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Is there a way to combine the two readings by trusting and distrusting Humbert at the same time? Sustaining such an ambivalent state of mind is generally challenging, as Dorrit Cohn observes in her analysis of a "historical pattern that recurs time and again in critical responses" to novels featuring unreliable narrators. As she puts it:

A first phase of their reception—sometimes lasting for decades—takes the narrator at his word, in a manner that makes for a fully concordant reading; and a second phase understands this same narrator as discordant— producing a reading that is itself at first received with surprise and disbelief, but that is before long widely accepted. I would propose that this second phase might ideally be followed by a third—one that is actually quite rare in practice: a self-conscious reading that understands the choices involved, a reading aware of the fact that there are choices involved, that the problems created by certain types of narrators—

narrators in whom one can spot incongruities in their evaluation of the events and characters of the story they tell—can be resolved in different

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ways.

Though Cohn sees the third phase as "quite rare," I wonder if focusing on the ways in which a given text manipulates our cognitive predispositions may make it easier for us to sustain that challenging state of "selfconscious reading." Specifically in the case of Lolita, if we realize that the novel encourages us to gravitate now toward one type of source-monitoring and now toward another (sometimes switching between the two in the same sentence), can we maintain for some time that strange mental stance of simultaneously believing and disbelieving Humbert?

And if we can do it with Lolita, what about Nabokov's other novels, such as The Eye, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and Pale Fire ? For it seems that by tirelessly probing and teasing and stretching our tendency to monitor sources of our representations, Nabokov made the cultivation of a mental vertigo in his readers into his trademark as a writer. Will our reading experience change as we gradually articulate the ground rules of the cognitive games that his novels play with us? Will we start putting a premium on consciously prolonging and cultivating those moments of cognitive uncertainty when we both believe and disbelieve, know and don't know, see and don't see?

Though, of course, we are already doing this, or something very close to this, when we are reading fictional chronicles of mayhem and murder, lies and thievery (i.e., narratives more immediately accessible and less disturbing than Lolita). Nabokov's novels are sometimes called "metaphysical" detective stories.26 Let us turn now to the "plain" detective stories and see how the research into the workings of our metarepresentational capacity clarifies the affinity between the two and generally begins to explain the pleasure that we derive from being intensely aware that we are being lied to.

TART 111

CONCEALING MINDS

ToM AND THE DETECTIVE NOVEL: WHAT DOES IT

TAKE TO SUSPECT EVERYBODY?

et us remind ourselves what a strange affair a typical detective novel is. Here is one of the masters of the genre, Dorothy Sayers, on the integrity of the craft:

There you are, then: there is your recipe for detective fiction: the art of framing lies. From beginning to end of your book, it is your whole aim and object to lead the reader up the garden; to induce him to believe some harmless person to be guilty; to believe the detective to be right where he is wrong and mistaken where he is right; to believe the false alibi to be sound, the present absent, the dead alive and the living dead; to believe in short, anything and everything but truth.1

In other words, we open a detective novel with an avid anticipation that our expectations will be systematically frustrated, that we will be repeatedly made fools of, and that for several hours—or even days, depending on how fast one reads—we will be fed deliberate lies in lieu of being given a direct answer to