A Response to Sarah Herbold

Nabo^ Studies 4 (1997) Forum Response AMY SPUNGEN (Highland Park, Illinois) A Response to Sarah Herbold Sarah Herbold's essay in Nabo^ Studies 3 (1996) raises die interesting question of where Nabokov, and Lolita specifically, fit in the realm of the occasionally conflicting modernist paradigms so exhaustively delineated in Astradur Eysteinsson's book The Concept of Modernism. Unfortunately, Herbold's interpretations of both Eysteinsson's and Nabokov's books are problematic. The density of Eysteinsson's text and his shifts from one modernist paradigm and its attendant terminology to another make for challenging reading; however, in bolstering her assertions that Eysteinsson's arguments seem paradoxical to the point of contradicting himself, Herbold neglects textual nuances and ultimately undermines her interpretation of Lolita. The challenges in assessing Herbold's arguments concerning Eysteinsson are exacerbated by the fact that she has attempted to compress an extremely complex book into two paragraphs. Eysteinsson himself refuses such a task, implicitly acknowledging the difficulty of his own text when he explains in its concluding segment why he offers no summary of his arguments . "Such a procedure," he writes, "never does much justice to the process of working through the issues at hand and can 226 Nabokov Studies only serve to reduce the value of deliberating the problematics of an entire cultural paradigm" (Eysteinsson 222). Most troubling is Herbold's statement that Eysteinsson "... asserts that modernism is revolutionary because it constitutes (in the words of Harry Levin) a 'conscience for the scientific age'" (145). As compelling a pronouncement as this is, Eysteinsson makes no statement precisely to this effect. Herbold's quote by Levin is used by Eysteinsson in a different context, namely, in a discussion about the tension between modernism and modernization . In fact, one of Eysteinsson's main points is that modernism , subversive by its nature and unquestioningly part of a massive literary revolt, has the potential to be truly revolutionary , but has not yet "decisively challenged prevalent signification systems of the cultural order, " remaining largely a branch of "idiolects." (Eysteinsson 219) Herbold also demonstrates in her essay mat she can be loose witii a quote. She writes that Eysteinsson "concedes that 'it is hard to imagine the impact of modernism's cultural reorientation . . . because of the very 'openness' of the semantic revolt'" (145-146). In fact, Eysteinsson's actual text reads thus: "Modernist practices often point toward an (impossibly) revolutionary restructuring of the codes, and thus toward a cultural reorientation the impact of which is hard to imagine because of the very 'openness' of the semiotic revolt" (222). Though any iotations from Concept run heavy risk of being taken out of context, this is a particularly significant one, for it could be interpreted as contradicting Herbold's statement that Eysteinsson views modernism as revolutionary in its most specific definition, namely, as having decisively accomplished an overthrow of existing literary structures. Had Herbold explored die implication of Eysteinsson's parenthetical aside in this sentence, she might not have concluded so roundly that he contradicts himself. Without making her position with regard to Eysteinsson clear, Herbold proposes to use Lolita as a "test case" to Response 227 demonstrate that the novel "engages with the world" by forcing the reader to reenact internally the conflicts of modernism and modernity (146, 150). To do this she determines that, given Nabokov's famous declaration that he writes with "no moral in tow" and other various statements about pursuing aesthetic fulfillment through his writing, the only way to experience Lolita is to "impersonate" me autiior, or nanator, or perhaps bom. "My identity and role," she writes, "shift as Humbert/Nabokov pits die private world of the highly-wrought self-conscious novel against the public world that is controlled by the Law, the Almighty, or the conventions of realism" (146, 149). In Herbold's analysis, the novel's nanative and nanator become absorbed spongelike by the reader, who reacts with any and all emotions—lust, honor, humor, anogance—filtered through Humbert. Apparentiy this reader is incapable of escaping from complete identification with the nanator, and indeed must embody all of his—and, by implication, Nabokov's— emotions. The reader as viewed by Herbold thus becomes an impossibly impressionable pawn of...