Nor as a writer can he easily escape into what he calls at the end of the book "the refuge of art," not only because of readers' repugnance for his theme, but also because the language needed to tell his story has a life of its own, one just as hostile toward Humbert's self-expression as normal people themselves are. That is to say, as an autobiographical narrator Humbert's life is unavailable to the language of direct description—and doubly so—not only because his explicit goal is to render time, but also because he is a pervert, and the sturdy conservatism of language refuses to allow the expression of the abnormal without semantic censure. Language constantly threatens to dismiss the all-consuming meaning of Humbert's passion as no more than a dirty joke, for even in his accounts of ostensibly non-sexual matters he cannot escape the jeering of ordinary language representing and expressing the ordinary world. In one instance, for example, he sees a sign on a motel advertising "Children Under 14 Free"; in another, he tries to understand the adolescent Lolita with the help of a child-rearing guide called Know Your Own Daughter. How can Humbert write in ways true to his life's experience if language itself constantly mocks him?

At one point early in his narrative, he attempts to escape the constraints of ordinary language and to express his own sense of his life by creating a special mode of discourse. In section 5, after three autobiographical paragraphs that end by explaining how he found a career as a teacher of English in France, he adopts the manner of a teacher toward us:

Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as "nymphets." It will be marked that I substitute time terms for spatial ones. In fact, I would have the reader see "nine" and "fourteen" as the boundaries—the mirrory beaches and rosy rocks—of an enchanted island haunted by those nymphets of mine and surrounded by a vast, misty sea...(I, 5)

The lecture on nymphets continues for another page and more, but Humbert's attempts to explain himself by creating a special technical language outside the constraints of common speech continue to be plagued by failures of expression evident from the start. He gives us readily enough the dry manner of rational exposition through definition and logical development: "I wish to introduce the following idea"; "I propose to designate"; "It will be marked." But he can only fill the content of this style with anti-rational, anti-logical terms of magic: "bewitched," "demoniac," "enchanted," "haunted," and so on. His attempt at a reasoned explanation explains nothing about nymphets, but rather only further mystifies the subject.

With the exception of this moment, rather than trying to find a specialized way of talking Humbert constantly attempts to preempt and to counterattack the revolt of language in order to contain its rebellion and limit its disruptive force. Through anticipation and self-mockery he works to forestall and to defuse the semantic protests of words and the moral protests of readers. For example, even before first-time readers know exactly what form Humbert's crimes have taken, he ends the third paragraph of his beautifully lyrical opening section ("Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul...") with the self-deflationary: "You can always trust a murderer for a fancy prose style." Again, he frequently addresses readers as "Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury," a reminder both that he is always aware of our judgmental reactions and that by the same token we should admit that we would wrongly prejudge him if we did not attend to his testimony in full. Further, though he constantly addresses his readers directly, he never treats them with disdain, the attitude he brings to almost everyone in his life other than Lolita. Nor does he try to dismiss or mitigate our moral disgust, but often presents a satiric self-loathing more vigorously and more fully expressed than any indictment we ourselves might render.

A reader's ultimate negative judgment is to shut a book before completing it, and Humbert makes many different efforts to keep us from doing so before we hear him out. Beyond inviting us to see his self-loathing and meeting the impotencies of his life and language with self-mockery, he attempts to amuse us with his comic contempt for the people in his life who unlike his readers are unaware of his real identity. He tells us, for example, that though he might have had his pick of many women, his first wife, Valeria is a "practically brainless baba." He mistakenly married her for the imitation she gave of a little girl, in order to control his sexual urges through prophylactic conjugal relations with an adult. But just before World War II when Humbert is trying to leave for America, Valeria suddenly manifests a behavior at odds with her established identity as the adoring love slave of her scornful master:

During the last weeks I had kept noticing that my fat Valeria was not her usual self; had acquired a queer restlessness; even showed something like irritation at times, which was quite out of keeping with the stock character she was supposed to impersonate...

We were coming out of some office building one morning with her papers almost in order, when Valeria, as she waddled by my side, began to shake her poodle head vigorously without saying a word. I let her go on for a while and then asked if she thought she had something inside. She answered (I translate from her French which was, I imagine, a translation in its turn of some Slavic platitiude): "There is another man in my life."

