Gilles. Différence et répétition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968. Derrida, Jacques. La Carte postale. De Socrate à Freud et au-delà. Paris: Flammarion, 1980. —. Echographies de la télévision. Entretiens filmés. Paris: GaliléeINA, 1996. Kierkegaard, Soren. Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs. Translation by M. G. Piety. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita. Edited by Alfred Appel, Jr. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. —. The Enchanter. Translated by Dmitri Nabokov. London: Picador, 1986. —. The Original of Laura. London: Penguin classics, 2009. —. Lolita. A Screenplay. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974. —. Speak, Memory. An Autobiography Revisited. London: Penguin, 1969. —. Strong Opinions. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

CHAPTER SEVEN TEACHING LOLITA: SOME REMARKS

1. I had the opportunity to teach Lolita when it was on the syllabus of the Agrégation in France in 1995, as the course was proposed to me as I was working on a doctoral dissertation on Nabokov. 2. The Agrégation is the national French competitive examination to be taken after four years of studies – usually an MA – and which has a required annual program of literary and cultural works. A course in literature needs therefore to prepare students for two kinds of exercise: the French dissertation, a written essay presenting an argumentation around a topic related to the work, and an “explication de textes” or “commentaire de texte,” an essay commenting on a short extract of a work. Professors are therefore required to build up a course composed of expository lectures and close commentaries of the work. Courses for undergraduates – second and third years – follow the same method. 3. A course usually comprises about ten to fifteen sessions of about two hours per week. 4. I think the following works by Nabokov should be advised: The Enchanter, as the first version of Lolita; Lolita. A Screenplay, as an adaptation of Lolita; Speak, Memory for its brilliant exposition of the author’s life; and Strong Opinions, for Nabokov’s commentaries on art and literature.

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As for the works written by other authors, I think students would better understand Nabokov if they read Proust, Joyce, and, of course, Poe for Lolita. 5. I used both the Penguin edition and Appel’s Annotated Lolita. 6. I advised the following secondary works: Alexandrov’s Nabokov’s Otherworld Boyd’s The American Years Couturier’s Nabokov ou La Tyrannie de l’auteur Green’s Freud and Nabokov Lokrantz’s The Underside of the Weave: Some Stylistic Devices used by Vladimir Nabokov. Page’s The Critical Heritage Pifer’s Nabokov and the Novel Rampton’s Vladimir Nabokov (1993) Roth-Souton’s Vladimir Nabokov. L’Enchantement de l’exil. Tammi’s Problems of Nabokov’s Poetics Toker’s Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures Wood’s The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction On Lolita proper, I think the following works are extremely useful: Bloom’s Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita Clegg and Tredell’s Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita Couturier’s Lolita (Edition Didier-Erudition, 1995) Couturier (ed.), Lolita (Edition Autrement, 1998) Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran Pifer’s Lolita, A Casebook Proffer’s Keys to Lolita Raguet-Bouvard’s Lolita: Un Royaume au-delà des mers As for the periodicals, I advise: L’Arc 99 (1985) Cycnos 10.1 (1993) Cycnos 12.2 (1995)

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Delta 17 (1983) Europe 791 (1995) My theoretical references are: Aristotle, Bakhtine, Barthes, Blanchot, Compagnon, Couturier, Culler, De Man, Deleuze, Derrida, Eco, Freud, Genette, Greimas, Kristeva, Laplanche and Pontalis, Lodge, Plato, Quéré, Ricoeur, Schaeffer, and Starobinski. I usually resort to theoretical works to explain literary categories such as narration, enunciation, irony, parody, etc. 7. I would recommend Boyd’s biography, Appel’s Annotated Lolita, Proffer’s Keys to Lolita, Clegg’s Lolita, and Couturier’s Lolita. 8. I require French exercises, i.e. dissertations and explication de texte, in written and oral forms. I find the explication de texte extremely useful in the study of the materiality of the text proper. 9. My students found Kubrick’s film extremely interesting as well as Bernard Pivot’s interview of Nabokov, which was broadcast on French television on May 30, 1975, and then distributed by VisionSeuil. 10. Students found the textual aesthetics of Lolita extremely engaging. 11. They found the ethical dimension troublesome. 12. I would like students to understand the unresolved ambiguities of the text. 13. I think Derrida’s philosophy might help to better understand the ambiguities of the novel. 14. I would like to read a study of the place of Lolita in the history of literature and its relationship with other fictional works.

PART TWO

CHAPTER EIGHT “PLAY! INVENT THE WORLD! INVENT REALITY!”: NABOKOV/DERRIDA

How to read literature with Derrida? How to teach literature with Derrida? These questions raise the issue of the relationship both between literature and philosophy and between literary criticism and philosophy. If one considers that literature is a mere example or counterexample of philosophy, illustrating, confirming, or infirming, diverging from a philosophical theory, philosophy stands in a superior position and is, from that viewpoint, the “truth” of literature. On the contrary, one may claim that literature puts philosophy in crisis, being the question of philosophy, giving thereby evidence of its failure. In that case, literature stands in a superior position. It is, however, possible to refuse to choose between these two opposite positions and disrupt their implicit hierarchy, as Jonathan Culler advised in his 1982 essay On Deconstruction.1 According to him, distinctions between literature and philosophy are to be maintained so as to allow a communication of these two types of discourse. Such a claim works therefore for the legitimacy of the use of Derrida’s work on literature. Moreover, J. Hillis Miller in a more recent article2 insists on the fact that Derrida wrote not only on literature3 but also on particular literary works by authors such as Mallarmé, Shakespeare, 1

Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982). 2 J. Hillis Miller, “Derrida and Literature,” Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, ed. Tom Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 58–81. 3 His main texts are Passions (Paris: Galilée, 1993) and Donner la mort (Paris: Galilée, 1999).

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Poe, Melville, Joyce, Celan, Baudelaire, Ponge, Genet, Blanchot, Kafka, and Proust.4 He asserts that Derrida is one of the great literary critics of the twentieth century. Yet, the question remains: how to read literature with Derrida? Even Derrida warns that deconstruction offers no method.5 It is, however, possible, as Culler rightly suggests, to apply Derridean concepts to literary texts, or to analyse privileged themes such as writing, presence, and origin, or even deconstruct opposites such as truth and fiction, as Derrida himself did when he undermined the superiority of speech on writing. Yet, a literary critic remains, as J. Hillis Miller remarks, alone: “This is one reason why it is difficult, if not impossible, to learn from Derrida’s work how to do literary criticism, unless what you learn is that you are always alone before the work, on your own in reading it, forced to invent your own way to allow it to come through in your writing.”6 I suggest that it is possible to adopt a strategy that resorts to Derrida’s texts on literary categories such as structure, genre, and interpretation, problematising these categories in the light of a literary text, showing thereby how Derrida has renewed them. I intend therefore to draw upon Vladimir Nabokov’s works so as to show the relevancy of Derrida’s philosophy on the study of literature. What’s more, my reading of Nabokov has convinced me that Nabokov’s aesthetics is in accordance with an epistemological choice that echoes Derrida’s claim about meaning, writing, and literature and its relationship with reality. It was in 1967 that Derrida wrote two essays in L’Ecriture et la différence7 challenging structuralist literary criticism, the first being “Force et signification” [“Force and Signification”] and the second 4

Miller does not mention Artaud and the recent book on Hélène Cixous H. C. pour la vie, c’est à dire … (Paris: Galilée, 2002). 5 Michel Lisse, in an article titled “Déconstructions” (Etudes Françaises 38, no. 1–2), quotes Derrida who writes in La Dissémination: “Pas de méthode pour elle [la dissémination] … Point de méthode: cela n’exclut pas une certaine démarche à suivre” [“no method … a lack of method: this does not rule out a certain marching order”]. 6 Miller, “Derrida and Literature,” 74. 7 Jacques Derrida, L’Ecriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967).

