Photographic Memory in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita

Abstract

Humbert’s passing phrase—“photographic memory”—may appear to be a playful, yet eager attempt to credit his self-centered narrative focus and persuasive control of language with photography’s apparent believability. But for a notoriously unreliable narrator obsessed with visual recollection, and for an author notorious for his clever tricks, the reader cannot make the same assumptions of photography—whether too seriously intertwined with believability, or too jokingly undervalued—and must examine more carefully what “photographic memory” can really mean. By relying on photographic history and theory, primarily Kaja Silverman, I seek to illuminate photography’s evasion of controlled operation and its essential “analogy” (Silverman 11) with the world, both of which I argue engender optimistic possibilities for Lolita’s photographable subjects in the reproduction of their own remembered image. When characters in Lolita slip in and out of the narration of Humbert’s visual memory, they challenge his singular control of his memory’s recollection and the memoir’s authorship. By these same analogic relationships in the novel, Nabokov opens an opportunity for the reader to reinterpret their place in it, including even that place of unreliable authority Humbert occupies. These opportunities for reciprocity in the development of Humbert’s visual memory invite an alternate and reversed relationship of spectatorship in a book historically critiqued for its unapologetic presentation of the solipsistic and often voyeuristic perspective of a pedophilic murderer. Additionally, reciprocity in recollection challenges popular critical views that Nabokov exclusively treated memory subject to the author’s will power, offering an alternate view of a famed author who instead welcomes textual instability and democratized control of memory and language as equally positive developments. By seeing the world differently, through Silverman’s account of photography, the reader can see Nabokov differently—as an author who welcomes instability and lack of single-minded authorial control, without sacrificing care, cleverness, or optimism.