“AND THIS IS THE ONLY IMMORTALITY YOU AND I MAY SHARE, MY LOLITA”: TIME, MEMORY AND ADDICTION IN NABAKOV’S LOLITA Amrita Chitkariya and Gauranshi Srivastava St. Stephen’s College
Nabakov couldn’t have been more right when he said –“I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it becomes”. These words manifest themselves through his most celebrated work, Lolita. Notwithstanding the revulsion it elicited for its controversial content, Lolita has carved a niche for itself and has stood the test of time. Despite an immense amount of scholarship and extensive research, there haven't been enough discussions on Lolita as a journey of an addict and his negotiation with time and memory. This paper is an attempt at understanding how this negotiation is inextricably linked to the perception of time, how desire dictates this transaction and the role of the text in both channeling and immortalizing the memory. Memory in Nabakov’s Lolita doesn’t simply exist as a recollection of a past experience but actively shapes Humbert Humbert’s present and future through the course of the novel to the point that it transforms itself into a mania. The novel, then, stands as a testimony to Nabakov’s belief that “a fully conscious self both fuels and is itself fueled by the ceaseless absorption of experience into memory, an on-going process in which past, present and future are figured in dynamic interdependency and not simply in succession” (Hasty, 226-7). The said mania is a product of Humbert Humbert’s overpowering urge to resurrect Annabelle’s memory through/in Dolores Haze, a memory of an incomplete sexual encounter/ “possession” (Nabakov, 145) that haunts him. Humbert’s refusal (bordering on absolute denial) to acknowledge the ephemeral nature and subsequently the impossibility of the experience he is out to recreate in all its details has strong undertones of addiction. An addict loses the teleological sense of time since he or she persistently aspires towards the first-time experience of it and is always dissatisfied. Following from this, the addict rejects the understanding of time-flow as unidirectional and tries to extend the duration of intoxication through the famous refrain of ‘just one more’. Humbert Humbert is also seen as being caught up in this temporal limbo, inhabiting the past and the present simultaneously but never really living in any of these moments, as he attempts to recreate and bring his incomplete sexual encounter embedded in his memory, to a completion – “But that mimosa grove – the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since – until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another” (Nabakov, 14). However, even though he says that he has broken the “spell by incarnating her into another”, Dolores always falls short of becoming Annabelle completely. Further, Humbert’s trip with Dolores around America can be read as a desperate endeavor to extend the timeperiod of his libidinous high.
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