life is too short & love is too long

that's right

no please im dying to talk about lolita

so, i feel like i have to start with the critique of psychiatry, specifically psychoanalysis, that runs through the entire book. humbert tells us that he revels in making himself obscure to psychiatrists by lying to them; the extent of the actual deceit is ofc unclear because he's an unreliable narrator, but certainly it's true that psychoanalysis fails to 'fix' humbert or to save dolores, most obviously when the beardsley teachers believe she's psychosexually underdeveloped and approach humbert to discuss it. humbert delights in pointing out that the patterns the analyst seeks in human behaviour and desires simply fail, again and again, to correct or prevent his preying on children; also, obviously, psychiatry operates within / continuous to the institution of the family, and so is often categorically incapable of preventing or even perceiving violence that occurs as a result of a familial relationship, as in humbert's use of the father role to enable his rape of dolores.

and like, sure, humbert has plenty of self-interested reason to disdain psychoanalysis, as a science that positions itself as potentially aiming to prevent his sexual abuse. but the reasons he generally gives for his criticism are clustered around the idea that psychoanalysis seeks patterns where there are none to be found, and makes meaning out of nothing (eg, "the scholastic rigamarole and standardised symbols of the psychoanalytic racket"). of course, in truth humbert himself seeks patterns and order constantly, from his emphasis on his european morals and the contrast to the unruly america (particularly the western states), to his supposed talent in seeing the stratagems of chess laid out neatly on the board in contrast to gaston perceiving "all ooze and squidcloud," to his use of tennis as a kind of disciplinary measure with dolores, aimed at making the "symmetry" of the court bring out the "harmonies latent in her." and, nabokov goes out of his way to tell us that humbert also retains belief in those two other viennese sciences of pattern-seeking par excellence: phrenology (historically more inclusive a science than how we think of it today, and very much growing from and encompassing physiognomy, to which humbert makes at least one explicit reference and on which he implicitly relies constantly throughout the book) and mesmerism (encountered in this time period as the 'hypnotism' humbert speaks highly of numerous times, along with the fact that at the very end of the book he tells us that one pseudonym he considered using was "mesmer mesmer", a reference to franz mesmer).

this got me thinking about what nabokov was trying to convey by giving us this very clear picture of humbert as someone who, though hostile to psychoanalysis in particular, is generally not only amenable to this type of pattern-seeking and narrativising but often actually dependent on it. and then i thought, well, it's not really about order or patterns in themselves at all. what's at stake for humbert, and for us as readers, is the power relations underlying various discourses of social order, and the pattern of control thus enabled. humbert's problem with psychoanalysis is that it positions itself, however ineffectually, as trying to create subjects who are sexually 'developed' and 'healthy', which he encounters as being directly oppositional to his own interest in preying on girls, and his attempts to make dolores into lolita, whom he wants to be cultured and mannered rather than unruly—but the sense of rule and order needs to come from himself, not from the abstract and distant authority that the analyst speaks on behalf of. so, the critique of psychoanalysis is twofold. 1) analysts fail to see the danger of humbert or the rape of dolores even when it's occurring almost in front of them; but, 2) even if they were to perceive these things, what the analyst can offer is really just an alternate version of the same sort of disciplinary ordering that humbert tries to subject dolores to, only with the definition of order or normality or health coming from a whole social matrix rather than from one man. analogously, humbert can wield the threat of child protective services against dolores, because although it would remove her from his control, she would be at the mercy of a different source of violence, namely the state. in this way, of course, humbert's abuse and rape of dolores is not actually oppositional to but metonymic of these broader structures of violence, control, and coercion, which fits also with the way we can read his use of the father role as pointing to the violence inherent to the patriarchal family structure and specifically the father-daughter relationship.

