Henry Singleton, Ariel on a Bat’s Back, exhibited 1819

The English Department Workshop Fund’s 18th and 19th Century and 20th and 21st Century Cultures Series are pleased to jointly welcome

Trevor Wells

MA Student in the Humanities, University of Chicago

From Keats’s Hum to Nabokov’s Humbert: Enchantment as Literariness

Thursday, January 23, from 5-6:30pm

Rosenwald 405

with respondent

Bradford Case, PhD Student in English, University of Chicago

This essay tracks Humbert Humbert’s widely allusive name to one of its many sources: the enchanter Hum, of John Keats’s narrative poem The Cap and Bells. To the present, this allusion has eluded public scholarly attention. My investigation of Nabokov’s persistent reference to this poem throughout Lolita leads me to claim 1) that Nabokov’s allusion to Keats’s Hum prioritizes the identity of Humbert as enchanter over his identity as sexual deviant, for Keats juxtaposes Hum to just such a sexual deviant in Emperor Elfinan and has Hum deceive Elfinan, and 2) that the novel Lolita insists on the inseparability of its own resonance as allegory for the literary text as such from any reading of its other possible meanings. Toward the latter argument, I liken Paul de Man’s concept of literariness to the concept of enchantment in The Cap and Bells and Lolita (and their authors’ previous works to which these allude, viz. “The Eve of St. Mark” [Keats] and The Enchanter [Nabokov]). This essay thus aims to reserve a place for Keats (with whose work critics have shown Nabokov engaged overtly throughout his career), beside Poe et al., as among the most pervasive influences on Lolita, and it challenges the both academically and popularly prevalent habit of remembering Humbert Humbert first and foremost as a pedophile or hebephile. According to my reading, Humbert’s status as ironist can neither pale in comparison to his status as hebephile and as rapist nor supersede it; instead, none of these qualities is possible to consider in isolation from the others.

Trevor’s paper (to be read in advance) can be found here. The password will be distributed to our listserv. Click here to join.

Our meetings are open to the University of Chicago community and visitors who comply with University of Chicago vaccination requirements. We are committed to making our workshop fully accessible for people with disabilities. Please direct any questions or concerns to the series coordinators, Bradford Case (bkcase@uchicago.edu) and Tyler Lutz (tyler.lutz@uchicago.edu).