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Lolita’s subjectivity

Since the beginning of this century, it seems a question has haunted certain literary circles namely the future of theory in literary criticism. Thus, in 2003 the "Whither theory ?" symposium was organized at Nanterre, France, some of its contributions being published in 2004, in number 12 of Tropismes. Since then, it has been agreed that theory will be necessary but unpredictable. That issue of Tropismes, was a counterpart of that published by The Oxford Literary Review which proposed in 2003 an issue whose title was "Angles on Derrida. Jacques Derrida and Anglophone Literature" in which was raised the question of the history and the future of Derridean deconstruction in literature. Now that is exactly that point I would like to look into, from recents texts by Anglo-Saxon literary critics, such as Travelling concepts in the Humanities by Mieke Bal published in 2002, The Singularity of Literature by Derek Attridge (2004) and The Literary in Theory by Jonathan Culler (2007). It appears that in these three authors, the same concern arises : the problematics of performance and agency. The importance assumed by performance in the language has been well known since Austin and his book How to Do Things with Words. The concept of agency is more recent and Mieke Bal explains it as follows : "From an originating, founding act performed by a willing, intentional subject, performativity becomes the instance of an endless process of repetition; a repetition involving similarity and differences, and therefore relativizing and enabling social change and subjects' interventions, in other words, agency." (Bal 179) No wonder that Attridge, who in 1992 had edited the interview of Derrida entitled "This Strange Institution Called Literature", in Acts of Literature, devotes a whole chapter (chapter 7) in The Singularity of Literature to what he calls "performance" where he maintains : "The literary work exists only in performance". (Attridge 95) Jonathan Culler for his part entitles chapter six of his work the performative, where he writes : "the fundamental problem of what today we call ‘agency’ in English : how far and under what conditions can I be a responsible subject who chooses my acts.” (Culler 161) So Bal and Culler notice the fact that whatever the importance granted to the act, to action, to performance, there is necessarily the presence of a subject and this remark echoes the question asked in 1989 by Jean-Luc Nancy to contemporary philosophers, namely "after the subject, who comes next ?" The answers of these philosophers, among whom Alain Badiou, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Henry, were published in Confrontation n° 20. I will however keep in mind from that rich abundance of reflections a remark of Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, namely the following question : "Car à y bien réfléchir, comment interpréter ce resurgissement inattendu du sujet au beau milieu d’un discours pourtant voué à la critique de l’autorité de la conscience et des illusions du moi?” (Borch-Jakobsen 56) [For if we consider things seriously, how should we interpret that unexpected reappearance of the subject in the very middle of a discourse yet devoted to the criticism of the authority of consciousness and the illusions of the ego?] Although it alludes to the discourse of psychoanalysis, it is possible to extend the interrogation to other fields and then wonder with Derrida what is behind the notion of the subject. In "Il faut bien manger ou le calcul du sujet” (Derrida Cahiers confrontations 91-114) [We can't do without eating or the subject's calculation], Derrida considers the subject is pure invention. Therefore, from the very start, Derrida is critical as regards the illusion of subjectivity. However, he was to devote several works to that issue. He published in 1993, three short essays on the proper name, viz Sauf le nom, Passion and Khora, after having dealt in 1975 with the problem of signature in Signéponge. So, Derrida invites us to wonder on the

- 1 - question of the subject from two key concepts, the name and the signature to which the concept of the voice must be added.

How, in fact, should we consider the subject after the time of post colonial studies and gender studies which have all emphasized the issue of identity? How can redefinition of the subject contribute to the reevaluation of the status of literary categories such as “author,” “narrator,” “reader,” and mainly “character.” I wish in fact to put forward the hypothesis of a resurgence of the interest focused on the character and on the question of who ? Who is Lolita, for instance? How does the character become what he or she is ? To what extent do action and repetition play a part? I will try to answer these questions by studying how Lolita, in the eponymous novel by Nabokov is revealed not only by her name, her words and acts but also by her writings in which I will analyze the importance of the signature and style but also of the voice almost inaudible but always unpredictable.

