As we pondered our chilhood and the memories kept inside our brain with or without our knowledge we bow to Nabokov and his novel Lolita, echoing Humbert as a remembering self. As was told to us in class we know one of the themes of Lolita include Time and Memory. Click HERE to see a recent web article on people with super memories. As I was searching on the internet I found Olga Hasty, who has some interesting ideas about Nabokov and memory in her work Memory, Consciousness, and Time in Nabokov's Lolita saying,
"Although Humbert’s pedophilia takes center stage for most readers of Lolita, it is in fact not sex but memory that plays the leading role. The “Confession” presents recollected and not on-going events and abounds with figurations of memory. Indeed, the narrative is itself what a Durkheimian psychologist might call “an instrument for provoking recall." The remembering self Humbert projects is defined in terms of the exceptional memory he repeatedly draws to his reader’s attention and demonstrates in a profusion of literary references and recollected details...the literary references - when they are recognized - establish a space of memory that the reader shares with Humbert" (232).
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The other theme is time which could be why memory is so important. Because time passes we only have our memory to stay connected with what time has taken from us. Erica Jong in The New York Time on the web article, SUMMER READING; TIME HAS BEEN KIND TO THE NYMPHET: 'LOLITA' 30 YEARS LATER addresses Nabokov and time saying:
"In ''Speak, Memory,'' his autobiography, Nabokov calls himself a ''chronophobiac'' (another one of his arresting coinages), and to a great extent ''Lolita'' is a book about chronophobia every bit as much as Shakespeare's sonnets are about mutability and the fleeting of youth and beauty. Humbert Humbert is in love with something which by definition cannot last. That prepubescent state he calls nymphage lasts from 9 to 13 at best, a fleeting four years, often less. The honey-hued shoulders, the budbreasts, the brownish fragrance of the bobby-soxed nymphet all are destined to be abolished by the advent of womanhood, which Humbert despises every bit as much as he worships nymphage. Humbert's dilemma puts the dilemma of all obsessional lovers in high relief. What he loves he is doomed never to possess. It cannot be possessed because time rips it away from him even as he possesses it.
The villain here is time. And the dilemma is the dilemma of the mortal human being who foresees his own death. It is not a coincidence that so many of Nabokov's heroes are doomed and so many of his novels are cast in the form of posthumous autobiographies. His subjects are nothing less than mutability and time, Eros and Death, the twin subjects of all muse-poetry.
Humbert Humbert is, like so many Nabokovian narrators, a man obsessed with an irretrievable past. When he rediscovers his nymphet in Ramsdale (even the place names in ''Lolita'' are full of sexual innuendo and irony), he recognizes at once that he has discovered the reincarnated essence of his Riviera puppy love, who perished of typhus decades earlier:"
Monday, September 21, 2009
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