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“La Structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours de sciences humaines” [“Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”]. His main point in “Force and Signification” is that structuralist criticism, even though it may be brilliant and fascinating, excludes the force of literature since the mere analysis of structure, based on the whole of relations and configurations, is exceeded by the living energy of meaning, the structure of the book becoming a skeleton, a town haunted by meaning which is characterised by reserve and excess. Derrida affirms: “Parler me fait peur parce que ne disant jamais assez, je dis toujours trop”8 [“Speaking frightens me because, by never saying enough, I also say too much”]. Likewise in “La Structure, le signe et le jeu …” he insists on excess in meaning as he asserts: “Il y a trop et plus qu’on ne peut dire”9 [“There is too much, more than one can say”]. In this essay, Derrida claims that the analysis of structure is based on the notion of a centre that is meant to organise the structure but mainly “de faire surtout que le principe d’organisation de la structure limite ce que nous pourrions appeler le jeu de la structure”10 [“to make sure that the organising principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure”] Decentring the structure may therefore help to make play work. In practise, how does a literary text give evidence of this play in structure? It seems that Nabokov was aware of the disorder working in order, of the erasure of a centre or an origin in the structure of his fictional works. In the introduction to his novel Bend Sinister (1963) he declares: The plot starts to breed in the bright broth of a rain puddle. The puddle is observed by Krug from a window of the hospital where his wife is dying. The oblong pool, shaped like a cell that is about to divide, reappears subthematically throughout the novel, as an ink blot in Chapter Four, an inkstain in Chapter Five, spilled milk in Chapter Eleven, the infusoria-like image of ciliated thought in Chapter Twelve, the footprint of a phosphorescent islander in

8

Ibid., 18. Ibid., 423. 10 Ibid., 409. 9

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Chapter Eighteen, the imprint a soul leaves in the intimate texture of space in the closing paragraph.11

And indeed the plot is not based mainly on a sequence of logical and causal actions, but on repetition. The image of the puddle appears and reappears through the recall of the word (puddle) or the evocation of a form (“an hourglass-shaped blot”12; “a kidney-shaped white puddle”13). This image cannot therefore be considered as a centre but mainly as an intertext which works on the reader’s mind and/or unconscious as an eclipse, producing the pleasure of a play in the structure based on cumulative occurrences infinitely varying the signified through the presence of a redundant signifier. Likewise, the composition of Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, is based on order and disorder. Formed by the juxtaposition of fifteen chapters written separately from 1936 to 1951, Speak, Memory is, according to Nabokov, “a systematically correlated assemblage of personal recollections.”14 Nabokov declares later in the introduction to his autobiography: “Although I had been composing these chapters in the erratic sequence reflected by the dates of first publication given above, they had been neatly filling numbered gaps in my mind which followed the present order of chapters.”15 Considering that there indeed exists a play in the structure of a book does not preclude the existence of an order and a structure. Yet, it is not based on the notion of a centre. Indeed, it is not easy to fix one origin or organising principle. Some Nabokovian critics consider it is the death of Nabokov’s father, others the birth of the narrator’s consciousness.16 As the autobiography of a writer, 11

Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 8. Ibid., 66. 13 Ibid., 128. 14 Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), 7. 15 Ibid., 8. 16 Nabokov writes in the first chapter: “the inner knowledge that I was I and that my parents were my parents seems to have been established only later, when it was directly associated with my discovering their age in relation to mine” (ibid., 18). Later on he says: “Indeed, from my present ridge of 12

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Speak, Memory could be the story of a vocation and thereby have its origin in the evocation of his first poem (chapter eleven). It seems, in fact, that the origin is constantly displaced, producing a limping in the structure. It is through cumulation that Nabokov proceeds, and not in linear sequence.17 He compares the composition of his novels to the fashioning of a puzzle or painting. He declares: “I don’t write consecutively from the beginning to the next chapter and so on to the end. I just fill in the gaps of the picture, of this jigsaw puzzle which is quite clear in my mind, picking out a piece here and a piece there …”18 He also says: There comes a moment when I am informed from within that the entire structure is finished. All I have to do now is to take it down in pencil or pen. Since this entire structure, dimly illumined in one’s mind, can be compared to a painting, and since you do not have to work gradually from left to right for its proper perception, I may direct my flashlight at any part or particle of the picture when setting it down in writing.19

Fragmented but ordered, the different chapters of the autobiography recede in a constant mise en abyme which excludes totalization. It seems therefore that both Nabokov and Derrida agree on the fact that there is a play in the structure due to the lack of a fixed centre. The multiplicity of the organising principles of Speak, Memory and Bend Sinister shows how the play allows a proliferation in meaning which is not fixed and permanent but renewed and constantly regenerated, through not only the mere polysemic accumulation of layers of meaning but the creation and production of dissemination, momentarily stopped thanks to a new organising order which is bound to entail a new meaning, another meaning, one more meaning. remote, isolated, almost uninhabited time, I see my diminutive self as celebrating, on that August day 1903, the birth of sentient life” (19). 17 Nabokov writes in his autobiography: “I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another” (109). 18 Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 16–17. 19 Ibid., 31–2.

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Genre is another literary category Derrida expatiates on in “La Loi du genre”20 [“The Law of Genre”]. Genre is, for Derrida, mainly characterised by its impurity because “la loi de la loi du genre … C’est précisément un principe de contamination, une loi d’impureté, une économie du parasite”21 [“the law of the law of genre … is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy”]. Genre is possible, even necessary  it is the law of genre  but it cannot be pure. As there is no text without one or even several genres, classification is possible but it is an endless task. One must go beyond the security of taxonomies, beyond the mere acknowledgement of the multiplicity of genres because, although a text participates in genre, it belongs to no genre, according to Derrida, who remarks that the mark of the genre is not part of the genre it designates. The feature or title or a work, autobiography for example, does not belong. A text therefore cannot be exhausted by a list of generic features; it closes badly and is left open to the discovery of a new genre, another genre, one more genre. The impurity of genre is given evidence in the already mentioned Bend Sinister. As a novel describing an imaginary world characterised by evil and absurdity, it is generally considered, and rightly so, as a dystopia. Nabokov himself admitted it was meant to be an indictment of Russian and German totalitarianism when, in 1944, even before the book was published, he wrote to Doubleday’s publisher, Donald B. Elder: I propose to portray in this book certain achievements of the mind in modern times against a dull-red background of nightmare oppression and persecution. The scholar, the poet, the scientist and the child  these are the victims and witnesses of a world that goes wrong in spite of its being graced with scholars, poets, scientists and children …22

20

Jacques Derrida, “La Loi du genre,” Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 249– 86. 21 Ibid., 256. 22 Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters 1940–77 (London: Vintage, 1991), 48.

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In another letter written in 1948 to Colonel Joseph I. Greene, he declared: One of the main subjects of Bend Sinister is a rather vehement incrimination of a dictatorship, and though the dictatorship actually represented in the book is imaginary, it deliberately displays features peculiar a) to nazism, b) to communism, c) to any dictatorial trends in an otherwise non-dictatorial order.23

No wonder his novel was compared to works by Orwell and Kafka. However, Nabokov refused such comparisons, declaring in the introduction to Bend Sinister: automatic comparisons between Bend Sinister and Kafka’s creations or Orwell’s clichés would go merely to prove that the automaton could not have read either the great German writer or the mediocre English one … The purpose of this foreword is not to show that Bend Sinister belongs or does not belong to “serious literature” (which is a euphemism for the hollow profundity and the ever-welcome commonplace). I have never been interested in what is called the literature of social comment (in journalistic and commercial parlance: “great books”). I am not “sincere,” I am not “provocative,” I am not “satirical.” I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer.25

Nabokov obviously refuses taxonomies and classifications. One may wonder if these are merely the expression of the author’s denial of a reading of his novels. They may also give evidence of an indictment of the notion of purity. The novel indeed stages the problematics of purity and impurity, as the distortion of languages in the world of Padukgrad corresponds to the monstrosity of a world which produces “a mongrel blend” of language. Far from recommending purity in language  just as Nazism pleaded for purity in race  Nabokov, through the hybridization of speech, advocates crossbreeding. In a lecture conceived in 1941 he pleaded for eccentricity and against purity when he declared: 23 25

Ibid., 80. Nabokov, Bend Sinister, 6.

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Stranger always rhymes with danger. The meek prophet, the enchanter in his cave, the indignant artist, the nonconforming little schoolboy, all share in the sacred danger. And this being so, let us bless them, let us bless the freak; for in the natural evolution of things, the ape would perhaps never have become man had not a freak appeared in the family.26

This is the reason why Bend Sinister is, notwithstanding its author’s denial, a political novel. Speak, Memory also stages impurity of genre as it problematises the genre of the autobiography. As the story of the author’s life, it is labelled, by the author himself in the subtitle, as an autobiography. Just like biography, autobiography is supposed to restore a certain “truth.” However, Nabokov was conscious of the aporia of truth, as he expressed in a letter to an editor of Doubleday in 1946: “I am writing you to explain a few things about my next book. This will be a new kind of autobiography, or rather a new hybrid between that and a novel.”27 In 1948, he wrote to the editor of Harper & Brothers: “It is a most difficult book to write, not only because it necessitates endless forays into the past, but also because [of] the blending of perfect personal truth with strict artistic selection …”28 Indeed, Nabokov has mingled “real” facts with fiction: he has invented the story of his self. He has superimposed imaginary, fictive scenes onto recollections, contaminating truth and fiction, memory and imagination. Thus, in the fifth chapter which corresponds to the revised version of the story he wrote in 1936, “Mademoiselle O,” he describes the arrival of his French governess in Russia in 1905 and explains how he used his imagination to restore verisimilitude: When she alighted at the little Siverski station, from which she still had to travel half-a-dozen miles by sleigh to Vyra, I was not there to

26

Vladimir Nabokov, “The Art of Literature and Commonsense,” Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace/Bruccoli Clark, 1980), 372. 27 Nabokov, Selected Letters, 69. 28 Ibid., 88.

