Shocked by this lenient attitude towards a rapist and child-molester, readers have felt uncomfortable and confused after finishing the novel Lolita, wondering how it is possible that, whilst reading, they almost forget how brutally Humbert exploits the orphaned Dolores Haze. Critics have argued that they could not help feeling forgiving towards the tragic, anti-heroic figure of Humbert at times, who commits a crime that would normally make them shout for maximum penalty. Nabokov’s novel has not only been controversial because of its alleged pornographic content involving a twelve-year old girl, but also because of its curious effect on the reader. The Russian born American author Vladimir Nabokov presents us with an eloquent and compelling figure in his masterpiece Lolita (1955), namely the narrator of the story, the paedophilic protagonist Humbert Humbert. It is not only real life orators who prove to be extremely powerful in their persuasion, but fictional ones as well. Throughout history, this power of words to influence the masses has proved itself time and time again - especially during the rise of fascism in Germany - and has indicated how vulnerable we actually are if not aware of the rhetorical devices the silver-tongued employ to influence our beliefs and ideas. Rhetoricians might be ‘forgetting the public good in the thought of their own interest’ and use their persuasive skills to sway the audience into a morally wrong mind-set. The gift of being a great orator can be potentially dangerous when it is employed for the wrong purposes, as the dialogue in Plato’s Gorgias shows. The two great philosophers of this time, Plato and Aristotle, famously wrote about rhetorical qualities in their respective works Gorgias and The Art of Rhetoric, and were among the first to emphasize the power of words. The word ‘rhetoric’ will probably lead many to think of the ancient Greeks and their studies on the practise of successful and persuasive oration. Narration and Nabokov’s Enfant Terrible: Rhetorical Strategies in Lolita In particular, we will analyze how, and to what effect, these texts’ formal characteristics create continuity or disruption between reader, writer, characters, and time past.This essay explores rhetorical strategies in the narration of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1955) with a view to the three key elements of rhetoric in the Aristotelian interpretation: logos, pathos and ethos. We will study how, through the act of writing, these writers negotiate the tension between longing to preserve the past and desiring to move forward into the present (and future). Stylistically, these texts often take strikingly innovative forms that compel us to forsake traditional reading modes.
All of our texts could be described as acts of mourning that attempt to restore what has been lost, but also to leave the past behind. We will read several texts in which here and now seem largely to be defined by a there and then that are painfully absent, yet still consume the present. Modernity has often been described as pervaded by a sense of loss and fragmentation. “Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!”-Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita