Because of this immediate and continual controversy, few readers have encountered the novel without some preconceptions about its salacious content. Merely cracking such a scandalous book cedes immense liberties to the author who then spirits us into a world where the principal character violates fundamental taboos, criminal laws, and social mores with more evident glee than disgust. Even the earliest, naive readers found a dmonitions enough in the "foreword" by fictional psychologist "John Ray, Jr., Ph.D.," who amply enumerates his disgust for the author of the "Confession" to follow: "No doubt, he is horrible," Ray writes,
he is
abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy....A desperate honesty that
throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical
cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. (5)
Those inclined to skip
prefatory remarks discover within three short paragraphs that the narrator's
obsession is a diminutive ("four feet ten"), school-aged
"girl-child" and Humbert himself, a "murderer." The reader,
like Humbert on his cross-country tour and like Nabokov in creating such a
fiction, enters a world where the most egregious offenses have already been
conceded and "everything [is] allowed" (268).
In this
environment marked by severe initial crimes and admissions, Humbert's less
severe transgressions, his everyday incivilities, become more humorous than
damning as he comments devilishly on the superficial faults of people around
him, fiddles with ridiculously "wrong" verbs, and dismisses one
pompous and overzealous dentist with these words:
"On
second thoughts, I shall have it all done by Dr. Molnar. His price is higher,
but he is of course a much better dentist than you." I do not know if any
of my readers will ever have a chance to say that. It is a delicious dream
feeling. (291)
Humbert couples this disregard
for taboos and the niceties of social interaction with an abuse of poetic
license, the excesses of prose that become a badge of his outlaw status:
"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style" (9), he
writes. He defends these literary transgressions with the same excuses--his
psychological instability, Lolita's irresistibility, and the relativity of
tastes and mores--that he hopes will mitigate his crimes. With Lolita he feels
"lost in an artist's dream" as he attempts to "fix" her
unadulterated form in words and, while touring the American landscape, to evoke
the "delicate beauty ever present in the margin" (152). The author's
concluding remarks, "On a Book Entitled Lolita," affixed to every
edition but the first, identifies the novel as a purely artistic enterprise
designed to produce a state of "aesthetic
bliss" (314). In response to an American critic who
characterized it as the product of a "love affair with the romantic
novel," Nabokov writes that "the subst itution of 'English language'
for 'romantic novel' would make this elegant formula more correct" (316).
Like Pale Fire (1962), Lolita begins with an immoderate conceit that allows its
author and reader to explore the extravagant, pleasurable, and disturbing
fringes of the language.
But as Kauffman points out,
Nabokov's commentary on Lolita has become as essential to the fiction as John
Ray's more explicitly fictional foreword (131). Ray introduces the novel with
promises of a "moral apotheosis" (5), and "an impersonation of
Vladimir Nabokov" (311) polishes it off with an equally monologic
elevation of art over morality. Cloaked in the language of psychological
analysis and moral panic, Ray's foreword pontificates about the peculiar
pathology that motivates Humbert Humbert. It anticipates a reaction against Humbert's
most extreme misdeeds, relegating them to the realm of the pathological, and
emphasizing the usefulness of his case for educators hoping to raise "a
better generation in a safer world" (6). And with Humbert's crimes against
Lolita already laid out before the reader, the concluding remarks by
"Nabokov" foreground style, implying that "only words" (32)
have been Dolores Haze's proxy all along, that in a novel where everything is
subsumed by linguistic concerns, the narrator a nd author are guilty only of
word crimes. Both the foreword and the afterword invite the reader to ignore
the important implications of the story they purport to explain, as Dolores
Haze becomes a footnote to a case study in sexual deviance or a conceit for
aesthetic pursuits. Lolita has become an enduring cultural phenomenon,
"Exhibit A" in debates about literature's ethical duties and the
pleasures of pure art; and although decades have passed since its initial
publication, John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., and "Nabokov" continue
to have the last word.