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greet her; but I do so now as I try to imagine what she saw and felt at that last stage of her fabulous and ill-timed journey.29

What’s more, Nabokov has shown how the writing of an autobiography was an impossible task as it encounters the dilemma of the impossible accurate report of its beginning  the birth of the author  and of its end: their death. Although Nabokov intended to write a sequel to Speak, Memory which would have covered the period from 1940 to 1960 when he was in America, he never did it. He chose instead to write a novel, Look at the Harlequins!, which appeared in 1974, and which is a parodic autobiography. He therefore resorted to fiction to testify to the aporia of autobiography, playing on and deconstructing the autobiographical genre through self-parody. In the same way, Lolita can be regarded as the sequel to Bend Sinister as it better succeeds in rendering the extreme of a political monstrosity  nazism  through the oblique report of another extreme monstrosity  paedophilia. One can also resort to Derrida in the interpretation of a literary work. Thus, Lolita exemplifies Derrida’s key notion of undecidability, i.e. the impossibility of choosing between two opposite and even contradictory meanings. As the story of the sexual violence of an adult  Humbert Humbert  on a twelve-year-old girl  Lolita – it stages a pathological case of sexual perversion. It could therefore be considered as a moral novel since evil is punished as Humbert’s confession is only published after his death. This interpretation is that of the editor John Ray, the author of the fictional foreword, who asserts: As a work of art, it transcends its expiatory aspects; and still more important to us than scientific significance and literary worth, is the ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader; for in this poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson …30

By delineating the life of an immoral, perverse character, Nabokov condemns such an attitude by showing what should not be done. Yet, 29 30

Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 77. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 7.

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the issue is complicated as the story is told by a homodiegetic narrator who admits he is a murderer but plays on the reader’s empathy, who takes pleasure in the reading of the story and the beauty of its prose. “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” says Humbert.31 Even John Ray admits he has been seduced by the magic of the style: I have no intention to glorify “H. H.” No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhoring its author.32

The reader is therefore placed in the paradoxical situation of a double bind  condemning the perverse but sympathizing with the poetnarrator. This double bind is intensified by the author himself who, in the postscript written one year after the publication of Lolita in 1956, but since then always appended to the novel, declares: There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray’s assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow.33

Through this declaration, Nabokov objects to a moralising reading of Lolita, such as expressed by John Ray, though he does proclaim this reading in the foreword. Does it mean that Lolita should be read only for its artistic pleasure? Should aesthetics preclude ethics? Is Nabokov to be taken as a mere aesthete, advocating art for art’s sake? The situation is more complex with Nabokov, who, in an interview, declared: 31

Ibid., 9. Ibid., 7. 33 Ibid., 313. 32

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In fact, I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from being a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and the cruel  and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent and pride.34

Therefore, Lolita is neither purely moral nor purely aesthetic, yet moral and aesthetic at the same time. In Lolita, Nabokov condemns conformist and puritan ideologies but remains on the razor’s edge. It is through the juxtaposition of two contradictory assertions that Nabokov manages to get the reader to experience undecidability, i.e. the inability to choose one attitude only, as the author refuses to impose an interpretation. He thereby entails real responsibility and a feeling of freedom. “La littérature est libre”35 [“literature is free”], according to Derrida. Lolita best epitomizes this assertion, as the author has taken the right to write about an extreme ethical case, but also since the reader is left free, though disturbed, at the end of the novel. Reading Lolita is therefore a political gesture as it is a lesson of liberty. However, a faithful account of the reading of Nabokov’s texts cannot pass over the artistry of his style. Nabokov has indeed been considered a virtuoso stylist, and rightly so, when one remembers for example Lolita’s poem in prose which starts Humbert’s confession: LOLITA, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.36

34

Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 193. Jacques Derrida and Antoine Spire, Au-delà des apparences (Latresne: Le Bord de l’eau, 2002), 66. 36 Nabokov, Lolita, 9. 35

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The poetic prose which thus characterises Lolita’s incipit, with its repetitive alliterations and assonances, its oral and visual play on words, consonants and vowels, reveals Nabokov’s aesthetic attention to the materiality of language. Derrida is also a master in style, playing not only on the signifier of words but intermingling associations of signifiers and signifieds, such as in the following series: “hospes, hostis, hostage, host, guest, ghost, holy ghost et Geist.”37 One can therefore make a rapprochement between Nabokov’s aesthetics and Derrida’s in so far as both insist on the textuality of speech. Considering the text as “a web of signs” [“un tissu de signes”]38 corresponds to an epistemological choice from Derrida which finds echoes in Nabokov’s own epistemology. The eminent Nabokovian scholar Michael Wood even maintains that: “He [Nabokov] also anticipates and varies Derrida’s famous claim that there is nothing outside the text, il n’y a pas de hors-texte.”39 Epistemological affinities between Nabokov and Derrida can indeed be given evidence in the way they consider meaning, writing and literature. As far as meaning is concerned, it is a well-known fact that, for Derrida, there is no transcendental signified, that “an infinite signified” exceeds language. Derrida insisted on the fact that “there is too much and more than one can say”40 (my emphasis). It seems that Nabokov was aware of this excess in meaning as, when asked if he believed in God, he replied: “I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more”41 (my emphasis). Likewise, Derrida affirms: “le sens n’est ni avant ni après l’acte”42 [“Meaning is neither before nor after the act”]. Nabokov also objected to the presence of one meaning preceding or closing a text as, in Lolita’s postscript, he 37

Jacques Derrida, Apories (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 110. Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 26. 39 Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov & the Risks of Fiction (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), 106. 40 “Il y a trop et plus qu’on ne peut dire.” Derrida, L’Ecriture et la difference, 423. 41 Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 45. 42 Derrida, L’Ecriture et la difference, 22. 38

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criticised teachers of literature who try to find a message in literary texts, indirectly addressing them when he explained: Teachers of Literature are apt to think up such problems as “What is the author’s purpose?” or still worse “What is the guy trying to say?” Now, I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no other purpose than to get rid of that book …43

As for interpretation, Nabokov advocated elegance rather than truth, declaring: After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution “English language” for “romantic novel” would make this elegant formula more correct.44

In an interview, he said: “I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.”45 This plea for elegance (“elegant formula,” “elegant solution”) finds echoes in Derrida’s account of grace in literature. Derrida writes in Passions: “la littérature est seulement exemplaire … chaque fois qu’il y a de la trace (ou de la grâce …)”46 [“literature is only exemplary … whenever there is trace (or grace …)”]. One may find echoes in the way Nabokov and Derrida consider writing. Writing, for Derrida, does not supplant speech but exceeds and includes language. In “La fin du livre et le commencement de l’écriture”47 [“The end of the book and the beginning of writing”], Derrida explains how writing designates all the physical gestures of inscription. In the same way, Nabokov describes in “The Art of Literature and Commonsense” how he writes: “The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words all being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.”48 The act 43

Nabokov, Lolita, 309. Nabokov, Lolita, 315. 45 Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 16. 46 Jacques Derrida, Passions (Paris: Galilée, 1993), 90. 47 Jacques Derrida, “La fin du livre et le commencement de l’écriture,” De la Grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 15–41. 48 Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, 379. 44

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of writing corresponds to the apparition of words already inscribed, invisible, i.e. absent, but present as if they were only erased, thereby a trace the writer will render visible. Inscription in writing also seems to be present in Nabokov’s imagination, as he says in Lolita’s postscript how inspiration went through him when he read a newspaper articles: As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.49

As, up to now, nobody has found this newspaper article, it may be completely imaginary. Thus, Nabokov associates writing to the gesture of drawing or even to the beginning of drawing, as the sketch of the ape could here symbolise the human’s first drawings and desire of freedom. What’s more, representation  the bars of the cage  is a physical gesture. Both Derrida and Nabokov therefore view writing as a physical inscription. One may also find similarities between Derrida’s and Nabokov’s claims on literature. According to Derrida, literature not only provides pleasure but is attractive because it is the place of the secret. Derrida explains in Passions what he means by “the secret” in literature. For him, it is not merely what is unknown, hidden, dissimulated since it is what remains even when everything is said, known, explained, revealed. As the secret is beyond speech, knowledge, and meaning, it is at the origin of our desire and passion to discover. The secret is what makes us love literature. Nabokov also links literature with pleasure and secrecy. In a famous sentence situated in Lolita’s postscript, he defines literature as follows: “For me a work of fiction exists only in so far as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.”50 Nabokov employs the 49 50

Nabokov, Lolita, 309. Nabokov, Lolita, 313.

