Humbert Humbert's rethoric and the paradigm of distrust: a reading of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita

• Grant number: 16/03970-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: June 01, 2016
• End date: December 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Jefferson Cano
• Grantee: Júlia Mota Silva Costa
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research project develops a reading of the novel Lolita (1955), written by Vladimir Nabokov. According to our reading, Humbert Humbert's narrative must be understood rather as a defensive play than as, in the words John Ray, fictional editor of the novel, "a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis". The hypothesis has its roots in the parallel with Dom Casmurro (1899), a novel by Machado de Assis, and the study that Helen Caldwell develops about this book in The Machado de Assis' Brazilian Othello (1960), in which the author questions the impartiality of Casmurro's narrative for the first time, and formulates the thesis that the novel is actually a legal piece of prosecution. In this sense, we identify mainly six rhetorical movements in Humbert Humbert's speech that point out to its manipulator character and structure the argument of the hypothesis to be evidenced, namely, (1) the suggestion of a pathological condition, (2) the dehumanization of the "nymphet", (3) the intertextuality, (4) the cultural relativism of pedophilia, (5) the remorse and (6) the primacy of art.