Fantasies of Lo

Leland de la Durantaye has misunderstood—or misrepresented—my interpretation of Lolita. Far from regarding Lolita simply as uncultivated white trash unworthy of the reader's empathy, I sought in my 1998 article to demonstrate that critics focus too much on the novel's superficial narrative layer, in which Lolita is a naïve and pathetic victim. They fail to see the more sophisticated and powerful Lolita who occasionally reveals herself (and is revealed by narrator and author) through the "veil" of her innocence—or of Humbert's solipsism. This "other" Lolita is a kind of double for Humbert (and Nabokov): an expert and seductive maker of fictions who loves to capture her "reader" in a web of enchantment. She is also sexually sophisticated as well as artistically so, and her cleverness is integral to her charm. This Lolita is made more evident in earlier sections; it is only at Coalmont, I wrote, that Lolita is reduced to a white trash victim of fate. I argued that this reduction should be seen (and may well have been meant by Nabokov to be seen) as a gross simplification, one not unlike de la Durantaye's own Lolita, who is a flat and unknowable—and therefore impotent—character.

One hint that Nabokov conceived of Lolita as a layered character whose reality is impossible to pin down is his frequent allusions to the motif of perceptual illusion. For example, early on Humbert describes how he often saw from his balcony "what looked like a nymphet in the act of undressing before a co-operative mirror," only to have it turn into "the disgusting lamp-lit bare arm of a man in his underclothes reading his paper by the open window in the hot, damp, hopeless summer night" (Appel, Annotated Lolita 20). In another example, Humbert later describes how his vision of "Lo in white shorts receding through the speckled shadow of a garden path" suddenly becomes "in an alternate vision, as if life's course constantly branched, Lo, in slacks, and her companion, in shorts, trudging up and down a small weedy area" (163). Nabokov's point is that life—like his novel—does constantly branch: Lolita's many names (Dolores, Lola, Dolly, etc.) similarly allude to the many different versions of her with which the reader (and Humbert) are presented.

In emphasizing the heroine's "duplicity" (or multiplicity), I did not mean to suggest that the reader should not be moved by her suffering or shocked by Humbert's treatment of her. But I did want to shift our focus away from the poor-little-Lolita reading so that we could recognize an alternate version of the story not simply as Humbert's specious attempt to shift the blame for his depredations to their victim (as Kauffman and others have argued), but as Nabokov's own sly homage to the power of women as makers of meaning and not simply its matter. It is difficult, but not impossible, to read Lolita as telling at least two competing stories simultaneously, neither of which wins out over the other, but that is what I think a robust and responsive reader must do to be "true" to Lolita.

It is true, as de la Durantaye writes, that I am interested in the ways in which the complex dynamic between Lolita and Humbert generates and mirrors a similar one between author (or narrator) and reader. But this interest does not have to reduce Lolita to a mere "emblem" or "allegory" of a narratological phenomenon. Nabokov himself focuses our attention on the fact that Lolita is in one sense merely a verbal fiction (e.g., "Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth," 9). But the fact that Nabokov makes his fiction reflect on its own means and effects does not mean his characters are mere "ciphers," as de la Durantaye's charge implies (though he later seems to endorse symbolic readings). They continue to live and breathe, exult and suffer, and could even be said to gain, as well as lose, significance...