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of Humbert's "impossible love." I felt deeply sorry (I say it now without any irony) for the witty, imaginative, and sensitive protagonist. As I was moving deeper and deeper into the novel, and Humbert was offering for my consideration one highly suspect supposition after another—that is, that some adolescent girls are demonic "nymphets" and that, though unaware of her special powers, one such "demon child" enchants the vulnerable Humbert into a mistimed and misplaced but poignant love affair—I ought to have started questioning the truth of such suppositions. I ought to have contemplated the possibility that Humbert is, as Nabokov righteously puts it, "a vain and cruel wretch," a ruthless pedophile, who exploits and victimizes the twelve-year-old orphan girl. Yet I did not.

Looking back at my first impression of the novel, I realize, to quote Boyd again, that I had "accepted only Humbert's version of himself." I responded to "Humbert's eloquence, not Nabokov's evidence." Boyd observes perceptively that by "making it possible to see Humbert's story so much from Humbert's point of view, Nabokov warns us to recognize the power of the mind to rationalize away the harm it can cause: the more powerful the mind, the stronger our guard needs to be" (232; emphasis added).

Understood within the context of a cognitive-evolutionary discourse, Boyd's notion of the "strong guard" corresponds, of course, to the concept of strong source-monitoring. In order not to be duped by liars, such as Lovelace and Humbert, who regularly lose—or seem to lose!—track of themselves as sources of their lies, we need to keep reapplying a very strong source tag, "Lovelace claims that" or "Humbert claims that," to every, however innocent and casual, observation such characters make and thus store it under the highest degree of advisement.

The trouble with this ideal stance of readerly vigilance is that it presupposes a constant state of suspicion that is difficult to maintain both in

11: Nabokov's Lolita

real life and in our engagement with the literary narrative. Note that there is a genre built around the hypertrophied readerly mistrust—the detective story—but it deploys a particular set of markers to signal to us early on that certain—by no means all!—information within it has to be stored with a high degree of metarepresentational framing. (I return to this issue again in Part III, dedicated to the detective novel.) By contrast, Lolita (although it can be read as a kind of a detective story) offers us little in the way of such markers. We do not realize until well into the novel, and sometimes not even then, that no information offered, however casually, by Humbert was safe from his manipulation and misrepresentation.

A novel featuring a first-person unreliable narrator thus exploits a particular niche in our cognitive makeup. Although source-monitoring is an integral part of our information management, exaggerated and unrelentingly strong source-monitoring can be rather cognitively expensive and thus not our default state of mind. It seems that we are not automatically open to incurring this large cognitive cost. Once we have bracketed the given fictional narrative as a whole as a metarepresentation par excellence stored with the perpetual source tag pointing to its author, we are not necessarily prepared to treat with suspicion the majority of representations that we encounter within it. That is, we could, but we need some reason for it. We need some indication that a given character (i.e., a source of this or that representation) is untrustworthy.

It follows, then, that Lolita manages to trick us into accepting Humbert's perspective on his relationship with his victim not because we are such gullible, naive, undiscerning readers walking around like happy idiots with our mental guards down, but rather because Nabokov makes the most of certain regularities of our cognitive system of information management. The "powerful mind" against which Boyd warns us is really our own.6

(a) "Distributed" Mind Reading I: A "comic, clumsy, wavering Prince Charming"