Now, these are ugly words for a husband to hear. They dazed me, I confess. To beat her up on the street, there and then, as an honest vulgarian might have done, was not feasible. Years of secret sufferings had taught me superhuman self-control. So I ushered her into a taxi which had been invitingly creeping along the curb for some time, and in this comparative privacy I quietly suggested she comment her wild talk. (I, 8)

In the taxi, Valeria raves on about her unhappiness with Humbert and her desire for an immediate divorce. Humbert for his part keeps demanding her lover's name:

Mais qui es-ce? I shouted at last, striking her on the knee with my fist; and she, without even wincing, stared at me as if the answer were too simple for words, then gave a quick shrug and pointed at the thick neck of the taxi driver. He pulled up at a small café and introduced himself. (I, 8)

Here we see a representative if minor instance of how multiple plots can express Humbert's temporal experience fully and truly. For first-time readers—as for Humbert himself in living through this event in his life—the taxi creeping along the curb seems a trivial and fortuitous detail. For re-readers as for Humbert at the moment of writing, the taxi has an entirely different meaning. Maximovitch (the driver's name) has been following the couple to protect his lover from just the kind of violence Humbert demonstrates. The creeping cab now takes its place in a pleromatic plot of fulfillment, keeping its disguised and deceptive narrative promise in unexpected ways, while the taxi and the other elements of the scene also become reassembled synchronically into a causal plot different from that at first experienced by diachronic readers.

The action finally imitated here by the multiple plots is Humbert's life in a moment of time. We know what it was like for Humbert to experience time as change, because—having been mistaken about and surprised by the same facts—we have gone through a simulacrum of his experience in its creation of a new consciousness defined by a new before and after. The creeping taxi and its driver are reassembled into a new casual plot with a different "one after that" becoming redefined as a different "one because of that." As usual, the evidence for Humbert's failure is literally right in front of him and us; yet like his reader he can perceive the truth only in retrospect.

By means of such different yet simultaneous plots, Humbert partly solves the problem of conveying and dramatizing his experience of time. That is to say, he manages some of the complex interrelated difficulties of language and time in his narrative by giving words simultaneous expression in different temporal registers. Because he wants his reader to understand what it was like to live through his life, his ambitions as a narrator inevitably find themselves on the horns of a chronological dilemma. Most generally, from his present temporal point of view as a writer in jail, he knows that his life—defined as the attempt to realize his dream of fully possessing the love of a nymphet—was finally a failure. Still, while his pursuit of his dream's realization was ongoing, he did not (and of course could not) know the final failed result of his struggles. Therefore (for example) something like a narrative of consistent elegiac lament from the standpoint of his prison cell would not present a narrative true to his life in its diachronic experience, where again and again he lived in hope of success. On the other hand, neither would he be true to the meaning of his story by meretriciously concealing once apparently irrelevant evidence that had become meaningful at different subsequent moments. His life as an ongoing present has had its pleromatic promises both kept and disappointed in unexpected ways, and this is the life he dramatizes for us as a narrator.

III

To solve the problem of giving us a diachronic sense of his experience without shirking the responsibility of his synchronic knowledge, Humbert employs a narrative technique of re-doubled and reassembled time exemplified early on in one form by the taxi scene (I, 8) and in another by the even earlier Annabel episode (I, 3-4). As I have indicated, it is at the end of the first section devoted to Annabel that Humbert tells us of their last sexual encounter on the day before she must leave the Riviera:

Under the flimsiest of pretexts (this was our very last chance and nothing really mattered) we escaped from the café to the beach, and found a desolate stretch of sand, and there, in the violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, had a brief session of avid caresses, with somebody's lost pair of sunglasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu. (I, 3)

Recall that as first-time readers we do not yet know anything about a "first" tryst. Therefore, reading of her death after this moment of farce and frustration seems to bring full closure to a causal plot with a beginning, middle, and end—a plot that extends in the same section from their meeting and erotic feelings, to their difficulties of sexual fulfillment, to her irrevocable loss. Yet even here Humbert's narration puts the meaning of language into a temporal flux and creates a coextensive pleromatic plot. The phrase "this was our very last chance," which seems only situational hyperbole in the first sentence, takes on a new and all too literal meaning when re-read in the light of the last sentence.

After ending Section 3 with Annabel's death, Humbert begins Section 4 with what seems a concluding speculation on the meaning of the episode. He insists on their love's unique harmony and intensity, and he wonders about its implications for his adult erotic life. But just then, when Annabel's story seems finally finished, Humbert begins a new paragraph by saying: "I have reserved for the conclusion of my 'Annabel' phase the account of our unsuccessful first tryst."

