If in the year 1950 a newspaper had an archive column "25 years ago", "50 years ago", "100 years ago", these columns would contain excerpts from 1925, 1900, 1850 respectively. There would not be any dispute about what was the normal meaning of these terms. Nobody would be saying that perhaps the excerpts should be from 1926, 1901, 1851 respectively.

 

Humbert is, normally, quite precise about time, as exemplified by the "5300 days". His calculation that "about as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer" is accurate, too. (In the shortest chapter in the book he gives an approximate date, 15 August, but he is clear that he is confused and that this date is only approximate.) Hence, as others have argued, it is striking that there is a discrepancy between his precise "56 days ago" and the other dates given, by him and by John Ray, Jr.

 

Clearly, as Brian Boyd has demonstrated, Nabokov was himself capable of miscalculation. But it is also possible that this is a deliberate error of Nabokov's, intended to show what Freud called a motivated slip of Humbert's. (That Nabokov accepted at least this part of Freud's thinking is clear from elsewhere in Lolita.) We will not make sense of this if we cling to what I insist is an abnormal, indeed simply wrong, interpretation of what "56 days ago" means, just because Nabokov scholars have copied each other in speaking of "3 days discrepancy". They are simply compounding the original mistake, and making it more difficult to decide whether the original mistake was Nabokov's or Humbert's.

 

The correct calculation of the discrepancy means that, if the other dates are correct, then Humbert could have started writing his book at most 52 days ago when he claims to have started 56 days ago. And I have drawn attention to the extraordinarily insistent hints on the significance of the number 52 (which we are told neither Humbert nor Quilty, but only the author, can understand) from Appel-Nabokov. Here, surely, is where the search for the solution of the riddle should begin.

 

Even if you want to insist (perversely, as I see it) that "56 days ago" might mean what I, and newspapers, and (I think) most English speakers would call "55 days ago", you must surely acknowledge that what we mean by "56 days ago" is one possible meaning. But this at least possible (and in my view unique and correct) meaning has been neglected by Nabokov scholars, as far as I know, until now.   

 

Anthony Stadlen