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word “bliss” to describe the reader’s experience of aesthetic emotion. This term has been translated in many various ways in French. Lolita’s first French translator, Eric Kahane, rendered it as “volupté”51 (sensual or voluptuous pleasure or delight), while French critic Danièle Roth-Souton talks of “félicité”52 (religious bliss), whereas Lolita’s second translator, the French Nabokovian scholar Maurice Couturier, used the term “jubilation”53 (exultation). It seems, in fact, that the word problematises and includes two opposite meanings at the same time, mingling the sensuous and the religious, the secular and the sacred. What’s more, when Nabokov tries to define this “bliss” he associates it with phrases such as “a sense of,” “somehow,” “somewhere.” The indeterminacy and irresolution of these phrases may designate the presence of some secret. Besides, when, in Lolita’s postscript, Nabokov recalls the key passages of his novel, he concludes the list by saying: “These are the secret points, the subliminal co-ordinate by means of which the book is plotted  although I realise very clearly that these and other scenes will be skimmed over or not noticed, or never even reached …”54 These “secret points” seem therefore to exist before signs and riddles can be deciphered by the reader. They correspond to the mute unsaid in language. Another example which may show Derrida’s and Nabokov’s congruence in terms of writing is their similar attention to detail. Quoting Derrida in his article “Derrida and Literature,” J. Hillis Miller comments on the subsequent sentence by Derrida by saying that, for him, “the little part is greater than the whole and contains it, circumscribes it.”55 Indeed, analysing Baudelaire’s short narrative “La fausse monnaie” in Donner le temps [Given Time], Derrida writes: “Encadré, enchâssé, bordé, debordé, le plus petit devient, 51

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, trans. Eric Kahane (Paris: Gallimard, “Folio,” 1981), 499. 52 Danièle Roth-Souton, Vladimir Nabokov. L’Enchantement de l’exil (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994), 144, 236. 53 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, trans. Maurice Couturier (Paris: Gallimard, “Folio,” 2001), 548. 54 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, 315. 55 Miller, “Derrida and Literature,” 77.

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métonymiquement, plus grand que le plus grand  qui le borde et le cadre.”56 Miller also reminds us that Derrida, in an unpublished seminar of December 7, 1994, said that Proust’s “récit de la mort de Bergotte” is an “art inouï de la composition en abyme, c’ est-à-dire de l’inscription dans la partie d’un tout plus petit que ses parties ou du détail plus grand que le tout …”57 [“an unheard of art of composition ‘en abyme,’ that is to say of the inscription in the part of a whole smaller than its parts or of a detail larger than the whole”].58 Derrida here problematises the issue of the relationship between the part and the whole, showing how a narrative within a narrative, through the mise en abyme composition, can include the whole narrative. Pretending that the whole is smaller than its parts can seem, at first sight, paradoxical and even a logical contradiction, but this remark allows a disruption of the hierarchy between the whole and the part. What is enclosed  the part  can therefore enclose  the whole.59 Derrida also insists on the importance of detail in reading and writing literature.60 Nabokov would not have refuted such an assertion as he declared in various interviews: “In high art and pure science detail is everything,”61 or, “In my academic days I endeavored to provide students of literature with exact information about details, about such combinations of details as yield the sensual spark without which a book is dead.”62 He had already expressed his aesthetic choice in the “Art of Literature and Commensense” by insisting on “the supremacy of the detail over the general, of the part that is more alive than the whole, of the little thing which man

56

Jacques Derrida, Donner le temps (Paris: Galilée, 1991), 123. Miller, “Derrida and Literature,” 77. 58 Miller’s translation in ibid. 59 Derrida often resorts to this paradoxical statement when he talks of the relationship between “l’englobé” [what is enclosed] and “l’englobant” [what encloses], which he juxtaposes in the expression “englobé/englobant.” 60 He has applied this method in numerous texts, building, for example, his commentary on Joyce’s texts on one word (“Yes”) or on Flaubert’s work on one letter. 61 Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 168. 62 Ibid., 156–7. 57

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observes and greets with a friendly nod of the spirit …”63Nabokov does not assert that the detail is larger than the whole, as Derrida did, but he gives priority to detail (“the supremacy of the detail”) and to the part (“that is more alive than the whole”). By doing so, he raises not only the issue of the universals dealt with by Plato and Aristotle64 but mainly the question of how the play in structure as a seemingly useless detail in a work of art  be it a painting or a novel  destabilises its composition. In Lolita’s postscript, Nabokov thus mentions a passage usually referred to as “The Kasbeam barber,” which he considers as one of the “nerves of the novel.”65 One may wonder why Nabokov declares that this episode is a key passage since it is brief  consisting of only ten lines  and appears as a mere diegetic detail, interrupting the narrative and offering no factual information about the story of the protagonist. Here is the paragraph: In Kasbeam a very old barber gave a very mediocre haircut: he babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, and, at every explodent, spat into my neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses on my sheet-wrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to produce faded newspaper clippings, and so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize as he pointed to an easelled photograph among the 63

Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, 373. In his article devoted to Aristotle in Le Dictionnaire des philosophes (Encyclopaedia Universalis, Albin Michel, 1998), Pierre Aubenque explains how, for Plato, there is a separation between the intelligible world  the world of stable immutable “Ideas”  and the sensible world made of changing realities, whereas Aristotle divides this world into two. For Aristotle, it is possible to reach knowledge thanks to the study of particulars which allow the intuition of universals. 65 He writes: “And when I thus think of Lolita, I seem always to pick out for special delectation such images as Mr Taxovitch, or that class list of Ramsdale School, or Charlotte saying “waterproof,” or Lolita in slow motion advancing toward Humbert’s gifts, or the pictures decorating the stylized garret of Gaston Godin, or the Kasbeam barber (who cost me a month of work), or Lolita playing tennis, or the hospital at Elphinstone, or pale, pregnant, beloved, irretrievable Dolly Schiller dying in Gray Star (the capital town of the book), or the tinkling sounds of the valley town coming up the mountain trail (on which I caught the first known female of Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov). These are the nerves of the novel.” Lolita, 314. 64

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ancient grey lotions, that the moustached young ball player had been dead for the last thirty years.66

Through the mise en abyme of a detail  the photograph of the barber’s son  the narration brings out the protagonist’s surprise (“it came as a shock”) and defers the perception of the presence of death. Death is the unique link of this episode with the rest of the story, announcing those of the main protagonists. This extract becomes a detail as it disrupts sequential linearity: the barber appears neither before nor after the episode. As a singular and autonomous event, it becomes a disjunctive supplement, not only enclosed in the narrative but enclosing it, like a graft radiating meaning.67 Detail is linked to not only meaning but also the representation of reality in literature. Reality is, for Nabokov, an object of knowledge which is “unattainable,” “unquenchable.” He writes: Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you get never near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable.68

Being a “very subjective affair,” reality raises the problematics of object and subject. Reality is therefore modified by the subject; it cannot be apprehended without an intentional subject. However, reality resists; it is not fixed, immutable; it can only be approached (“nearer and nearer”) but it cannot be mastered (“you get never near enough”). Therefore a gap remains between the subject and the object and this gap cannot be filled, saturated. It is the reason why it 66

Ibid., 211. Derrida makes use of the image of the graft in writing when he asserts: “Ecrire veut dire greffer. C’est le même mot” [“To write means to graft. It is the same word”] (La Dissémination [Paris: Seuil, 1972], 395). 68 Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 10–11. 67

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is not only unattainable but unquenchable. Derrida also uses this word  “unquenchable”  to describe the characteristics of reality when he writes in Signéponge that the law of the thing is to be “insatiable.”69 For Derrida, the thing should not only be described, known, expressed, even written, but submitted to. There exists a law of the thing which enjoins the author to respond. It is unquenchable because its desire is never satisfied. The thing induces a duel with the author. Even if these declarations should be taken within the context of a commentary on Francis Ponge’s work, it seems doubtless that, for Derrida, the referential function of language is not annulled in literature. Although Nabokov is a master of deception, in the creation of illusions and simulacrums, he too anchors his work in reality. In Lolita’s postscript, he writes: The obtaining of such local ingredients as would allow me to inject a modicum of average “reality” (one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes) into the brew of individual fancy, proved at fifty a much more difficult process than it had been in the Europe of my youth when receptiveness and retention were at their automatic best.70

Nabokov does not separate language and the world. He incorporates (“injects”) reality in fiction, seasoning fiction with realistic ingredients. Fiction therefore does not provide a mere referential illusion but is interlaced with reality. However, reality can only be quoted and/or invented. Literature is indeed not the mere degraded imitation of reality, as Plato considered (art being the image of an image), or even a creation as Aristotle claimed, it is an invention. In Lolita’s postscript, Nabokov writes, apropos the composition of the novel: “It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced by the task of inventing America.”71 Nabokov shows therefore how reality  whether it be his native country, Russia, or his adopted one, America  is the place of the other as 69

Jacques Derrida, Signéponge (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 16. Nabokov, Lolita, 310. 71 Ibid. 70