Because he reverses the sequence of incidents from his life's time in his story's time, we read about the first unsuccessful sexual encounter already knowing of Annabel's imminent death. We know therefore (for one thing) that failure and frustration were all the twelve-year-old girl would ever know of consummated love. The known pathos of Annabel's destiny creates a dignity for their first sexual gropings in the garden, a dignity that would not have been available to a strict chronological account. That is, our knowledge of her future protects the scene from the bathos of situation and language always threatening to sink it:

A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion. (I, 4)

"Scepter of my passion" indeed! But what can Humbert (or anyone) say about the physical facts of love that would not sound ludicrous in comparison with the helpless aching tenderness of its emotions? It is at this moment only a few pages into the book that we come to understand the very real limits of sexual expression for Humbert both verbally and in fact. Physical sensation is only the most he can really give (though he would be willing to give his entrails) and physical possession is only the best he can hope to get.

He earlier says of his love with Annabel that its "frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh" (I,3). Just so, Humbert later expresses the wish to turn Lolita inside out and kiss her kidneys. The man who knows all Lolita's clothing sizes, who interprets every sound and silence in a suburban house only as clues to her exact position within it, who transforms her mimeographed class roster into a love poem, who cherishes an old sock—this is a man for whom sexual possession makes only the most extreme but still unsatisfactory compromise that the possession he desires must make with the limitations of reality. The fact is that his desire to possess his beloved object is so great that it could never be fulfilled in life, because its literal fulfillment would destroy its object and thus defeat its goal.

Because their lovemaking is interrupted immediately after the passage just quoted, Humbert's love for Annabel ends without even sexual fulfillment on his part. And because we already know about their farcical troubles on the beach and that she will soon die, we know too that any such fulfillment will be forever denied. Like Humbert as a narrator we are placed on the horns of a temporal dilemma, and the garden scene is thereby expanded in its duration and deepened in its emotional force. Because we must reverse Humbert's life-time in his narrative-time and reassemble the temporal sequence in imagination to make it fit the story's chronology, readers new to the book come to resemble re-readers, and it is as virtual re-readers that we experience Humbert's ongoing story in the garden both diachronically and synchronically, as he has and does. Without the expansion of time into a dual presence, the moment could hardly have seemed so touching. But precisely because of the unusual narrative structure, the garden can seem an Edenic one, where Humbert may innocently express what love and sex can really mean to him, without the special betrayals of language or the humiliation and guilt that must always accompany his account of his love for Lolita.

In his poem, "The Reader" (2001), Richard Wilbur beautifully evokes the powers and pleasures of re-reading fiction:

She is going back, these days, to the great stories
That charmed her younger mind. A shaded light
Shines on the nape half-shadowed by her curls
And a page turns now with a scuffing sound.
Onward they come again, the orphans reaching
For a first handhold in a stony world,
The young provincials who at last look down
On the city's maze, and will descend into it,
The serious girl, once more, who would live nobly,
The sly one who aspires to marry so,
The young man bent on glory, and that other
Who seeks a burden. Knowing as she does
What will become of them in bloody field
Or Tuscan garden, it may be that at times
She sees their first and final selves at once,
As a god might to whom all time is now.
(ll. 1-16)

If re-readers become like gods in their temporal point of view, they also become like first-person narrators. From the start of his story, Humbert invites us into an ongoing process of re-reading his life as he does, the better to understand its meaning as a function of time by seeing the present in the light of the future. Operating within the book's smallest and largest narrative units, the technique creates a complexity of attendant emotions like that complexity which characterizes a reader's experience of Lolita as a whole.

IV

In early episodes like those involving Annabel and Valeria, we come to know how the same facts, by hermeneutically transpiring within a pleromatic plot, may be reassembled to take their places in a new causal plot. But though Annabel appears only three pages into Humbert's narrative, it is not the first time that Nabokov has used one of his creatures to employ the same technique. In the third paragraph of his pompous and inept "Foreword," John Ray, Jr., Ph. D. continues to condescend to a story readers have yet to begin:

For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the "real" people beyond the "true" story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. "Windmuller," of "Ramsdale," who desires his identity suppressed so that "the long shadow of this sorry and sordid business" should not reach the community to which he is proud to belong. His daughter "Louise" is by now a college sophomore. "Mona Dahl" is a student in Paris. "Rita" has recently married the proprietor of a hotel in Florida. Mrs. "Richard F. Schiller" died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. "Vivian Darkbloom" has written a biography, "My Cue," to be published shortly, and critics who have perused the manuscript call it her best book. The caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk. (6)