this sort of interrogation of the relationship between institutional violence and coercion and humbert's rape of dolores is pushed even further, i think, when we consider psychiatry as a subset of medical practice, and medicine's role in the book. most obviously, there is humbert's use of psychotropic drugs in his attempt to rape dolores the first time; drugging her is something he previously fantasised about and practiced by administering sleeping pills to charlotte. but the book is also littered with medical intervention that humbert perceives as akin to, or symbolic of, sexual violation. when humbert visits quilty's dentist uncle, for example, he says that the uncle perceived his mouth as "a splendid cave full of priceless treasures", but that humbert "denied him access". his arrest he describes as "surrendering like a patient". describing the moments of "paradise" he experienced sometimes after raping dolores, he compares her to "a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation". this obviously recalls humbert's own willingness to drug dolores in order to rape her; however, it also suggests that there is a very real way in which medical intervention—frequently coercive, invasive, authoritarian, &c—is itself already a site of bodily violation and violence. once again, the institution or the social ordering of a relationship—doctor–patient, father–daughter—is an obfuscatory device. the relation creates and enables violence, then defines it out of existence. in 'lolita', humbert's ultimate use of this process is through the re-naming of dolores and his continuous efforts to force her to become the 'nymphet', a figure that replaces 'child' and re-defines her as seductive, otherworldly, &c.

i think this is also something nabokov plays with in humbert's and dolores's travels westward. humbert sees america generally as coarser, less well-mannered, and more unruly than the continent. thus, he perceives their travels as taking them outside the bounds of the social limitations and norms that could prevent or frown upon his rape of dolores: the school, the neighbours, and so forth. but this is clearly at odds with both his continued reliance on the father–daughter relationship in order to abuse dolores, and the fact that westward expansion never simply meant encountering a 'wilderness', but overruling whatever did exist before and installing the very social forms and institutions that, in the novel, enable humbert's rape and abuse of dolores: the state, the family, and so forth. in other words, humbert perceives his movement west as escaping some strictures of modern sexual mores and interference; in his mind, then, the 'conquering' of land is continuous with the sexual abuse of a girl. what nabokov points out is that, although humbert is not in fact 'escaping' into a wilder world, he is in some ways correct to perceive this broader project of expansion west as enabling rape, situated in the context of the broader violence of such expansion. for nabokov this can all be contextualised, i think, as part of the overarching centuries-long post-enlightenment discourses of ordering, controlling, and disciplining nature (which itself is often spoken of in the feminine), where humbert embraces and extolls such acts of discipline and control so long as he is their director, and opposes them only insofar as he perceives them as challenging his own authority—as in the case of his fear and disdain of psychoanalysis.

i love the attention you paid to order and symmetry and pattern-seeking; i’ve written a load before about this related process of circumscription and containment that takes place in the novel - humbert has to, essentially, entrap and localise dolores, and he does so by relegating her to the ordered structure that eg. the nuclear family unit (metonymically encoded in the ‘white-frame horror’ haze house) encodes, and of course by making sense of her through the language of the dominant literary landscape. & how such appeals to order, patterns, regiment, containment, circumscription, are mechanisms of fascism both in terms of art & how we legitimise it (’real’ art exists within a set criteria; ‘degenerate’ or false art violates or disregards this notion of ordering and correctness &c.) and in terms of, as you discuss, discourses of social order. & how the critique of psychiatry that the text articulates (and as is made v clear in the john ray ‘preface’!) is the idea that these social orders can be reformed and reconstituted rather than destroyed.

re. your commentary on the relationship between psychiatry and broader medical practices - YES & i’m reminded of this passage (the one i lifted the quote in my bio from, lmao); a v succinct enmeshment of rape, horror (and the discursive creation of lolita as a horror figure; here a ‘complex ghost,’ elsewhere a ‘small ghost,’ a haunting presence, a doll), the vague and changeable subject position of The Wife relative to humbert (lolita/valeria/charlotte all merging into one another....) appeals to europeanness as the language of an elevated class, and rape as a kind of medical violation (’recline in dull invitation [...] with flesh ajar like the rubber valve on a soccer ball’s bladder,’ ‘vivisecting parties’). and the reference to (i assume?) gas chambers at the end! really just an absolute Passage.

