Post for 10/22

I really liked the Winston article we had to read for Tuesday's class. It is interested, as I am, in the intersection between humanity and the fictionality of the story. However, the element I hadn't really considered, is the way Humbert fetishizes and tries to imitate fiction. I had thought about it more in terms of "lying" and "truth." But Humbert's problem is that he can't separate fact from fiction, right? Right. He can't separate fact from fiction, because he won't let himself accept the harsh realities. Instead, he tries to fictionalize his life to make things better than they were. I had always seen this as connecting to others. I had never really thought of Humbert's lying as (possibly) being entirely self-serving. I suppose, for all my rhetoric of "understanding others complexly" I was just thinking of Humbert as so uncomplicatedly bad, that I suppose I didn't consider that he really may be telling the story (and occasionally not telling the truth) really for himself. Almost telling the story as an act of repenting. And in fact, the final bit really comes close to that idea. The truth is that if we can agree that Humbert Humbert can't keep fact from fiction (not a particularly daring thesis) than it would be obvious to me that Humbert is telling the story to seek a redemption.

Humbert Humbert cannot separate fact from fiction. This is his fatal flaw. He wants everything to be perfect. He wants everything to fit in the neat, beauty of prose. Life, however, resists narrative structure, and this is Humbert Humbert's problem. He is trying to put the messiness, and complication of life into the simplicity of fiction. It doesn't work. It won't work. And that's the problem with his framework of thought. Not at all unlike cinderella's sisters, he tries to cut the heels off reality to make his reality fit into the shoe of fiction, or of prose. However, by doing this he ignores the complexity of life. Of his, less, but more importantly of Lolita's. He's so set on making everything perfect, and fable-like, that he's ignoring the reality of the situation. He doesn't realize how he's destroying Lolita's life, because he refuses to see the messiness, and contradictions of her personhood, due to his desire, or incapability to see the world outside the frame of a traditional narrative. Relevantly, Winston says here, "Humbert's solipsistic imagination refuses to acknowledge the individuality of the girls he loves or to allow them freedom to shape their own lives" (424).  This is so much what I'm trying to say. Humbert is telling us his story, not his life. Whether or not he can tell the difference is a different story.