Between these narrative and
interpretive boundaries, between the limiting and inexact formulas of
"moral apotheosis" (5) and "aesthetic bliss" (314), winds
Humbert Humbert's tortuous tale, as it retraces his travels along highway after
highway and from town to town, always hoping to postpone its own conclusion.
After thousands of miles of cross-country travel designed to prolong his time
with Lolita, Humbert uses every rhetorical strategy available to preclude his
story's inevitable end and avoid any final judgments. Through tantalizing
allusions to a variety of genres and through an interminable intertextual
network, he constructs an extremely intricate and entangled narrative, avoiding
the ends associated with those genres and misdirecting any readerly desire for
closure. Humbert's excess of style works in cahoots with his aversion to ends
by creating contradictory desires: for the pleasure of language and text that
suspends, during the itinerant middle, the need for ultimate revelation; and
for that very revelation. Bloom argues that the novel, "baroque and
subtle" and brimming with allusions, "is a book written to be reread"
(1); but he also suggests that Lolita's baroque construction and "almost
pure revel in diction" are symptomatic of a "fear of meaning"
(2). Although this characterization applies to Humbert's
"Confession," the novel as a whole is concerned with the very
problematic that Bloom identifies. Distinct from Humbert's tale, Nabokov's
novel engages in an ongoing meditation on the nature of endings, one that
foregrounds the many contradictions between the positions espoused in its
afterword and foreword-between desire and meaning, revel and revelation,
reading and rereading. Lolita serves as the title for two books: the first,
Humbert's autobiography and apologia, consists of a distended, resounding,
emphatic middle that finally draws to a close only when he discovers that his
own creation must end in order to become a work of "articulate art"
(283); and the second, Nabokov's novel, with its book end commentaries,
identifies the toll exacted during Humbert's journey to awareness. A return to
the text that launched "Hurricane Lolita," that seemingly
inexhaustible cultural
phenomenon, demonstrates Nabokov's profound mistrust of his novel's
own boundaries, his concern with the promise and potential falsity of last
words.
Humbert's
road trip (re)introduces the reader to a country on the slovenly verge of
postmodernity, with its farrago of displaced images and styles. His index of
motel architecture, for example, reads like a sourcebook for postmodern design,
with stone cabin giving way to brick unit, adobe unit, log cabin, clapboard
"Kabin," ad infinitum. With so many decontextualized styles waiting
at every exit, his compendious description of the American highway landscape
compresses a hemisphereful of designs into a single journey. Humbert's approach
to genres is similarly eclectic, and he dabbles in them without surrendering
his story to the narrative logic and trajectory implied by their conventions;
bouncing from town to town to evade legal responsibility for his actions, he
likewise eludes the less rigid but still present rules of generic structures.
Critics have argued for the predominance of various genres within the
novel--from the fairy
tale to the romance to the fantastic--all with some justification.
Most strikin g at the start, with its "Confession" subtitle hinting
at something salacious inside, are the novel's "pornographic"
elements. Of course, as Nabokov writes, aficionados of such literature were
disappointed by his departure from the conventions of the pornographer's craft,
especially his reversal of the standard crescendo of erotic scenes. Still, at
the time of its initial publication, many critics identified the novel's veiled
pornography as the source of their (dis)satisfaction. Other early critics, John
Hollander among them, viewed Lolita as a resuscitation of the romance novel
(560). More recently, Thomas Frosch has read "the plot as a series of
typical romantic structures, each one a version of the quest or hunt"
(127), with Lolita the ultimately unpossessable object; Frosch has argued that
by anticipating the reader's mocking response to a supposedly worn-out genre,
Nabokov neutralizes such criticism (141-42). Related to the story of a quest,
the fairy tale is also essential to the novel's structure, as Alfred Appel
points out; he writes that beyond the ubiquitous references to Elphinstones and
Enchanted Hunters, the
themes of deception, enchantment, and metamorphosis are akin
to the fairy tale;... while recurrences of places and motifs and the presence
of three principal characters recall the formalistic design and symmetry of
those archetypal tales. (346)
The novel also exhibits the influence of nontraditional
forms like advertising and comic books, as the culture "ever present in
the margin" (152) of Humbert's sight also wanders into the tale. Because
the text incorporates so much in passing, Lolita is one of the few modern
novels, as Jameson suggests, to tackle pop culture and strip-mall America, the
products of Hollywood and suburbia, with a semblance of "dirty
realism" (64). Finally, Todorov's characterization of "the
fantastic" as a break with the acknowledged order, an "irruption of
the inadmissible within changeless everyday legality" (25), also applies
to Lolita; so riddled with seemingly impossible coincidences, the novel
situates itself within the "hesitation" between the uncanny and the marvelous
that Todorov claims for the fantastic. And the list of generic influences--the
apologia, the memoir, the road story, the nouveau roman--extends on and on.