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Derrida reminds us that “L’autre, c’est bien ce qui ne s’invente pas, et c’est donc la seule invention au monde”72 [“The other is really what cannot be invented and it is therefore the only invention in the world”]. In “Psyché. Invention de l’autre” [“Psyché: Invention of the Other”], Derrida expatiates on the notion of invention. Invention is, according to him, an event as it responds to the call of the wholly other. Invention is beyond creation, imagination, production. The desire of invention is situated between the meanings of inventing/discovering; inventing/creating; inventing/imagining. Invention allows “inventer le monde, un monde, non pas l’Amérique, le Nouveau Monde, mais un monde nouveau” [“the invention of the world, a world, not America, the New World, but a new world”].73 This exuberant affirmation of invention was, I think, already expressed by Nabokov who, in his last published novel Look at the Harlequins!, has the child-narrator’s grand-aunt exclaim: “Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!”74 Philosophy and literature can therefore indeed communicate, without necessarily subordinating one to the other. The objection consisting in expressing doubts about the relevancy of resorting to Derrida’s philosophy in literary criticism does not take into account the fact that literary criticism is frequently  consciously or unconsciously  indebted to a philosophy or an ideology, whereas Derrida allows and aims at an awareness of presuppositions and a freeing from metaphysical and theological fetters.75 “How to do?” (how to read, teach literature with Derrida) was the question that initiated this work. Derrida has helped us, through his notions of play in structure, impurity in genre, and undecidability to enrich our reading of some of Nabokov’s texts, and these notions could be useful in the study of other literary works. As for the communication between a philosopher and a writer of fiction, it 72

Jacques Derrida, Psyché. Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987), 60. Ibid., 34. 74 Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins! (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 13. 75 This Derrida expresses in De La grammatologie when he expounds his theory of a science of writing. 73

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seems possible to resort to Derrida’s method of the contraband  the juxtaposition of a philosopher’s work and that of a writer  to find similarities or other points of contact and production.76 What’s more, although Nabokov did not read Derrida and Derrida had, by July 2002, read only Lolita,77 the disturbing echoes between their texts may give evidence of their belonging to an “epoch”  that of the beginning of writing as opposed to the logocentric period which Derrida analyses in “La fin du livre et le début de l’ écriture.” Their common attention to language, revealed in the verbal play which characterises each of their styles and their common interest in Joyce, allows a possible rapprochement suggesting further research in the study of an epistemological break in the twentieth century going back to Joyce in literature and Nietzsche in philosophy.78

76

Derrida has himself juxtaposed a text by Plato and one by Mallarmé in “La double séance” of La Dissémination, Hegel’s and Genet’s texts in Glas. 77 This is what Derrida told me in July 2002 when I asked him what he had read by Nabokov. 78 Joyce was indeed the only writer Nabokov accepted comparisons to. During an interview he declared: “oh, yes, let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is patball to Joyce’s champion game” (Strong Opinions, 56). As for Nietzsche, Derrida not only wrote on his work but frequently referred to him, in particular in “La fin du livre et le commencement de l’écriture,” where he reminds us how, for Nietzsche, writing was not subjected to logos and the truth.

CHAPTER NINE “SOIS SAGE, Ô MA DOULEUR …”: PSYCHICAL SUFFERING IN SOME OF NABOKOV’S WORKS

Given that psychology differs from psychoanalysis but envelops it, I would like to analyse Nabokov’s relation to the psyche in the debate within psychological studies between those giving priority to consciousness as in cognitive sciences1 and those acknowledging the unconscious as in psychoanalysis. It is a well-known fact that Nabokov’s interest in psychology was precocious as he read psychologist William James at twelve or thirteen thanks to his father’s encouragement. What’s more, in an interview given to Alfred Appel in 1970, when he was asked if he was a psychological novelist, he answered: “All novelists of any worth are psychological novelists …”2 The relationship between Nabokov and psychology had been dealt with in two papers presented at the International Nabokov Conference in 2010 in Kyoto, Japan, by Brian Boyd with “Nabokov as Psychologist: Routes for Exploration” and Jean-Pierre Luauté with “Was Nabokov a Psychologist?” For Boyd, he was undoubtedly a psychologist, and a serious one, though playful as he was “a reader of others and himself … an observer and an introspector.”3 1

Cognitive science is defined as “the collective name for branches of existing disciplines (cognitive psychology, neurophysiology, computer science, epistemology, etc.) which have cognition as their object of inquiry.” Thomas Mautner, The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy (London: Penguin Books, 1997), 97. 2 Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 174. 3 Brian Boyd, “Nabokov as Psychologist: Routes for Exploration,” in The Proceedings of the International Nabokov Conference: Revising Nabokov

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According to Jenefer Shute, “Nabokov considers consciousness, rather than unconsciousness, psychology’s proper realm.”4 This seems to be true when we refer to Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory, where consciousness appears as the structural element of subjectivity. In the first part of the first chapter, he associates the beginning of, he says, “reflexive consciousness” with the dawning of the sense of time,5 and describes the birth of consciousness as follows: “I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold.”6 He then praises human consciousness by declaring, “How small the cosmos … how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness,”7 and adds in the chapter dedicated to the evocation of his first poem the following opinion: “But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one’s position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer the better.”8 He considers that the poet must be able to think of several things at one time as they thus reach a state close to euphoric ecstasy. They experience, Nabokov says, “a sense of oneness with sun and stone.”9 This quasi-transcendental glorification of consciousness may appear at first sight, in the debate in psychological studies, an undeniable argument for those among Nabokovian scholars who are in favour of the priority given to cognition and the theory of mind, such as Boyd. But the issue is more complex and this is what I intend to show in the second part of my paper. Revising, March 24–27, 2010, Kyoto, Japan, eds. Mitsuyoshi Numano and Tadashi Wakashima (Kyoto: The Nabokov Society of Japan, 2010), 145. 4 Jenefer Shute, “Nabokov and Freud,” The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Vladimir E. Alexandrov (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1995), 418. 5 Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (London: Penguin Books, 1969), 18. 6 Ibid., 18. 7 Ibid., 21. 8 Ibid., 169. 9 Ibid., 110.

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I wish to tackle now the problematic relationship Nabokov entertains with psychoanalysis. Boyd and Luauté both insist on Nabokov’s hostility towards the father of psychoanalysis, Freud. And his violent criticisms are well known. Nabokov calls Freud “the Viennese quack” but praises “his comic appeal.” He considers that Freudism is “one of the vilest deceits practiced by people on themselves and on others,” and says that he rejects it utterly.10 He mocks “the credulous and the vulgar [who] continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.”11 He warns the readers in the foreword to Bend Sinister that his books “should be stamped Freudians, keep out,”12 and exclaims in the introduction to King, Queen, Knave that, “The Viennese delegation has not been invited,”13 adding that, “If, however, a resolute Freudian manages to slip in, he or she should be warned that a number of cruel traps have been set here and there in the novel”14 He reproaches Freudism with its reductive symbolism, its uniform philosophical and ideological system, its proximity with the way totalitarianisms think, its determinism and thereby its refusal of free will, and finally its negation of responsibility. He thus declares: “I also suggest that the Freudian faith leads to dangerous ethical consequences, such as when a filthy murderer with the brain of a tapeworm is given a lighter sentence because his mother spanked him too much or too little – it works both ways.”15 Confronted with such declarations, it seems, at first sight, obvious to take them at their face value, and a lot of Nabokovian scholars have taken for granted such hostility and refrained from using psychoanalytical theoretical tools out of respect and loyalty towards Nabokov’s prescription. Some have even taken sides with Nabokov and consequently rejected Freud and psychoanalysis. The best example is Brian Boyd who, in his biography published in 1990, refers to “the archaic mythmaking and 10

Ibid., 23–4. Ibid., 66. 12 Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), xviii. 13 Ibid., viii. 14 Ibid., x. 15 Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 116. 11

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witchcraft of Freud,”16 and mentions in his paper presented at Kyoto in 2010 “the intellectual vacuity of Freudian theory.”17 Yet other scholars transgress Nabokov’s authorial interdiction to analyse his works from a Freudian point of view, the best examples being Geoffrey Green who, in 1988, entitled his book Freud and Nabokov, and Maurice Couturier who, in 2004, offered what he called a “psychoanalytical reading” of Nabokov’s works in Nabokov ou la cruauté du désir [Nabokov or the Cruelty of Desire] while applying Lacanian theory. Others have tried to problematise Nabokov’s rejection of Freudism. It was Jenefer Shute who, in a very interesting essay entitled “Nabokov and Freud” published in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (1995), drew attention to the particularity of Nabokov’s obsessive rejection. Her theory, which I agree with, is that Nabokov paradoxically affirms the importance of Freud through his negation. She writes, first, that “Freud’s presence has haunted the Nabokovian text – which misses no opportunity to declare its absence,”18 adding that, “To proclaim an absence so often and so insistently is to evoke a presence.”19 She considers that it is because the realm of psychoanalysis – that is, the realm of imagination, memory, and desire – coincides with the domain of Nabokov’s fiction that the struggle is, she says, territorial, and Freud is therefore a worthy rival. They are close to each other and the best way Nabokov found to pay homage to Freud was to detach himself from him. One should not however deny and obliterate completely Nabokov’s resistance because his precocious awareness of Freudian theory was visionary in a way, as French philosophers such as Michel Foucault or Gilles Deleuze were to criticise in the seventies a certain psychoanalysis which veered towards a rigid, fixed, and dangerously conservative dogma. It was Jacques Derrida who best gave account of this necessary deconstruction through his reference to the presence of a double 16

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990), 91. 17 Boyd, “Nabokov as Psychologist: Routes for Exploration,” 146. 18 Shute, “Nabokov and Freud,” 413. 19 Ibid., 414.

