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Metaphor
Explanation and Analysis—Visual Memory:
When describing his mental images of Annabel Leigh and Dolores “Lolita” Haze from his prison cell, Humbert uses two different metaphors for understanding visual memory:
There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: “honey-colored skin,” “thin arms,” “brown bobbed hair,” “long lashes,” “big bright mouth”); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).
Humbert claims that there are “two kinds of visual memory.” The first, he writes, takes place “when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind.” Here, he uses a “laboratory” as a metaphor for memory, imagining himself as a scientist who pieces together an image of a person limb by limb. The second type of visual memory, he argues, occurs when “you instantly invoke [...] the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors.” This second type of memory, then, is even stronger than the first, as he claims that he can see an “objective” image of Lolita as a “little ghost” standing before him. The first metaphor draws from the language of science and medicine, and the second, in contrast, invokes ghosts and the supernatural, perhaps communicating Humbert Humbert's irrational, destructive, and even frightening interest in Lolita.
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