Memory, Consciousness, and Time in Nabokov's Lolita

Olga Hasty

Memory, Consciousness, and Time

in Nabokov's Lolita

ABSTRACT

In his "Confession of a White Widowed Male," Humbert Humbert,

the fictional narrator of Nabokov's Lolita, writes: "I am not concerned

with so-called 'sex' at all." In the context of a narrative that centers

on his pedophilia, it is difficult to take this assertion seriously. Yet if

we do, we come to appreciate that Humbert's sexuality is emblematic

of a distinctly modernist response to the perennial question of

how to counter temporal passage and the inevitable loss attendant

on it. Nabokov's configuration of memory, consciousness, and time in

Lolita shows how passage itself might be engaged in the creative

enterprise of resisting loss.

In his afterword "On a Book Entitled Lolita" Vladimir

Nabokov situates the origin of the work that won

him notoriety, acclaim, and considerable wealth in

an incident that is distant from the pedophilia that

appears central to the novel:

The first little throb of Lolita went through me

late in 1939 or early in 1940, in Paris, at a time

when I was laid up with a severe attack of intercostal

neuralgia. As far as I can recall, the initial

shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted

KronoScope 4:2 (2004)

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2004

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.1

The pitiable results of the experiment Nabokov designates as "the first little

throb of Lolita" had been anticipated by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke who,

some four decades earlier (1902-3), having observed a beast pace his narrow

cage in that very same Jardin des Plantes, described it in the exquisite lyric

"Der Panther:"

Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe

Und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt.

(It seems as if there are a thousand bars

And past these thousand bars no world.)2

Like the ape that Nabokov subsequently invoked, the panther is shown not

simply in sad captivity, but in a state of tragically circumscribed consciousness,

aware only of the bars of his cage in their horrific multiplicity and not

of the world beyond them. Such circumscription of consciousness lies at the

heart of Lolita, where we see the drawing of the confining bars (indeed, the

very construction of the cage) and yet also the means by which awareness

might be extended beyond them. In the following exploration of the complex

architecture of this cage, we observe that it is the configuration of time

and memory that determines whether consciousness is gloriously expanded

or tragically minimized. In this context, the pedophilia that shocked readers

when Lolita was brought out - first by a French (1955) and then by an American

publisher (1958) - can be recognized as not itself the illness, but rather as the

symptom of a distinctly modernist confrontation with temporal passage. By

attending to how the fictional narrator's desire is framed, we come to understand

that his sexuality foregrounds questions of time and that his cage is a

temporal one.

Nabokov began work on Lolita, the novel for which he (correctly) believed

he would be remembered, as he was writing the sketches of what would

become Speak, Memory, a dazzling display of the creative possibilities that

arise when, as he puts it, "memory meets imagination half-way." This lucid

memoir is a testament to Nabokov's conviction that a fully conscious self

both fuels and is itself fueled by the ceaseless absorption of experience into

226 * Olga Hasty

memory, an on-going process in which past, present, and future are figured

in dynamic interdependency and not simply in succession. As elsewhere in

his writings, in Speak, Memory Nabokov deploys what he calls "memory in

the making" in a forceful stand against linear temporality in favor of a thickly

experienced time. In this regard Nabokov concurs with Bergson and Proust.

Yet although he held these great thinkers about time and memory in esteem,

when it came to the notion of involuntary memory, Nabokov parted company

with them to claim memory for consciousness. This claim informs the

vehemently anti-Freudian stance Nabokov assumes in his fictional and nonfictional

writings alike. Freud roots his theory of memory in a sharply-drawn