Who, then, is Lolita? The question could be asked of virtually any literary character: Hamlet, Antigone, Emma Bovary, Alice. First, Lolita is a name, the term by which a person is designated. Moreover, as the first and last word of the novel, “Lolita” highlights the problematics of identity. Even the foreword, signed by John Ray, Jr., Ph.D, begins with the title given by the narrator Humbert Humbert to his manuscript, "Lolita or the Confession of a White Widowed Male.” But the name in Nabokov's novel acquires a particular value. Thus, the famous incipit of Humbert's narrative not only insists on the obsessive power of the pronunciation of the name but also presents a list of the variant names attributed to Lolita : "She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.” (Appel 9) Lolita is designated differently according to her relationships with other characters. She is Lo at home (her mother calls her Lo); she is Lola in the family ; she is Dolly to her schoolmates and teachers; she is Dolores for the registry office. Humbert reserves the name of Lolita or more precisely "my Lolita" when she appears in his fantasies or his memories. He calls her "Lolita" aloud only three times. Lolita is also called Carmen by Humbert as well as "the child", "the brat" and even "die Kleine". Lolita's identity arises from this summary of interpersonal relations, of social parts working in a network. Nabokov, through his narrator Humbert, amuses himself at playing with the signifier of the first names when he shifts from "Charlotte" - Lolita's mother he marries to come nearer Lolita - to Lolita along the following chain : Charlotte, Lotte, Lottelita, Lolitchen, Lolita. (Appel 76) But what Humbert is most interested in, is the substitutive shift from the women who have preceded the nymphet to Lolita. Thus, his first experiences with Monique, the prostitute, Valeria, his wife and mainly Annabel, his first youthful love make Lolita appear as the one who comes to oust, supplant, make up for these prototypes. Humbert exclaims when he sees Lolita for the first time : "I find it most difficult to express with adequate force that flash, that shiver, that impact of passionate recognition.” (Appel 39) The character of Lolita takes Annabel's place who, Humbert says, is incarnating in another ("I broke her spell Annabel's by incarnating her in another.")(Appel 15) Lolita appears only progressively and indirectly. She is dissimulated in the foreword, behind her married woman's name Mrs Richard F. Schiller. We do not know at that stage of the reading that Lolita is her name. In the same manner, when Humbert hears Charlotte Haze pronounce the name of Lo, Humbert thinks she is referring to the maid ("Lo being presumably the maid" says he [Appel 38]). Lolita is just a remembrance all along the first nine chapters of the novel, and she appears in her full physical splendour in chapter ten. She shifts from a single idea to an incarnated image. The evolution is still more striking when Humbert calls her by a new hybrid name with a surprising juxtaposition,

- 2 - namely "Dolly Schiller". There is thus in the act of naming the fact of giving and receiving, the fact of making someone come to existence.