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resistance, because there are, according to him, “two forms of resistance in force, both resistance to psychoanalysis in the world and resistance to the world within psychoanalysis that also resists itself, that folds back on itself to resist itself … to inhibit itself, in a quasiautoimmune fashion.”20 This citation is extracted from a very small book by Derrida whose title in French is États d’âme de la psychanalyse, translated by Peggy Kamuf as Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul. It is Derrida’s address to the States General of Psychoanalysis organised by French Canadian Psychoanalyst René Major in July 2000 in Paris. Derrida’s address is somehow revolutionary because, for him, it seems that it is no longer sexuality or the unconscious which are characteristic of psychoanalysis but cruelty and suffering. He says: “The only discourse that can today claim the thing of psychical suffering as its own affair would indeed be what has been called, for about a century, psychoanalysis.”21 He goes on: “‘psychoanalysis’ would be the name of that which … would be turned toward what is most proper to psychical cruelty.”22 I thereby intend to wonder about the role and consequences of cruelty and suffering in some of Nabokov’s works in a third part of my argument. Some scholars have broached the issue. It was Richard Rorty who, in his 1989 Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, was the first, I think, to draw attention to the question of cruelty in Nabokov. Michael Wood wrote in his 1994 book a chapter called “The Cruelty of Chance,” while Zoran Kuzmanovich titled his 2003 article on Bend Sinister “Suffer the Little Children,” just as Maurice Couturier treated in his 2004 book on Nabokov the cruelty of desire. I wish, for my part, to study the issue of psychical suffering in some of Nabokov’s works: first, the short story “Signs and Symbols” and then Lolita, but mostly Ada. The short story narrates a day of an old couple of Russian Jewish immigrants whose only son has been in a 20

Jacques Derrida, “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul: The Impossible Beyond of a Sovereign Cruelty,” Without Alibi, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 242. 21 Ibid., 240. 22 Ibid., 240.

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psychiatric hospital for four years. When they decide to go and visit him for his birthday they are not allowed to see him because he has tried to commit suicide. The son is described as a solitary, silent, and almost indifferent character, whereas the mother suffers as she feels, the narrator says, “the mounting pressure of tears,”23 and thinks “of the endless waves of pain.”24 Whereas tears and emotion characterise the mother’s pain, the son’s psychical suffering is associated with silence, solitude, and suicide. Lolita too is aching and she weeps. Humbert writes: “Her sobs in the night – every night, every night – the moment I feigned sleep.”25 She entreats him to leave her alone: “Oh, no, not again. Please, leave me alone,” she says.26 Her voice is subdued and smothered by Humbert’s, and the amount of her suffering is proportionate to her attempts to free herself from his predatory hold. As for the novel Ada, the topic of suffering is at first reading hidden behind the dazzling brilliance of Van Veen and Ada’s love, but the motif is conspicuous and is linked to their little sister Lucette, whose presence is subterranean, shadowy, and obscure because she is the one who is in love with Van but her love is unrequited. At the beginning of the novel, Van is fourteen, Ada twelve, and Lucette is only eight, so she appears first for Van and Ada (and the reader) as a pest, an intruder who impedes the couple’s lovemaking. So they conceive a whole bunch of stratagems to keep her away, such as tying her to a tree, having her learn a poem by heart, and leaving her in a bathtub. These may appear as mere insignificant games but the way Lucette reacts shows that she suffers, all the more so as, being a child, her vulnerability increases her pain. Kuzmanovich reminds us that, for Rorty, “The death of a child is Nabokov’s standard example of ultimate pain,”27 but wonders if, for 23

Vladimir Nabokov, “Signs and Symbols,” in Nabokov’s Dozen (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960), 54. 24 Ibid., 57. 25 Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 176. 26 Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, 192. 27 Zoran Kuzmanovich, “Suffer the Little Children,” in Nabokov at Cornell, ed. Gabriel Shapiro (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 2003), 51.

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Nabokov, children’s suffering is even more monstrous due to its being undepictable. Lucette also weeps and ends up committing suicide. This is depicted in the climactic fifth chapter of the third part of the novel. Lucette is now twenty-five and is travelling with Van by boat. She decides to seduce him. When she was younger and had visited him at Kingston, she had claimed her love for him, saying: “I’m madly and miserably in love with you and … you can do anything you want with me.”28 She even said once: “I adore, I adore, I adore more than life you, you … I ache for you.”29 On the boat, she appears as a dangerous temptress to Van who is sexually aroused and is about to yield to her advances but ends by retreating to his cabin as he happens to see Ada on the screen of the film they watch. When, at night, Lucette asks him if she can come, we cannot but sympathize with her when Van says: “I’m not alone.”30 This lie is reminiscent of those he used to tell her when she was a child, and resonates like another humiliating rejection. Lucette then takes several pills, goes to the bar, drinks three vodkas, thinks of a suicide note, and finally plunges into the ocean. There is here “a touch of cruelty,” as Wood calls it,31 which is more painful than mere indifference or lack of sensitivity as Boyd qualified Van and Ada’s attitude during their games. The remorse they both experience after Lucette’s suicide is manifest when Ada exclaims in the last chapter of the novel: “Oh, Van, oh Van, we did not love her enough … we teased her to death!”32 This raises the question of responsibility when one makes or lets somebody suffer. In his book on Ada, Boyd addresses the issue: “We should also recognize the failure of our own moral vision and acknowledge how easily we succumbed to Van and Ada’s partiality of interest, becoming so caught up in their eagerness to be alone together that we became impatient with Lucette and only

28

Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), 292. 29 Ibid., 323. 30 Ibid., 387. 31 Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov & the Risks of Fiction (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), 221. 32 Nabokov, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, 459.

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wished her out of the way.”33 We, as readers, cannot but feel like those volunteers in Stanley Milgram’s experiment, who, Kuzmanovich reminds us, although ordinary people, “consented to inflict on others what they believed to be painful, even dangerously painful, electric shocks, all for the sake of what they understood to be scientific necessity.”34 Derrida would call this proclaimed reason a mere alibi. In his address to the States General, he surprisingly resorted to this concept to characterise psychoanalysis, as he declared: “Psychoanalysis, for me, if I may be permitted yet another remark, would be another name for the ‘without alibi’. The confession of a ‘without alibi.’”35 The Milgram volunteers should not have tried to justify themselves, they should have endorsed their responsibility and recognised their destruction drive. Even Ada used this term (“alibi”) to refer to one of their stratagems to fool Lucette. We can read, henceforth: “The idea was to have Van fool Lucette by petting her in Ada’s presence, while kissing Ada at the same time, and by caressing and kissing Lucette when Ada was away in the woods … This, Ada affirmed, would achieve two ends – assuage the pubescent child’s jealousy and act as an alibi in case she caught them in the middle of a more ambiguous romp.”36 One cannot help remembering Nabokov declarations on his ethics. He indeed answered the interviewer who asked him what the worst thing men do were: “to stink, to cheat, to torture.”37 We should not therefore, as readers, be accomplices but on the contrary denounce cruelty and testify. Just as Kuzmanovich concluded his article on Bend Sinister by saying that “such torture cannot make sense in the world of Bend Sinister or in any other world. It cannot because it must not,”38 we must therefore, on the contrary, “make it known” (to use Derrida’s phrase)39 as if we were therapists listening to their patients’ suffering. This denunciation of cruelty, whether it 33

Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s Ada: The Place of Consciousness (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1985), 96. 34 Kuzmanovich, “Suffer the Little Children,” 53. 35 Derrida, “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul,” 240. 36 Nabokov, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, 168. 37 Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 152. 38 Kuzmanovich, “Suffer the Little Children,” 57. 39 Derrida, “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul,” 279.

