Time Will Tell: (Re)Reading the Seductive Simulacra of Nabokov's Lolita

TIME WILL TELL: (RE)READING THE SEDUCTIVE SIMULACRA OF NABOKOV'S LOLTTA Harriet Hustis The College of New Jersey Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, the sordid and self-professed "confessions of a white widowed male" named Humbert Humbert, concludes with a striking, if somewhat unsavory, reflection. Having narrated the story of his abduction and molestation of his thirteen-year-old step-daughter, Dolores Haze, and described his eventual murder of her impotent lover and subsequent abductor, the pornographer Clare Quilty, Humbert announces, "This then is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful brightgreen flies."1 Why, in the metaphoric gore ofhis own act ofnarration, does the incarcerated Humbert Humbert call attention to the fact that he has "reread" the story which he has (presumably) just penned? To what extent is his—and, by extension, the reader's—appreciation for the commingled elements ofbeauty and atrocity that he describes (the "marrow," the "blood," and the "beautiful bright-green flies") premised upon this act of rereading?2 What does an act of rereading—both in and of Nabokov's Lolita—involve, entail and encourage, exactly? In his chapter entitled, "? Thousand Times and Never Like': Rereading for Class," Peter J. Rabinowitz argues that we often use the term "reading" to refer to two essentially different and distinct activities : "reading against memory" or "the process by which a reader makes retroactive sense of an already completed text," and "configurational" reading or reading "toward the end." For Rabinowitz, the former constitutes "the act of holding a work up to itself; "reading against memory" emphasizes "the act of looking at the formal ingenuity of its coherence rather than being carried along by the perplexing flow of the plot," and thus it "stresses design at the expense of dramatic force."3 Ultimately, Rabinowitz concludes that "reading against memory" is really an act of rereading in disguise: it treats a text's retrospective coherence as an ever-present given by retroactively identifying it as that which is always immediately apparent. Similarly, in his essay entitled "Good Readers and Good Writers," Nabokov insists that, for his own part, he "usefs] the word readervery loosely" because "[c]uriously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and ere- 90Harriet Hustis ative reader is a rereader." According to Nabokov, "rereading," or what Rabinowitz terms "reading against memory," is the only way that we can accurately "acquaint ourselves" with a text. Unlike visual perception , Nabokov argues, [i]n reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting.4 Nabokov thus overtly privileges "reading against memory" ("rereading ") as the only way to comprehend and experience the inherently diachronic nature of narrative. When we read, we cannot immediately and instantaneously traverse space via perception ("take in the whole picture") and experience, appreciate, or enjoy the attendant aesthetic details. According to Nabokov, reading is a prolonged acquaintance that extends over time; "good" reading therefore entails rereading because the combination of scope and precision—the integration of the textual and the temporal—is only an eventual result of multiple moments of consideration and deliberation repeatedly experienced in the wake of a prior familiarity with the text itself. In short, for Nabokov, the value of rereading appears to reside in its capacity to teach us about the expense—and expanse—of time.5 As Rabinowitz has suggested, however, when "reading against memory" (or rereading) is conflated with what is commonly labelled a "first-reading"—that is, when "coherence is . . . presented as if it actually were configuration"—"covert systems of value" are introduced. What is erased or suppressed is the fact that "rereading is not simply a chronological stage that comes, horizontally, after first reading. Rather, these two sets of strategies are represented vertically by two different [readers] at a given moment, two...