that he manipulates time along with the sympathies of his readers as he works against the clock to tie up his narrative threads: thus, he neatly, but implausibly, settles the destinies of the three main characters with a reconciliatory visit to Dolores and revenge on Quilty. Or we can convict an author (Vladimir Nabokov) who is defiantly unwilling to be enslaved to dates (like the early Dickens), or prone to errors with them. (3) The conundrum has provoked thirty years of controversy over larger aspects of the novel, since what Lolita is doing goes beyond its internal calendar. In 1968, Carl Proffer could not verify the passage of fifty-six days and attributed this--along with other local chronological discrepancies that he found--to Humbert's "bad memory" and "messy time keeping." (4) In 1979, Christina Tekiner contested Proffer's complaint, corrected his miscalculations, and (developing Elizabeth Bruss's hypothesis) speculated on an alternative reality, more complicated than it looks, that might be attached to the divergent dates: "If the chronology is correct, [the events] prior to September 22 have some basis in the `reality' of his life," but the events "after September 22 are his fabrication." (5) Although she reads most of the book as a realistic novel, she views the last nine chapters at an angle to reality that is "entirely the product of [Humbert's] imagination." Tekiner's key insight of a significant exception to the chronological line is more discussed than substantiated and, aside from the dates, she gives no clear textual warrant for her intuition. Some critics have followed her in declaring the inconsistency centrally relevant to the perplexing narrative; Leona Toker, for instance, believes that the "crafty handling of dates ... untells Humbert's tale ... by exposing [his] cognitive unreliability." (6) Today, few commentators can make the dates add up, and there is no consensus on the relevance of the discrepancy. The rel...