Now this evolution is also visible in the style of the person or of the character, in his or her words and acts. That's what Jonathan Culler suggests when he writes : "Characters, we say, discover who they are, not by learning something about their past but by acting in such a way that they become what then turns out, in some sense, to have been their ‘nature.’" (Culler 34) I would like now to start the analysis of the verbal and behavioural style of the character of Lolita, showing how it reveals to what extent Lolita is first of all essentially a teenager who through her desire of emancipation is a constantly evolving subject. Thus the first words she pronounces are to be found in chapter eleven of the first part. Thus: "The McCoo girl ? Ginny McCoo ? Oh, she is a fright and mean. And lame. Nearly died of polio".(Appel 41) The sentences are short, the vocabulary is comparatively limited, the tone is informal. She frequently uses slang to express herself. So, "you dope", "super", "goon", "drip" spangle her conversations, showing thereby she is really a teenager. But her acts still more reveal she belongs to her age bracket - which, by the way, corresponds to one of the criteria of the nymphet, for Humbert Humbert. Thus Lolita shouts, moves, laughs, reads magazines, all that mainly in the first part of the novel. In the second part, after Lolita and Humbert have become lovers, Lolita will show a desire to free herself from Humbert's power. The novel will then offer a set of oppositions between Humbert's manipulation who gets attached to Lolita as to a prey and Lolita's emancipation, between the strength of action in Humbert the predator and the suffering of subjection in Lolita. Humbert's hold shows itself in priority in the perversity of his gaze. As early as the foreword, John Ray refers to Humbert's name as a mask "through which two hypnotic eyes seem to glow."(Appel 3) When in the fifth chapter, Humbert gives a definition of a nymphet, the look of the nympholept on the nymphet is the main criterion. The nymphet does not realize her power, a unilateral relation is firmly established between the nympholept and the nymphet, the latter becoming an object in the hands of the pervert. Besides, Humbert specifies : "It is a question of focal adjustment, of a certain distance that the inner eye thrills to surmount and a certain contrast that the mind perceives with a gasp of perverse delight"(Appel 17). The look shapes, fashions, captures the character. Again Humbert's look on Lolita's body will enable the narrator to describe Lolita who becomes a moving body. Indeed when Lolita appears to Humbert for the first time, he describes her skin, her hair, her ankle, the down on her forearm, her eyes. A little later, he wonders : "why does the way she walks… excite me so abominably?"(Appel 41) Even the way Humbert takes over Lolita's name adding a simplistic determination such as "the Eternal Lolita", "that Lolita", "my Lolita" shows to what extent Humbert's ascendancy is powerful. Lolita is doubly reified. She is turned into Humbert's fantasy who exclaims after the masturbation scene on the sofa : "What I have madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita - perhaps, more real than Lolita overlapping, encasing her, floating between me and her, and having no will, no consciousness - indeed, no life of her own."(Appel 62) Deprived of any will, not conscious of herself, Lolita does not exist any more to Humbert's eyes. She does not act, she is subjected. Besides, Humbert uses the passive voice when he considers that "Lolita had been safely solipsized."(Appel 60) How can one exist when one is torn, like Lolita, between a pervert and an all but affectionate mother who considers her "aggressive, boisterous, critical, distrustful, impatient, irritable, inquisitive, listless, negativistic and obstinate." (Appel 81) How can one find a certain amount of liberty ? Lolita says, at one moment, without realizing how ironical the situation is : "This is a free country." (Appel 46) Already, just before they became lovers, Lolita had made a move to free herself symbolically from Humbert's hold who says what follows : "For a second, I held her. She freed herself from the shadow of my embrace." But soon, Lolita is subjected to cuddles, promises but also