Todorov's
approach seems most germane to Lolita because he maps not a definite generic
space but a "frontier of two genres" (41), an interstitial space
between preexisting borders. Nabokov's novel occupies a place on the literary
map akin to those cartographic idiosyncrasies where several states converge at
a single spot; within the limits of a single page he can wander into different
forms, using their often vastly different conventions. Humbert Humbert, feeling
in control of the goings-on in the Haze household, provides another analogy for
this plurality of focus:
I am
like one of those inflated pale spiders you see in old gardens. Sitting in the
middle of a luminous web and giving little jerks on that strand. My web is
spread all over the house as I listen from my chair where I sit like a wily
wizard. (49)
Fashioning himself as the
center around which everything revolves, Humbert sees a wealth of plot strings
at his disposal. In the most general structural terms Humbert embroils his
assiduous, detective-like readers in an extended search for the overarching
structural principle, while seeding the narrative with false leads galore.
Unfolding according to Barthes's model of narrative as "striptease"
(Pleasure 11) Humbert's "Confession" appears to prolong the pleasure
of anticipation, itself contingent on the promised revelation of a secret; but
who or what is stripping? The initial pursuit of Lolita evolves like a
striptease, but its consummation comes too early in the novel as a whole to
provide any sense of ultimate meaning or closure; this premature disclosure is
the apotheosis of Humbert's anticlimaxes. Other possible but untimely endings
include Lolita's getaway from the hospital, redolent of the triumphant finale
in an "escape from prison" plot; Humbert's fairytale return to
"Mrs. Richard F. Schiller," with its promise, to his mind, of a
mature, loving relationship; and his first moment of anagnorisis, when he
recognizes that his depravity makes a "joke" of life, redirecting him
toward the "local palliative of articulate art" (283). But if the
reader anticipates an end for the truth and closure it brings, Humbert
deliberately, with seeming pleasure, inundates us with possible endings,
obscuring the object of narrative desire.
That
object is named and understood only late in Lolita, long after John Ray sets
the stakes and Humbert embarks on what Barthes calls the "dilatory
space" (S/Z75) of the novel. Hartman's theory of beginnings and ends helps
ground that meandering middle within an already established structure. In
"The Voice of the Shuttle" he elaborates a rhetorical figure from
Sophocles into a more general theory of "poetical and figurative
speech," suggesting that all poetic language may be characterized by one
essential feature: a structure composed of "overspecified ends and indeterminate
middles" (339). Though Hartman focuses primarily on poetry, on
specific lines and images, he also discovers his formula in the most archetypal
plots. The story of Oedipus, for example, narrates the abridged life of a man
who, by "killing his father and marrying his mother, simply elides
individual identity and is allowed no being properly his own" (348). And
in one final feat of extension, Hartman argues that life itself seems bound by
this basic structure:
Human
life, like a poetical figure, is an indeterminate middle between overspecified
poles always threatening to collapse it.... Art narrates that middle region and
charts it like a purgatory, for only if it exists can life exist. (348)
The opening lines of Speak,
Memory (1966) read almost like a prototype of Hartman's essay, as Nabokov's
family photographs and home movies, at times triggers of the keenest nostalgia,
also serve as disquieting artifacts of a time before his birth and premonitions
of his eventual death. Nabokov's autobiography thus begins with an observation
about the oppressive brevity of every life story: "The cradle rocks above
an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of
light between two eternities of darkness" (19). The circumstances that bring
about Lolita's tragedy render it particularly poignant: as well as any
character in literature, Dolores Haze-"deprived of her childhood"
(283), and ultimately of life--exemplifies Hartman's collapsed middle because,
as we learn on rereading, she has died "in childbed, giving birth to a
stillborn girl" (4), before the reader ever encounters her
"immortality" through language. As in the oedipal archetype, she has
been waylaid on her own search for i dentity, propelled prematurely into
adulthood, and hastened toward her death. Because of her marriage and
subsequent name change, the fact of Lolita's premature death remains
undisclosed in an initial reading. Hartman probably envisions such a cryptic
yet momentous opening when he writes, "Stories begin...with something that
means too much" (352).
