The Enchanter

The Enchanter : Nabokov

sorry this is late! I've been sick with a virus...

I've chosen to write about the sections, "the regularity of fluctuations in her heath" and the Spider Dream that ends the chapter. Overall the vibe of The Enchanter was uncomfortable. As a reader with common morals and a sound mind it was difficult to read about this man, his pedophilia, and the twisted workings of his brain without wanting to scream "get it together!". It puts a lot of pressure on the reader to know the workings of the characters brain as he plots.

"The regularity of fluctuations in her health seemed to him to embody the very mechanics of her existence; that regularity became the regularity of life itself;....the faceted transparancy of his deductions had begun to suffer from the ceasless vacillation of his soul between despair and hope, the perpetual ripple of unsatisfied desires, the painful burden of his rolled-up, tucked-away passion- the entire savage, stifling existence that he, and only he, had brought upon himself"

He knows that he has brought this uncomfortable existence upon himself, but is unable to stop once he starts, if even ever at all. It is interesting that he considers her health the only thing that vacillates him between hope and despair, and does not rationally take into account anything else (such as morals, laws, the worry of others finding out) He vacillates until the very end because there is no safe time, his fantasies lead him to beleive they can go be alone and everything will be great but reality proves that there is no right place. What he wants will always be forbidden. 


"...when it has all grown totally still, he would lie supine and evoke the one and only image, entwine his smiling victim with eight hands, which turned into eight tentacles affixed to every detail of her nudity, and at last he would dissolve in a black mist and lose her in the blackness, and the blackness spread everywhere, and was but the blackness of the night in his solitary bedroom."

Here lays supine, which is used to describe the girl sleeping in the hotel room before he molests her. And his dream, another fantasy, is not even the kind of dream that has remote possibilities. The spider hands, having 8, that turn to tentacles bring up that animal imagery again. He refers to the girl as his "smiling victim" so first off, a victim not a lover, and in this dark dream figures she would be smiling as he attacks her. Normally one would dream about a person they have feelings for and refer to them as their lover, refer to their interaction as embracing. His dream has no feeling of love to the outsider. It ends with the fading to black, which is almost foreshadowing the end of the book, the impossibility of the situation.