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be psychological as in Ada or political as in Bend Sinister, becomes a militant and civic act, and we thereby recognise Nabokov’s declarations who, during an interview, when asked what the best things men did were, replied: “To be kind, to be proud, to be fearless.”40 Nabokov’s works tell us much about the author’s personality, and this is the subject I would like to conclude my paper with. There are indeed in his texts a tension between a luminous part and a sombre one, between bliss and pain. Lolita and Ada are impressive examples of this duality. The ecstatic happiness Humbert experiences in the gratification of his desire and the one Van and Ada reveal through their sensuous love are opposed to Lolita’s suffering and Lucette’s pain. In each case, jouissance is undermined by death and destruction drives. Life, or survival, however, trumps death as when Van, in the fifth and last part of the novel, exclaims: “I, Van Veen, salute you, life …”41 Pain, being a passion, must subside, and I am referring here to a line twice mentioned in Ada and associated each time with Lucette which says: “Subside, agitation of passion!”42 This echoes the first line of Baudelaire’s poem “Recueillement”: “Sois sage, ô ma douleur et tiens-toi plus tranquille” [“Be wise, oh my sorrow, and calm down”]. Just as Lucette’s pain corresponds to the flaw in Van and Ada’s ecstasy, Nabokov’s own vulnerability can be perceived behind the cliché of his arrogance. Cruelty is therefore for him not only a question of ethics or responsibility but also a question of being human, of being, of experiencing, as he says, “the itch of being.”43

40

Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 152. Nabokov, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, 445. 42 Ibid., 324, 450. 43 Vladimir Nabokov, “Foreword,” Glory (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), 10. 41

CHAPTER TEN SARTRE, LACAN, DERRIDA, AND NABOKOV

In order to explore the relationship between Nabokov and French thought, I propose to study the contents and significance of what two main leading French modern philosophers, Sartre and Lacan, wrote on Nabokov’s works. Let us begin with the Sartre/Nabokov controversy. It centred around two texts: on the one hand, Sartre’s review of the French translation of Nabokov’s novel Despair which first appeared in the French journal Europe on June 15, 1939, and was republished in Situations 1 in 1947; on the other, Nabokov’s review of the English translation of Sartre’s novel La Nausée. This review, entitled “Sartre’s First Try,” appeared first in The New York Times Book Review on April 24, 1949 (ten years after Sartre’s) and was then republished in Strong Opinions in 1973. Sartre’s review has already been much commented upon. I will select two articles by famous American Nabokovians and two by French Nabokovians. It was indeed in 1994 that Don Barton Johnson wrote an essay entitled “The Nabokov-Sartre Controversy” in the first volume of Nabokov Studies. As for Sergey Davydov, he alludes to Sartre’s commentary in his essay on Despair in the Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (1995). Don Barton Johnson considers that Sartre’s review is “dismissive” (1994, 74), accusing him of attacking Nabokov for qualities he later praised in the French New Wave (79), and concluding by comparing Nabokov’s “sensual textures” to Sartre’s “abstract universe lacking human features” (79). Johnson undeniably takes sides with Nabokov against Sartre. As for Davydov, he writes: “Even a superficial glance at Despair reveals the extent of the misreading to which the reviewer (that is Sartre) subjected the novel” (1995, 89). In 1993, French Nabokovian Isabelle

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Poulin called her article on the controversy “La Nausée de Vladimir Nabokov et la Méprise de Sartre,” [“Nabokov’s Nausea and Sartre’s Mistake”], playing on the title of the French translation of Despair, La Méprise [“Mistake”], whereas French Nabokovian Wladimir Troubetzkoy wrote in his note on Despair in the Pléiade edition of Nabokov’s works: “Ainsi, Jean-Paul Sartre, en 1939, a-t-il commis à propos de La Méprise l’une des plus intéressantes bévues” [“Thus, Jean-Paul Sartre made in 1939 one of the most interesting blunders about La Méprise”] (1999, 1630). So, all these scholars considered that Sartre had been mistaken about Nabokov, too critical, and having missed Nabokov as he did not realise Nabokov’s genius. They reproached him for delaying Nabokov’s recognition in France. They therefore all denigrated Sartre (as Nabokov did, as we shall see later on). Now, what is our own reading of Sartre’s review? It is a rather short review of three and a half pages, composed of three paragraphs. In the first, Sartre sums up the story of the novel, indicating the time and place (“One day in Prague”) and two of the protagonists, that is Hermann and the tramp Felix, and insists on one of the main themes of the novel which is the resemblance Herman thinks or imagines existing between him and Felix. Sartre rightly states that Hermann wishes to make use of this resemblance and actually does it by murdering Felix while thinking he is committing the perfect crime. But Hermann makes a mistake, forgetting Felix’s stick which identifies him, and so the crime is, as the English translation says, “undermined from within” (86). What interests Sartre is the analogy between the undermining of the crime and that of the novel. He indeed begins the second paragraph by stating “that this zeal in self-criticism and self-destruction is rather characteristic of Mr Nabokov’s manner” (86), initiating thereby a reflection on Nabokov’s self-reflective formal propensity. When Sartre then writes that “He (Nabokov) is an author with a great deal of talent, but he is the son of old parents” [“un enfant de vieux”], it is first undeniable that he recognises Nabokov’s talent but also disparages it somewhat when

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using the phrase “enfant de vieux,” which points to the authors that preceded and influenced Nabokov, notably Dostoevsky. However, Sartre here detects the later and much studied theme of intertextuality which was to overstep the mere reference to influences, foreseeing and initiating the much developed Nabokovian criticism based on annotations. Sartre then goes on developing Nabokov’s novelistic choices, declaring that, whereas Dostoyevsky believed in his characters, Nabokov no longer believes in his, nor indeed in the novelist’s art. Nabokov uses Dostoyevskyian techniques but mocks them, according to Sartre. So the French author highlights the way Nabokov keeps his distance from classical devices by debunking them and reflecting on them as Sartre declares: “we must, in the novel, distinguish between a time for making tools and a time for reflecting on the tools made. Mr Nabokov is an author of the second period. He locates himself resolutely on the level of reflection. He never writes without seeing himself write” (87–8). And indeed, there are, in Despair, numerous metafictional passages, when the protagonist – who writes a diary – wonders, for example, about the technique of the incipit, announcing later postmodern writing. Yet Sartre says he is not satisfied with the result and rather ill at ease because a rather curious work ensues, reminiscent of Gide’s The Counterfeiters but lacking its experimental purport. Sartre concludes by saying: “what a lot of fuss over nothing” (89). Sartre considers therefore that the novel is an artistic failure. He reproaches Nabokov for failing to invent new techniques and acting too superior, and eventually says that “this is what I call a literature of the learned” (89) [“de la littérature savante”]. Despite the praise (Sartre mentions “excellent little scenes,” “charming portraits and literary essays”), the tone is undeniably critical and denigrating. Yet, in the third paragraph, Sartre detects one of the later developed themes in Nabokovian criticism, that of exile, as he writes the muchquoted sentence: “at the present moment there is a curious literature of Russian – and other – émigrés, who are rootless (‘déracinés’). Mr Nabokov’s rootlessness, like that of Hermann Karlovich, is total” (89–90). This sentence has been criticised by some Nabokovians – in the wake of Nabokov himself – maybe because Sartre concludes that, by being rootless, Nabokov could only write on gratuitous

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themes. Yet, when one remembers how Nabokov relates his memory as an émigré in Germany or France in Speak, Memory, one must recognise that Sartre had felt the strange experience of ghostly and spectral feelings that Nabokov described so well when he mentioned the “spectral Germans and Frenchmen in whose more or less illusory cities, (they), émigrés, happened to dwell” (211). So, Sartre’s review is indeed generally critical but there are some nuances. His tone is not constantly negative and he qualifies his judgement by resorting to modalising expressions such as “perhaps” (86), “in a sense” (85), or “it seems to me” (86). His tone is indeed much less categorical that Nabokov’s (as we shall see later). So we should qualify the criticism Nabokovians made on Sartre’s review, as the French author did recognise Nabokov’s talent, but Despair was not, according to him, a masterpiece. He criticised the novel more than the author, even if he made cutting remarks. Sartre was indeed right about the novel, which announces perhaps the later masterpieces such as Lolita, Pale Fire, or Ada, but is not a major piece in Nabokov’s oeuvre. It is indeed a good self-reflective novel, with the presence of a floating, ethereal atmosphere in keeping with the rootlessness of both character and author, but not a sweeping success. It should not be a crime of lèse-majesté to pass a judgement on Nabokov’s performances and/or personality. Sartre’s review may therefore help us to demystify the almighty power of our author, to create a distance from the fascination the reading of his works may produce. It is not because Nabokov criticised Sartre that we, Nabokovians, should follow close on his heels. As has been said beforehand, Nabokovians reproached Sartre for his mistake. Yet, Nabokov who loved to deceive us, may well be himself mistaken as we shall try to prove in the forthcoming analysis of his review of the English translation of La Nausée. The review appeared in 1949, and the date is not insignificant. Whereas Sartre had written his review on Despair in 1939, that is one year after the publication of La Nausée, at a time when Nabokov was in France (he indeed spent three years in France from 1937 to 1940), when Nabokov wrote his the situation had changed. Nabokov was in the United States and Sartre was a leading figure in the French