- 3 - threats. She shows resistance by her bad mood, squabbles even insults. So, Humbert tells about what he calls her "wild words" namely "stinker… you can't boss me… I despise you…" (Appel 171) Insult is with Lolita, a way of distancing herself, a burst of revolt facing bondage, a desire of freedom. The very moment when she frees herself - only to some extent as she leaves with another paedophile, Quilty - is the moment when she runs away. She is not subjected any more, she acts. Besides, she becomes conscious of herself and of her power when, for instance, during the tennis match, she feels herself watched by Quilty. Humbert describes that exchange of looks in the following way : "and I also knew that the child, my child, knew he was looking, enjoyed the lechery of his look and was putting on a show of gambol and glee." (Appel 237) Unlike the hold of Humbert's look, Lolita here reacts to Quilty's. She then plays a part as she learned to do when she used to practise putting on an act in a literal meaning as well as a figurative meaning. Humbert then exclaims : "I seemed to myself as implausible a father as she seemed to be a daughter. Was, perhaps, guilty locomotion instrumental in vitiating our powers of impersonation?" (Appel 174) Lolita then becomes what she is, as Culler expresses, referring to Judith Butler : "You become a man or woman by playing a role" (Culler 157) or "A man is not what one is but something one does, a condition one enacts. Identity is an effect" (Culler 157) Thus Lolita establishes her identity through her acts and one of the ways she uses to have her voice heard is to write letters. She writes two in the novel. The first is the one she sends to her mother when she is in the holiday camp. The letter consists only of four lines. It is addressed to her mother and Humbert. The play on words she makes by calling them "Dear Mummy and Hummy" shows she is perfectly conscious of the part of a father Humbert intends to play. The tone is conventional "Hope you are fine. Thank you very much for the candy". The letter ending ("Love") becomes ironical. But what is prevailing, is her signature. Lolita signs "Dolly", she refers to herself neither as her mother's daughter who calls her Lo, nor as the object of Humbert's desire who calls her Lolita but as a teenager who goes to school or stays in a holiday-camp. She also signs "Dolly" her second letter, sent to Humbert after a three years'separation. But she adds her marital name in parentheses (Mrs Richard F. Schiller) revealing thus the enigma of her name mentioned in the foreword and disclosing the change of her civil status. The head word (Dear Dad") and the letter ending ("Yours expecting") are evidence of the ironical charge of her letter. But in each of the two letters, it seems difficult for Lolita to be a subject – to express herself. Indeed in the second letter she writes : "This is a hard letter to write."(Appel 266) She announces she is married, pregnant and so asks urgently for money. In the first letter, she had written the following sentence ; "I crossed out and rewritten again lost my new sweater." (Appel 81) The "I" sign of her subjectivity is crossed out as if Lolita stepped back, destroying herself before reconstructing herself, parting with herself before regaining her self control. Maurice Blanchot describes thus that double move : "Dans l’espace neutre du récit, les porteurs de paroles, les sujets d’action – ceux qui tenaient lieu de personages – tombent dans un rapport de non-identification avec eux-mêmes: quelque chose leur arrive qu’ils ne peuvent ressaisir qu’en se dessaisissant de leur pouvoir de dire ‘je’.” (Blanchot 564) [In the narrative neutral space, the mouth pieces of messages, the acting subjects - those who took the place of characters - fall in relation of non-identification with themselves : something occurs to them they can only catch up again by giving up then power to say "I".] One could also say referring to Derrida that Lolita is in a relation of ex-appropriation with herself, for deprived of herself, she catches up again her subjectivity in a double gesture of appropriation and expropriation, of mastery without mastery. That is perhaps the reason why Humbert can at last hear Lolita's little voice when he receives the second letter, the one where he explains : "The other letter began talking to me in a small matter-of-fact-voice."(Appel 266)

