The Enchanter

Nabokov argues that "There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter - but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.”

The writer’s ability to enchant his audience places his work on an echelon above many other writers. When a story is able to grab you and pull you into another world that makes you reflect, contrast, and moon over the details of the textures, style and imagery, you are in the world that Nabokov tries to create for you. Lolita is an easy example of a book that brings you into its world. The depth and elusive meanings of the text encompasses all the points of view that Nabokov requires of himself. Even though VN would refute his novel conveying any lesson or moral, the reader or at least I have come out with a different understanding of the world that envelops me. VN likes to think of his text as a parody of out existence which is a major factor in being an enchanter, because the story parallels our world and creates its own rules and aphorisms that mess with our expectations. The last paragraph of the first chapter of Lolita really pulled me into the text: "Ladies and gentleman of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns." (I love mythology) This imagery really helped me insert myself into the world of HH, which is a place that is best to be enchanted by than to actually experience.

Nabokov wrote a novella called “The Enchanter” in Paris in the nineteen thirties. That he considered his pre-Lolita, which he lost after travelling to America and recovered it in Ithaca in 1959. What a coincidence. The story is very different from Lolita, but it covers the same broad idea of a pedophile seducing a younger girl into having sex with him. I also found out, while digging through the wonderful world of wiki a piece of information that contradicts one of my previous blogs, that HH is not necessarily a pedophile, but a Hebephile, which an age group just above pedophilia. (Should we not be so harsh on him then?)