Hartman's
analysis also applies on the level of Lolita's poetics, especially when the
realities of death, aging, and ends creep into Humbert's narrative. Having just
introduced his mother into the background of his childhood in the French
Riviera, Humbert dismisses her summarily, recounting her sudden death with one
abrupt gesture: "picnic, lightning" (10). She becomes the paradigm
for the women in his life, all of whom enter the story in the shadow of their eventual
deaths. Humbert's penchant for hapax logomena and idiosyncratic
coinages parallel in language the foreshortened life of Lolita: despite their
ostensible vibrancy, they are dying phrases, obsolete just after their initial
utterance. A master of so many poetic devices, Humbert riddles the narrative
with instances of tmesis, the figure
Hartman identifies as the epitome of poetry's elided middles and
overspecified ends (344). From his evocation of "the Old and rotting
World" (85) he left behind, to his self-characterization as "an
enchanted and very tight hunter" (268), Humbert repeatedly pries apart
common phrases to insert the world outside his solipsism. But unlike the
classical model where necessity is parted for the sake of art, the order is
reversed in Humbert's fantasy world: tmesis allows ends to rush back in. Images
that traditionally evoke nostalgia become symptomatic of inevitable decay.
Humbert's disdain for psychotherapy emerges through the insertion of a space
when he argues that Lolita's previous sexual experimentation absolves him of
his crimes. He writes:
I am
not a criminal
sexual psychopath taking indecent liberties with a child. The rapist
was Charlie Holmes. I am the therapist--a matter of nice spacing in the way of
distinction. (150)
Of course, Humbert has
fantasized about and plotted just what he denies; the typographic space merely
serves to clarify the connection between the two words, to inject reality into
his rationalization. And as Lubin argues in his study of Nabokov's poetics,
with a rhetorical question that recalls Hartman's argument:
Isn't
phrasal tmesis a syntactic equivalent of those "specious lines of
play" his books are filled with?... It is the greater
deception writ small. The mind apprehends the terminal words which
it expects to find juxtaposed, and then it must accommodate the alien phonemes
thrust between. (196)
Lubin suggests that throughout
Nabokov's work, and especially in Lolita, experimentation with generic forms,
with incongruous juxtapositions, enacts in the narrative as a whole his more
local, poetic concerns (197). Advertised as a "Confession," Humbert's
tale is also a litany of great deceptions; one of the reader's tasks is to
discover what has been elided or evaded in Humbert's specious lines of play,
what has been obscured behind his "tangle of thorns" (9).
The major limitation of
Hartman's suggestive essay is its incomplete theorization of the dynamics of
plot. By focusing on the minutiae of rhetorical figures and extending the model
outward, he can only situate the poles, the beginnings and ends, without
examining the movement between. In Hartman's schema the ends and beginnings
apply equal force in compressing the middle, where art thrives. But what forces
govern the space between? In Reading for the Plot, Brooks theorizes the
interstices, examining the way stories both unfold and curl back on themselves.