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intellectual world because of the success of his philosophy: existentialism. Yet, Nabokov was not impressed by this notoriety as he scornfully named Sartre’s philosophy “a fashionable brand of café philosophy” (228) in his review which he called “Sartre’s First Try.” His review is, like Sartre’s, a rather short one, of three pages, and composed of six paragraphs. After some derogatory allusions to existentialism and remarks on translation inaccuracies, and after an observation on an error in the novel, Nabokov attacks Sartre in the fourth paragraph. He considers that La Nausée is not worth translating because of its “very loose type of writing,” popularised by, he says “many second-raters – Barbusse, Céline, and so forth.” He then adds: “Somewhere behind looms Dostoevsky at his worst” (229). His remarks are full of hostile allusions: to the epigraph of the novel by Céline, to Sartre’s review and his commentary on Dostoevsky. He undeniably denigrates Sartre, giving the impression that he is taking revenge on him. It is only in the sixth and last paragraph that Nabokov offers a literary criticism of La Nausée. He rightly detects the illumination that Roquentin (the protagonist) experiences “when he discovers that his ‘nausea’ is the result of the pressure of an absurd and amorphous but very tangible world” (229–30). But then he goes on: “Unfortunately, all this remains on a purely mental level” (230), adding” “When an author inflicts his idle and arbitrary philosophic fancy on a helpless person whom he has invented for that purpose, a lot of talent is needed to have the trick work” (230). Nabokov therefore accuses Sartre of having written a roman à thèse in which he mainly tries to apply his philosophy but doesn’t manage to make a work of art out of it, because “the task to make the world exist as a work of art was beyond Sartre’s powers” (230). As if echoing Sartre’s review, Nabokov considers La Nausée a failure and that Sartre has no talent. But his criticism is much more categorical, devoid of any praise and conceding no quality. Nabokov does not like Sartre. During an interview with Alfred Apple in 1975 he referred to Camus and Sartre: “That awful Monsieur Camus and even more awful Monsieur Sartre” (1990, 175). Therefore, was Nabokov’s review right? Or was his criticism merely biased, prejudiced by his own criteria of evaluation?

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To answer this question I will first give an account of my own reading of La Nausée. It was indeed with great pleasure that I reread this novel of my youth and found that it was not abstract or “mental,” but on the contrary very concrete. Sartre succeeds in rendering the existence of the world through the numerous episodes when Roquentin feels and touches objects. Moreover, it now belongs to classical literature, just as Lolita does. As for French critic Maurice Blanchot, whose authority I strongly acknowledge, he considers in the essay he wrote on Sartre’s novels in 1949 that Sartre overcame the difficulty inherent in a novel imbued with philosophy because the novel, whose characteristic should be in general ambiguity, succeeds, in this case, in losing its ambiguity without damaging its value through the device of the revelation. For Blanchot, La Nausée is a success. So, to conclude on this Sartre-Nabokov controversy, one might say that they are both great writers. I nevertheless wish to rehabilitate Sartre – who was not mistaken on all levels, and whose analysis is just at times – and desacralize Nabokov whose authorship should not blind us. Besides they both had their literary canons, their likes and dislikes, and we should not always take for granted their discourses. I personally react negatively when Nabokov denigrates writers such as Stendhal or Camus, who illuminated my youth and have become classic writers. In fact, Nabokov and Sartre’s creative, deep selves (to use Proust’s expression), which are present in their fiction, may be at odds with their social, mundane selves. Never trust the artist, trust the tale, as D. H. Lawrence would say. As for Jacques Lacan, it was in 1959 that he expressed himself on Lolita. The text is situated in Lesson June 24, 1959, integrated in Seminar VI, titled “Le Désir et son interpretation” [“Desire and its Interpretation”]. Two pages are devoted to the commentary on Lolita and are situated at the beginning of the lesson. They are preceded by a paragraph where Lacan differentiates “perverse phantasy” from “perversion.” According to him, it is not sufficient to understand perverse phantasies to be able to have access to the structure of perversion. That is exactly what he is going to demonstrate with the example of Lolita. He therefore intends, he says, to tackle Lolita

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because it deals with desire, although “there are better things written than Lolita on what one could call the theoretical plane. But Lolita is all the same an exemplary enough production” (2). He then recalls Nabokov’s well-known hostility towards “Freudian charlatanism,” but he explains that the author “gives the clearest witness to this symbolic function of the image of the other – the i(a)” (2). We should bear in mind that Lacan differentiates the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. When he refers to the i(a), he alludes to the imaginary, fantastical representation of the object(a). Lacan continues by resorting to the structure of the novel which, according to him, “has all the characteristics of the relationship of the subject to desire, to what is properly speaking a neurotic phantasy,” because the novel offers a contrast between “the sparkling [“étincelant”] character of desire while it is being meditated on [in the first part] … and its prodigious collapse [“déchéance”] bogged down [“enlisée”] in a reality” [in the second part] (3). Although Lacan does not name the protagonist, referring to him as the subject, he obviously alludes to Humbert who, indeed, experiences authentic desire during his quest but sees it become dull and vanish when he obtains a sexual relationship, when desire is no longer “meditated on,” dreamt, fantasised, when Lolita becomes a mere object of consumption. Then Lacan salutes the “constructive coherence” where “the pervert properly speaking shows himself, appears in another, another who is more than the mere double of the subject, who is something different, who appears there literally as his persecutor, who appears in the margin of the adventure as if … the desire that is in question in the subject can only live in another, and where it is literally impenetrable and completely unknown” (3). Lacan seems to imply that Humbert’s desire is represented in a concrete manner because it becomes the desire of the other (Quilty’s), because it is an absolute desire (“impenetrable”), and because it is beyond mere satisfaction. When Lacan then refers to Quilty, he declares that he is, “the character who is substituted for the hero at a given moment of the plot, the character who is properly speaking the pervert, the one who has access to the object.” It seems therefore that Lacan differentiates the two types of perversions. Whereas the perverse dimension of

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Humbert’s desire can only be accomplished somewhere else, the authentic pervert is Quilty. Lacan concludes by saying that “this sort of negative of the main character … has here something quite exemplary which may serve us as a schema to understand that it is only at the cost of an extrapolation that we can produce the perverse structure” (3), meaning perhaps that Lolita is a literary example which proves, thanks to its structure, that it is indeed very difficult, or even impossible, to access to the real nature of the desire of the pervert. Real perversion is unrepresentable. Maurice Couturier, in his psychoanalytical analysis of Lolita which appeared in his 2004 book Nabokov ou la cruauté du désir, also points out the opposition between Humbert’s authentic desire in the first part of the novel and the loss of desire in the second part when Lolita becomes a mere provider of pleasure. He also rightly differentiates the two different kinds of perversion, as he calls Humbert a narcissistic pervert whereas Quilty is a sadistic pervert. Even if Couturier does not allude to Lacan’s text, he is unsurprisingly on the same wavelength. Couturier however adds some relevant new remarks about the importance of love. Love makes Humbert realise that he has transgressed the ethical law and that art is the only refuge, that only writing can enable him to fill his lack of being. Now, according to me, whereas Humbert fantasises on Lolita, seeing her through his images of Carmen, for example, or literary figures in general, Quilty is merely moved by a predatory drive. His lucidity and cynicism make him enjoy evil, whereas when Humbert loses Lolita he suffers feelings of guilt and remorse. Humbert suffers even more when he realises that Quilty’s desire has been fulfilled, that he has obtained the full satisfaction that Humbert longed for, that is Lolita’s love. And so it is love which constitutes the structural knot of the novel as the issue centres indeed not on the Humbert-Quilty couple but on the triangle formed by Humbert, Quilty, and Lolita, recalling the vicious triangle formed by Yasha, Rudolph, and Olya in The Gift. Here, Humbert loves Lolita who loved Quilty (so she told him), who does not love her and even refused her love. Can we thus

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conclude that Humbert is not a pervert but merely perverse, that his perversity is different from mere, authentic perversion? This categorical conclusion would be perhaps another manipulation from the narrator because it exonerates the character once more. I therefore remain careful. So, to conclude on those readings of Nabokov by French philosophers, I will say that, whereas Sartre allows us to ponder once more on the problematic of the author and urge us to beware of his discourses, Lacan raised the issue of the subject by acknowledging its identity. Both have permitted us to react as careful readers who should free ourselves from misreadings in order to take into account but also shake off the veils that envelop our corpus – in a gesture of unfaithful faithfulness, to use Derrida’s expression.

References Alexandrov, Vladimir (ed). The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Garland, 1995. Johnson, Don Barton. “The Nabokov-Sartre Controversy.” Nabokov Studies 1, no. 1 (1994): 69–83. Lacan, Jacques. Le séminaire livre VI. Le Désir et son interprétation. Paris: Editions de la Martinière et le Champ Freudien Editeurs, Juin 2013. Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory. An Autobiography Revisited. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. —. “Sartre’s First Try.” In Strong Opinions, 228–30. New York: Vintage International, 1990. —. Oeuvres romanesques completes. Vol 1, edited by Maurice Couturier. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Poulin, Isabelle. “La nausée de Vladimir Nabokov et la méprise de Jean-Paul Sartre.” In Vladimir Nabokov et l’Emigration (Cahiers de l’émigration russe 2), edited by Nora Buhks. Paris: Institut d’Etudes Slaves, 1993, 107–19. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critiques littéraires (SituationsI). Paris: Gallimard, 1947. —. Critical Essays (Situations I), translated by Chris Turner. London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull, 2010.