able narrator and complain about the morality of Lolita? Nabokov should not
be impugned for his readers’ failures, should he? And isn’t Booth here and
throughout chapter 13 working with a narrow, moralistic view of the art of
fiction?
In his afterword to the second edition in 1983, Booth does not say anything
further about Lolita, but he does make two general responses to the objections
generated by chapter 13. (1) He defends his concerns with the relation between
technique and morality as fully consistent with his conception of fiction as
rhetorical action. And, (2) he admits two problems with the execution of his
argument. As my second epigraph indicates, these are (a) mixing his personal
beliefs into his analyses and (b) underestimating the difficulties of ethical crit-
icism. I think Booth is on target in both of these general responses, but I also
think that his commentary on Lolita is more a sign of his underestimating the
difficulties of ethical criticism than of his mixing his personal beliefs into that
commentary. Although Booth finds Nabokov’s novel to be “delightful” and
“profound,” his comments also make it clear that he finds nothing “delightful”
in the narrative’s main action, Humbert’s violation of Dolores.
With these considerations in mind, I undertake in this chapter the task of
doing better justice to the difficult problem of the relation between technique
and ethics in Lolita. Given the rhetorical paradigm’s emphasis on authors and
audience, I initially approach that task not by diving back into the text of the
novel but by considering two especially notable groups of actual audience
members—and by not castigating either group or Nabokov. The first group is
the one that most troubles Booth, those who are taken in by Humbert’s artful
narration. The second is a group that is, I believe, more common today than it
was in 1961, and I have encountered some of its members in my teaching. This
group is determined not to be taken in by Humbert and thus resists all of his
rhetorical appeals, including those that arise from his self-condemnations at
the end of his narrative. Accounting for these two sets of responses will also
mean situating these two groups in relation to Nabokov’s authorial audience,
which in turn means looking at the causes of the response of each group in
Nabokov’s construction of the novel.
Keeping this focus on audience in mind, I propose a spectrum of readerly
effects of unreliable narration that extends from estranging unreliability at one
end to bonding unreliability at the other. By estranging unreliability, I mean
unreliable narration that underlines or increases the interpretive, affective,
and/or ethical distance between the narrator and the authorial audience. By
bonding unreliability, I mean unreliable narration that reduces the interpre-
tive, affective, and/or ethical distance between the narrator and the authorial
audience. My hypothesis is that Nabokov’s specific and complicated deploy-
98 • CHAPTER 5