Using Freud as a foundation, Brooks inverts the commonsensical but simplistic
notion that ends necessarily succeed beginnings in a logical conception of the
syuzhet, or plot. On the contrary, he writes,
The
sense of a beginning...must in some important way be determined by the sense of
an ending. We might say that we are able to read present moments--in literature
and, by extension, in life--as endowed with narrative meaning only because we
read them in anticipation of the structuring power of those endings that will
retrospectively give them the order and significance of plot. (94)
Brooks posits a natural,
readerly desire for endings as a structuring principle in narrative, which
proceeds as a "movement toward totalization under the mandate of
desire" (91). According to Brooks, that totalization involves more than a
heaping on of proairetic events; it develops according to a "pattern of
anticipation and completion which overcodes mere succession" (94). Again
following Freud, Brooks also emphasizes the role of repetition as a structural
principle, especially in the privileged moment at the outset of traditional
narratives when tellers acknowledge their status as retellers.
Lolita begins as such a story, as John Ray "preambulates" a
manuscript written by Humbert, who himself relates events with the shaping
power of hindsight. Repetition also creates a return within the bounds of the
text, though Brooks underscores the ambiguity of this "doubling
back," for nobody "can say whether this return is a return to or a
return of" (100). When Humbert embarks on his "cryptogrammic paper
chase" (250 ), revisiting through travel guides and guest books his
initial journey with Lolita, he both reenters the preceding text and allows for
the return of Quilty, the repressed of Humbert's "Confessions."
Repetition and memory, both constitutive elements of storytelling, serve to
"pervert time" (111), according to Brooks; and that is Humbert's main
narrative goal all along.
But another force is present in
Lolita, one that counterbalances Humbert's deliberate ramblings. In the
conclusion of Reading for the Plot, Brooks anticipates the limitations of
narrative theory after the nouveau roman and postmodernity ushered in new
notions of plot. Nabokov's extraordinary admiration for Alain Robbe-Grillet
(and vice versa) signals their mutual interest in abandoning traditional
narrative structures and exploring alternative models (Boyd 398, 654). Brooks
writes that these new modes of fiction demonstrate a
fragmentation
of plot, using it in residual and parodistic ways, working to disappoint the
reader's normal expectations concerning the plotted narrative, yet nonetheless
carrying reading forward by way of plotted narrative elements. (315)
But forward to what end? Brooks
implies a continuity between experimental and traditional narrative based on a
teleological conception of plot. The end remains a necessary goal, while the
middle serves as an "arabesque," a "detour," a
"struggle toward the end under the compulsion of imposed delay" (107--08).
According to Brooks, incest serves as the "exemplary" obstacle to
plot fulfillment, the "short circuit" that diverts the text into a
protracted cure and prolongs the narrative (107--08). Because its plot revolves
around acts of incest, Lolita is riddled with these archetypal short circuits;
and many readings, including that of John Ray, focus on its teleological
elements, on Humbert's curative evolution toward "moral apotheosis"
(5). But what becomes of the novel's forward progress when the narrator teases
the reader by solving the mystery of Quilty's identity without reporting it,
forcing the most assiduous readers to return to the text and reconstruct the
chapters-long hunt? And in a novel that alludes cryptically to the fate of the
title character in a foreword, then leaves her status ambiguous, to be
apprehended only on rereading, how can we speak of page 309 as "the
end"? For Janeway, reviewing for the New York Times, a return to the text
(albeit a slightly altered one) changed entirely the complexion of the book; she
writes: "The first time I read Lolita I thought it was one of the funniest
books I'd ever come on.... The second time I read it, uncut, I thought it was
one of the saddest." Perhaps more than most novels, Lolita reread,
returned to, is a qualitatively different book, not only because of the story
remembered but also for the knowledge newly revealed. Beyond the novel's
natural page-by-page progression, parallel and contradictory structures
undercut our rush toward ultimate revelation, leaving it partial in an initial reading.
