Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [64]
Here is one specific strategy that Nabokov uses to turn our source-monitoring ability to Humbert's advantage as he constructs his initial account of his and Lolita's "love affair." Nabokov "distributes" Humbert's version of events through the multiple minds within the narrative.7 That is, he makes other characters indirectly tell Humbert's story the way he wants it to be told. The effect of this distributed representation is such that instead of dealing with just one source of information—Humbert, whose credibility we could have sized up pretty quickly—we are encouraged to perceive that we are dealing with multiple sources of information. Some of those sources—most of them, in fact—are introduced and removed so fast that we simply have no opportunity to evaluate their trustworthiness and even to realize that such an evaluation is necessary.
The minds through which the story is told in such a distributed manner include the mind of the implied reader, of Lolita, of her friends and family, and of the numerous people they meet on their travels. Typically, we would get Humbert's report of what happened to him and Lolita (e.g., they were stopped for speeding), followed by a representation of participants' thoughts and feelings (e.g., what the patrolmen who stopped the couple thought of them). The representation in question is supplied by Humbert in such a calculatedly quick, casual, and assured manner that we rarely pause and attempt to separate the observed behavior (here, of patrolmen) from Humbert's interpretation of a mental stance behind that behavior. Instead of registering the information as "Humbert claims that" (one crucial source tag) "when patrolmen stopped their car they thought" (another source tag) "X" (the representation itself), we instead register it as a representation with just one agent-specifying source tag: "when patrolmen stopped their car they thought X." Even if at this point in the narrative we have good reasons to mistrust Humbert, we have no reasons to mistrust the patrolmen we have just met (so to speak). We thus swallow the false representation because it is presented to us with an apparently trustworthy or, at least, not conspicuously untrustivorthy source tag.
And, of course, whatever patrolmen and other strangers are thus reported to think or feel, their thoughts and feelings tacitly corroborate in a broad variety of ways Humbert's tale of the oversexed little demon seducing the innocent adult. The overall effect of those accumulating snapshots of states of mind is that the "vain and cruel wretch's" version of the story imperceptibly worms its way into the reader's consciousness.
The novel does contain several strategically chosen occasions on which we are allowed a glimpse at Humbert as the source of our representations of the characters' thoughts and feelings. The accretion of such occasions toward the end of the story finally forces us to start doubting what we have until now considered trustworthy reports of mental states. Many of these doubts, however, are never completely confirmed or cleared up. As in Clarissa, we are left with a feeling of a mental vertigo8 induced by the author's consummate manipulation of our source-monitoring ability.
To begin to appreciate the range of strategies Humbert uses to erase
11: Nabokov's Lolita
himself as the source of every mental state reported by the novel, consider his early attempt to ascribe a certain memory to his readers. Here is Humbert telling us about his childhood on the Riviera:
My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which . . . the sun of my infancy had set: surely you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges. (10)
As a matter of fact, we do not know "those redolent remnants of day suspended,