Unreliability, Psychology, Liberty
Unreliability, Psychology, Liberty
Well we certainly get our fill of the unreliable narrator in Part 2 of Lolita. First, H.H. can’t remember his and Lolita’s travel itinerary (which contrast suspiciously with his seemingly photographic memory earlier). On their second cross-country trip there is the question of weather or not someone is following H.H. and Lolita, or if it all in H.H.’s head? Even H.H. is unsure: ”I pursued the shadow of her infidelity; but the scent I traveled upon was so slight as to be practically undistinguishable from a madman’s fancy” (215) and, he describes himself as “a murderer with a sensational but incomplete and unorthodox memory” (217). The ending scenes are almost surreal; the dialogue and actions of H.H. and C.Q. seem so strange. But towards the end, when H.H. realizes his own unreliability: “I have somehow mixed up two events…” he also give us an explanation for not editing his memoir: “such suffusions of swimming colors are not to be disdained by the artist in recollection” (263).
Part Two also seems to contain hidden attacks on psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, etc., or at least commentary on these subjects. Most obvious is H.H.’s Freudian pursuit to recreate his relationship with Annabel. As he says when he tries to recreate their sexual encounter, “so much for those special sensations, influenced, if not actually brought about, by the tenets of modern psychiatry “ (167). There is the play on the words ‘rapist’ and ‘therapists’: “The rapist was Charlie Holmes; I am the therapist – a matter of nice spacing in the way of distinction” (150). H.H. references his pistol as “the Freudian symbol of the Ur-father’s central forelimb” (216), and psychoanalyzes his own poem, writing while he was in a Quebec sanatorium. Finally, there is Nabokov’s admission in his note on writing Lolita that he has an “old feud with Freudian voodooism” and a “loathing of generalizations devised by literary mythists and sociologists” (314).
The Alfred Kinsey report on Americans’ Sexual Behavior seems relevant to this commentary on Freudian psychology, as one of the woman responding to the report said “it is a great refreshment to find a real scientist spiting so accurately in Dr. Freud’s late eye” (373). As Peiss said, “the Kinsey reports documented the wide gap between what Americans did and what they said” – a gap that some people would argue still exists, if to a lesser extent (376). It seems to reinforce Foucault’s ideas about the repressive hypothesis, but for it me, Kinsey’s study left me unsatisfied. What accounts for this gap? And how did we get rid of this gap, if indeed we need to? To relate back to my very first post on Foucault – does sexual liberation (if such a thing exists) lie in closing this gap?
Tags: Freud, liberation, repressive hypothesis, truth
