Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [70]
It is peculiarly appropriate that to comment on his predicament, Humbert draws on the famous sentimental emblem of the second part of the eighteenth century—an image of a trapped bird13—put into cultural circulation by the author himself particularly fond of experimenting with his readers' source-monitoring ability (for how trustworthy, for example, is a narrator who tells the story of his conception and his mother's pregnancy and labor as if he were present on all of these occasions?14). Already by the early nineteenth century, a writer could imply that a character takes herself a touch too seriously by having that character liken herself to the Sternean starling (as does Maria Bertram in Austen's Mansfield Park), but we get no indication in Lolita that Humbert is aware of this ironic tradition. His portrayal of the caged self is yet another in a series of images showing him as trapped and enslaved by his irresistible nymphet, and, on this occasion, we have no way of knowing whether he can put a critical distance between this vision of his plight and the reality of his relationship with Lolita. In Phelan's terms, Humbert misregards his reality, manifesting unreliability "on the axis of ethics and evaluation."15
Yet, scattered throughout the novel—and growing more persistent toward its end—are Humbert's apparently reliable assessments of that relationship. Their presence eventually enables us to reread Lolita not as a "love story" but as a story of a "vain and cruel wretch," who has been misleading himself and his audience about the true meaning of his actions and is now beginning to face that true meaning, albeit gradually and reluctantly. This crucial dual perspective of Lolita is possible only because it is firmly grounded in our metarepresentational capacity. Nabokov intuitively exploits this capacity both to deceive and to disabuse his readers. Here is how it works:
I have shown already how, to convince his audience of his version of events, Humbert distributes representations testifying to his tortured virtue and Lolita's demonic sexuality via different, seemingly independent and disinterested, sources throughout the narrative. Because we register those sources (can't help doing so—metarepresenting species that ours is!), we are amenable to buying into the false perspective that they tacitly and tirelessly convey. But then something else happens, too. Nabokov splits his narrator in two—Humbert before he started writing the "Confession of a White Widowed Male" and Humbert who is writing his "Confessions" and rethinking his story-—a phenomenon that Phelan characterizes as the "dual focalization"16 of the novel. The "present-tense" Humbert is forced to see things that the "past-tense" Humbert managed/chose not to see, and this painful new "sightedness"17 renders him an increasingly, if fitfully, reliable narrator.
In other words, to deceive us, the novel triggers our metarepresentational capacity by alerting us to the source tags of certain representations (i.e., agent-specifying source tags pointing to policemen, garage-fellows, hotel pages, vacationists, salesgirls, the implied reader, Dick, Bill, etc.), whereas to undeceive us, it triggers our metarepresentational capacity by alerting us to the time tags of certain representations (i.e., source tags pointing to Humbert "then" and Humbert "now"). Let us consider some instances of the latter, using as a starting point Phelan's analysis of Lolita in Living to Tell about Lt.
To show that Lolita contains frequent shifts between the perspectives of the pre-"Confessions" protagonist and the protagonist who is now writing his "Confessions," Phelan turns to Humbert's description