On reading again
by Jacqueline Ristola
I have the luxury of falling in love with reading again. It’s been an intellectual journey, yes, but also a physical one: curling up with books on couches and lounge chairs. Primping pillows just right to be comfortable and well supported, balancing books on my bent legs and knees. Reading today has been recursive, slipping me back and back and back, to college, to high school, to childhood(–)reverie.
Just reads: Lolita by Vladimir Na-BO-kov; Are you my Mother? by Alison Bechdel (insert joke about test fame here).
While provokes me to write is a (perhaps tenuous) connection between the two. or rather, how one text has provided insight upon another. Bechdel’s memoir spends a good deal of time working through psychoanalytic texts to examine her, her mother, her relationship with her mother. She spends a good deal of time explaining the work of Donald Winnicott (seems like a cool dude). What struck me was this piece of Winnicott’s theorization:
It only struck me again when leafing through The Annotated Lolita, when I stumbled upon a key passage in the book, where Humbert cops to falling in love with the fiction of Lolita. The jist is this: Humbert realizes that he did not love Lolita (Dolores) but Lolita (the fictional being), and said fictional being lies between Humbert and Dolores:
“What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita — perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; floating between me and her, and having no will, no consciousness — indeed, no life of her own” (L 62).
As I reread this, it occurred to me. Is this Lolita object the same as the transitional object, that comes in between the subjective (Hmbert) and objective (Dolores, in Humbert’s view)? If so, this would form a funny challenge Nabokov’s critique of psychoanalysis in the novel. But, perhaps, the joke is on Humbert, who toys with psychoanalysists and psychoanalysis altogether (“pseudo for pseudolimidos””pseudoliberations of pseudolibidoes,”) only to be a case study for the field.
This is a simplistic connection, and a probable misreading; to substantiate it would take a lot of work at present I doubt I would be able to complete. But I jot this down to mark it in my mind, and also observes the ways in which texts can speak to each other, and to us. They change us, move us, shape us. For me today, these books kept me thinking, reading, and now writing (blogging!) Fun fun.
Critical Hit!! 