Lolita is her mother’s progeny in regard to reading though she is even more the lineal descendent of Gerty McDowell: “She believed, with a kind of celestial trust, any advertisement or advice that appeared in Movie Love or Screen Land… The words ‘novelties and souvenirs’ simply entranced her by their trochaic lilt. Humbert knows exactly how to manipulate such an uncritical sensibility: while listening to accounts of Charlotte’s past love life and inventing stories of his own, Humbert notes that the two sets were technically “congeneric since both were affected by the same stuff (soap operas, psychoanalysis and cheap novelettes) upon which I drew for my characters and she for her mode of expression” (82). Humbert constantly acts in a way to simultaneously disguise and satisfy his criminal desires, creating as it were a kind of semiotic polysemy that allows him to be one thing while appearing another, as when he speculates on the physical possibilities that would attend his marriage to Lolita’s mother.Ĭharlotte Haze is an naive reader who has “blind faith in the wisdom of her church and book club” (77–78), though the novels Humbert found her reading when he arrived are quickly replaced by illustrated catalogues and homemaking guides as their relationship progresses (80). His damning diary is written in a “microscopic script” that “only a loving wife could decipher” (44). Humbert invents “elaborate dreams, pure classics in style,” in order to mock the psychoanalysts who attempt to interpret them (36). The book is filled with codes, disguised words, and hidden messages, as well as language and behavior designed to produce systematic misinterpretations. This depiction could be applied to all of Nabokov’s works, and is especially resonant for a discussion of Lolita. Humbert, commenting on a word, “mask,” that he has just written, wonders suggestively: “Is ‘mask’ the keyword? Is it there because there is always delight in the semitranslucent mystery, the flowing charshaf, through which the flesh and the eye you alone are elected to know smile in passing at you alone?” (55). Above all, the work is a sustained drama of reading and misreading. It parodies a number of familiar types of narratee, castigates inappropriate expectations and responses to the events, provides a running commentary on the values of a variety of authors and genres, and shows how individuals variously attempt to gain cultural capital or enhance their social position through the books they read or claim to read. Perhaps more than any of Nabokov’s other works, Lolita (1953) thematizes and explores the subject of reading relations.
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