- 4 - It is indeed a voice Humbert could not hear . Blinded and deaf, he did not listen to the suffering sustained by Lolita. However, before they did become lovers, Lolita's voice was characterised by its shrillness. So the adjectives which describe it are either "harsh"(Appel 41), or "high"(Appel 41), or "sharp"(Appel 50), or strident" (Appel 65, 154, 166). It is a cry or a moan : Lolita is aching, she weeps. "Her sobs in the night - every night, every night - the moment I feigned sleep" Humbert says (Appel 176). Lolita implores at one moment to let her talk to the Mc Crystal family she catches sight of in one of their peregrinations. Humbert writes : "Lo, in a hot, happy, wild, intense, hopeful, hopeless whisper - Look, the Mc Crystals, please, let's talk to them, please… please, I'll do anything you want, oh please." (Appel 157) Lolita entreats him to leave her alone. "Oh, no, not again. Please, leave me alone, will you." (Appel 192). But very often, her voice is censored, smothered by Humbert's. Thus when he finds her again at last and she tells him about her life spent with Quilty, Humbert reports her own words thus : "Oh, I - really I - she uttered the "I" as a subdued cry". (Appel 276) It is not accidental for Nabokov to stop twice - the first corresponding to the mention of the "I" crossed out in the letter sent by Lolita to her mother - on the way Lolita says or writes "I", for we are in fact in the core of the symbolism of her subjectivity. Who is Lolita, behind this "I" either crossed out or smothered so much as Lolita learns to lie to free herself from her predator's yoke. She lies for instance on the identity of the author of the theatre play in which she takes part when Humbert asks her who wrote the play, she answers : "some old woman, Clare somehing, I guess." (Appel 209) whereas the author is Clare Quilty, the stage director with whom she is going to run away. Faced with Humbert's cruelty and jealousy, Lolita's dissimulation appears as a survival strategy. However, beyond the lie, the unpredictable truth arises when Lolita surprises Humbert and the reader by her very clearmindedness. Thus while Humbert admires his nymphet riding a bicycle, Lolita cries out : "Can you remember… What was the name of that hotel… the hotel where you raped me ?" (Appel 202) A short time before the night when they had their first sexual intercourse, Lolita had already told him : "you revolting creature. I was a daisy-fresh girl, and look what you have done to me. I ought to call the police and tell them you raped me. Oh you dirty, dirty old man." (Appel 141) Lolita's actual unpredictability makes Humbert realize he is confronted with a subject who escapes his hold. Thus when Charlotte Haze dies and Humbert decides to collect Lolita at her holiday-camp, he is suspicious, he says, of the nymphet's reaction and he therefore calls her unpredictable. (Appel 101) Lolita's personality arises through the strangeness and otherness of her voice. Humbert reports thus the way Lolita introduces him to her husband : "Dick, this is Dad, cried Dolly in a resounding violent voice that struck me as totally strange, and new, and cheerful and old, and sad." (Appel 273) Likewise, Humbert manages to imagine Lolita's real and secret personality only after losing her. It seems then he opens to her only at that moment : "It struck me… that I simply didn't know a thing about my darling's mind and, that, quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, a palace gate - dim and adorable visions." (Appel 284) The subject, Jean-Luc Nancy says, is what is coming, it is always to come. It is therefore, not only what is said or what is done, but what happens in its unpredictability and unexpectedness. That's what Derrida calls "the event" - he explains : « La force de l’événement est toujours plus forte que la force d’un performatif. Devant ce qui m’arrive et même dans ce que je décide (cela [devant] comporter une certaine passivité, ma décision étant toujours décision de l’autre) devant l’autre qui arrive et m’arrive, toute force performative est débordée, excédée, exposée. » (Derrida L’Université sans Condition 75-76) [The strength of an event is always greater than the strength of a performative scheme. Confronted with what happens to me and ever in the decision I take that including a certain passivity, my decision always being the decision of the other before the other who is coming and is coming to me, any performative force is overflown, exceeded, exposed.] Besides, Derrida specifies: “L’autre appelle à venir et cela n’arrive qu’à plusieurs

- 5 - voix. » (Derrida Psyché 61) [The other invites to come and it needs several voices] Humbert does realize this at the end of the novel when after killing Quilty, he remembers, how, one day, he had found himself on the brink of a mountain precipice and heard a harmony of sounds coming up from the town in the Valley. He explains it was the melody made by children playing and then comes the revelation. He writes : "I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord." (Appel 308) Because he can't hear Lolita's voice among those of the other children, he realizes his cruelty. Lolita's voice can be heard only in relation to others as the otherness can only arise in the multiplicity of voices. Humbert has not been able, has not wanted to hear Lolita's voice, that is what she was trying to express of herself. Likewise, the reader subjected to the manipulation of a not very reliable narrator, must want to endeavour to hear her voice often made inaudible by the censorship of the perverse narrator. To study Lolita's character, one has to go beyond the text surface which basically deals with Humbert's fantasies, to slide between the rifts of that same text. One must not hear Lolita but listen to her. It is then almost a militant commitment requiring an attentive receptivity.