also v. much love your commentary on what the movement west & mimicry of a frontier expansion is doing---nothing to add because you very much Covered it but, just imagine me pumping my fist and yelling Yes!!! Yes!!!!

since you brought up the tennis scene i NEED to say that one of the most interesting parts of that scene (for me!) is the part where humbert laments having never gotten a photograph of dolores; the suggestion that a photograph could, essentially, ‘freeze’ her in time in the same way that the whole notion of the ‘enchanted island’ attempts to ‘freeze’ her; the implication, then, that lolita as a memoir is performing the function that the photograph ought to have performed, that (as goes the ethos of the book writ large) the very process by which lolita comes into existence is a reaffirmation of the boundaries that we see dolores spend the whole novel trying to escape. reading lolita as photographing dolores as returning her to humbert and humbert’s aesthetic terms. delicious.

¹ Walter Benjamin's 1923 essay Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers contains the idea that a translation should not read like a text conceived in the target language but should rather emulate the rhythms and patterns of the source language, so a translation from german to french shouldn't germanify the text but rather frenchify the german language. This of course can be read in many different ways, but the most straightforward reading is one closely resembling the translator's note from Three Body Problem that keeps making the rounds on tumblr, and so what to some may seem like a groundbreaking new revelation in translation is indeed an idea that just recently celebrated its 100th birthday. Which is of course not to say that the Benjamin essay isn't valuable reading, but it is very clearly a document from a time where translation studies weren't established as a field yet and theoretic approaches to translation were mostly done by translator's explaining their choices or in the realm of philosophy, in both cases almost always on literary translation, leaving out vast areas of the field and often largely ignoring the material circumstances that affect the production of translations.

² Skopos Theory, coined by Hans Vermeer, is the idea that the deciding factor of a translation is its purpose, so who, why, when a given translator is translating for should decide the strategy and thus the criteria by which to judge the translation. A strategy that works for poetry doesn't necessarily work for dishwasher manuals and shouldn't be judged by its standards, to pick a blunt example.

³ Benjamin, Trotsky, Costanza

⁴ Rosemary Arrojo is a brasilian translatologist who contributed greatly to the field of translation studies. One of these contributions is an essay she published in response to french writer and feminist Hélène Cixous' Reading with Clarice Lispector, a book describing a feminist approach to women's literature that, as Arrojo shows, merely takes advantage of the existing power relations, putting her own ideas into Lispector's mouth in the knowledge that rarely anyone in the imperial core will understand brasilian portuguese well enough to correct her on it. in reading Cixous, Jerry shows that he has indeed understood nothing and relies on his imperial core worldview in much the same way as Cixous.

⁵ another contribution of Arrojo is the 1986 book Oficína de Tradução, where in a chapter she likens translation to Cleopatra, who takes on new forms throughout the ages yet remains an idea in the public imaginary, much in the same way translation does. So it is easy to understand what is meant by "a coloniser" but why is it said the gf wanted Cleopatra? This is not difficult, like most reasonable ppl she is into femboys. why one would assume Jerry to take on the femboy role can easily be understood when reading Daniel Boyarin's Unheroic Conduct, so in spite of Jerry clearly being in the wrong, this leaves open the possibility of a misunderstanding of social roles that is mutual. George's comment ("you don't have the nose for it") makes playful reference to Elaine's plot, as having the nose for something ("den richtigen Riecher") is a german way of phrasing an instinctive understanding, that would be rendered in english as a "hunch" or "gut feeling", which Jerry clearly has neither for women nor for translatology. This is in character behaviour for George, see Seinfeld episodes The Pledge Drive, where he starts eating candy bars with knife and fork after Elaine talks about having seen Mr Pitt do it, and The Cartoon, where he dates a woman who looks exactly like Jerry. in tying Arrojo's translatological thought to Jerry's dainty Hollywood nose, so unlike Cleopatra's, this plotline translates core ideas of postcolonial translation into USamerican gendered body politics.