bonding too closely on the ethical axis with Humbert (his narration raises
the question of whether his image of Lolita in his arms is the image of a four-
foot-ten schoolgirl), but the bonding effects on the axis of perception remain
strong. To put these points another way, the implied Nabokov uses the playful
comparison so that an element of the novel’s aesthetics, Nabokov’s stylistic
virtuosity, which he allows Humbert to share, disposes rhetorical readers to
regard Humbert as a reliable interpreter. This disposition is, of course, subject
to change as the narration proceeds, and, especially in light of the warning
signals, it does not automatically generate a disposition to regard Humbert
as a reliable evaluator. But on the whole, Nabokov’s strategy is to encourage
rhetorical readers’ initial bonding with Humbert.
This bonding is also encouraged by optimistic comparison with the narra-
tion of John Ray Jr., whose foreword frames Humbert’s narration. The interre-
lations of reliability and unreliability in Ray’s narration are themselves worthy
of an extended analysis, but for my purposes, the most relevant feature of his
narration is the inconsistency of his style. It varies from a clumsy formality
(“the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange
pages it preambulates”; “this commentator may be excused for repeating” [3,
5]) to a straightforward effectiveness (“he is horrible, he is abject” [5]), to the
repetition of platitudes: “‘Lolita’ should make all of us—parents, social work-
ers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the
task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world” (6). The result is a
narrator whose perceptions and evaluations Nabokov invites his audience to
question, even if he does not give his rhetorical readers enough information to
construct clear alternative views. More generally, after serving up three pages
of John Ray Jr., Nabokov has made his rhetorical readers more susceptible to
the rhetoric of Humbert Humbert, and when Nabokov employs the technique
of playful comparison on the first page of Humbert’s narration, he encourages
his audience to bond with Humbert to a considerable extent.
In much of the rest of the early chapters, however, Nabokov employs his
strategy of complex coding. A particularly salient example occurs in chapter
5, as Humbert presents his theory of nymphets.
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—the112 • CHAPTER 5