To summarize: a character is first of all a proper noun, a name given by the author and received by what is in expectation in the making up of the character, what is in expectation of the story. The name content, its signified, fills out along the narrative and it seems then that the character gives something back to the writer and the reader. The author plays a part in the construction of the character, as the latter is equally a fictional creation, an invention of this same author. The character is shaped indirectly and almost subliminally - by the environment, the clues - thanks to a sort of undertext which accounts for his/her past, his/her motives, his/her projects, the consequences of his/her acts - yet,what identifies the character according to Nabokov, is his or her stability, just as for a real person. So, Nabokow writes through his narrator for Humbert : "I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind." (Appel 265) There would therefore exist permanent features in the character's identity, due to the repetition of his/her acts in accordance with our expectations - this would correspond to the idem-identity of a subject for Paul Ricoeur - and an evolution due to the repeated differences of these same actions comparatively to these norms - that would be Ricoeur's ipse-identity. In both cases, a character's identity is apprehended by the reader's receptivity.

This is why a literary character is, thirdly, a mental representation. Unlike a character in a play, who on stage has an actual body and an actual voice, a literary character is a fictional being and as such is almost disembodied: a ghost. As Maurice Blanchot asserts: "La voix narrative . . . ne peut s’incarner : elle peut emprunter la voix d’un personnage. . . Appelons-là (par fantaisie) spectrale, fantomatique.” (Blanchot 565) [The narrarive voice… cannot be embodied : it can borrow a character's voice… let's call it (in a fanciful way) spectral, ghostly] Likewise J. Hillis Miller writes: "we as readers invoke, convoke, call up, conjure, the ghosts of all characters when we pick up the novel and read. Reading a novel is like the conjuring of ghosts." (Miller 132) The character becomes the reader's imaginary construction. Humbert writes: "Please reader… Imagine me, I shall not exist if you do not imagine me" (Appel 129). His remark is all the more ironical given that Humbert's character is not difficult to imagine since he imposes his vision on the reader, whereas Lolita is concealed behind his biased narrative and can only truly exist as a result of a volitional act by the reader.

- 6 - Finally, the character is a face - in the sense used by Levinas - that is, an encounter with alterity. When Humbert endeavors to remember Annabel and Lolita, he sees their faces: “I remember… Annabel's features far less distinctly today that I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skilfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with eyes open (and then I see Annabel); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes… the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita)” (Appel 11). The two faces are superimposed upon each other. Annabel’s withdraws and fades away as Lolita’s appears. Of course, these are merely memories, mental images rife with the possibility of deception and delusion. Lolita's face appears in more detail at the end of the novel, when the reader is finally allowed to glimpse her features, and especially her smile: "Now, I do not remember if I have mentioned that Lolita had an absolutely enchanting smile for strangers, a tender furry slitting of the eyes, a dreamy sweet radiance of all her features…" (Appel 285). Lolita, we learn, is open to others and has a capacity for welcoming people. Her smile is in accordance with the ethical dimension of the novel. Derrida believes that for Levinas, the face "marks the limit of any power, of any violence and the origin of ethics" [marque la limite de tout pouvoir, de toute violence, et l’origine de l’éthique] (Derrida, L’Ecriture et la Différence 154). This is the very place where Humbert has failed. As a subject responsible for his acts, he has chosen to refuse any face-to-face with Lolita; he has not acknowledged her features, her speech, her voice, the smile she reserves only for strangers, according to him. Thus he has known no gift, either given or received.

WORKS CITED

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Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge, 2004.

Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: U of Toronto

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Blanchot, Maurice. L’Entretien Infini. Paris: Gallimard, 1969.

- 7 - Borch-Jakobsen, Mikkel. “Le sujet freudien, du politique à l’éthique.” Cahiers

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Derrida, Jacques. “Il faut bien manger ou le calcul du sujet.” Cahiers Confrontations n°20

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- - -. L’Ecriture et la Différence. Paris : Seuil, 1967.

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- - -. L’Université sans Condition. Paris : Galilée, 2001.

Miller, J. Hillis. « The ‘Quasi-Turn-of-Screw Effect’ : How to Raise a Ghost with Words. »

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