Brooks's desire for the end may
be only one of many readerly desires at work in narrative. Hollywood's craze
for sequels, for example, reflects a desire not to have closure or to limit its
finalizing effects; the audience can anticipate continuation as well as conclusion.
Also important for Lolita, however, is the pleasure of the text itself. When
Trilling argues that the reader begins to sympathize with Humbert, to forgive
his crimes as manifestations of "the last lover's" (5) overpowering
love, he only obliquely evokes the novel's capacity to engage even reluctant
readers. Humbert's expressions of love convince many, not only because they
hint at redemption but also because the language itself is enchanting. The
novel returns repeatedly to its elided middle, as Humbert recreates his
previous journey while searching for Lolita; but it also attempts to create a
desire for that middle, one that counterbalances its onrushing narrative.
Humbert's pleasure in the process of evoking Lolita is evident from the fam ous
first words of his narrative, from his incantation testifying to her capacity
to enthrall. He blackmails Lolita, forcing her to remain with him, both to
satisfy his sexual desire and to serve as a kidnapped poetic muse; paralleling
his sexual desire is another "ancient lust" (45), also perverse, to
read and write her while suppressing the natural transience of beauty and
narrative, the progression into experience and wisdom. Dolores Haze becomes
Humbert's "Lolita" only when safely textualized, when Humbert formulates
a word--nymphet--to signify her difference; and he tries not to acknowledge any
relation between that signifier and a being herself--namely, Dolores
Haze--choosing instead a world of free-floating language in an equally
liberated narrative structure. Humbert's story is a desperate attempt to
elongate the elided middle, an attempt at pure arabesque, an abeyance of the
most burdensome pole of narrative: the end that promises enlightenment but also
marks the death of something essential.
Humbert hints at his narrative
goal from the early pages of the novel, as he evokes an "intangible island
of entranced time where Lolita plays with her likes" (17) and fashions his
writing as just such an island, where Lolita can live out the prescribed role
for nymphets and himself: "Let them play around me forever. Never grow
up" (21). Because Humbert fondled Lolita's precursor, Annabel Leigh, on an
"immortal day" (39) that opens a "rift" in his life, she
still lives, according to Humbert's initially self-satisfying logic; for
Humbert, the intervening 25 years "tapered to a palpitating point, and
vanished" (39) after his first glimpse of Lolita. Fittingly, Humbert
begins his narrative by telescoping years of reality, by eliding the unpleasant
middle with Valeria and "Taxovich" (28) in favor of the idyllic poles
represented by his two nymphets. Of course, in his more lucid moments, Humbert
realizes that Lolita's life will necessarily follow the natural timeline: the
nymphet's life span is bounded by the "ag e limits of nine and
fourteen"(16). He acknowledges as much when he writes, "I knew I had
fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever
Lolita" (65). Humbert's quotidian life, or as much as his
"Confession" relates, seems dedicated to prolonging his exposure to
Lolita and to keeping his narrative alive. When plotting a way to circumvent or
eliminate the threatening presence of Charlotte Haze, Humbert considers briefly
the blunt instrument of blackmail; but he decides against it after imagining
the consequences of failure:
If I
said "Either I have my way with Lolita, and you help me to keep the matter
quiet, or we part at once," she would have turned as pale as a woman of
clouded glass and slowly replied: "All right, whatever you add or retract,
this is the end." And the end it would be. (84)
In strategizing his life with
Lolita, all ends are repellent, and his narrative develops into a variety of ad
hoc efforts at extension: sleeping pills to incapacitate the entire Haze
household, a marriage to Charlotte Haze to grant him unlimited access as
stepfather, and even an elaborate, but untried, murder plot against his wife.
Down to
the level of his sentence structure, to his penchant for periodic and
(surprisingly for such a demanding stylist) rambling sentences, Humbert's style
reflects his aversion to ends. Describing a trip into town, he writes in a
crescendo toward an abrupt and unwanted conclusion:
The
wings of the driver's Marlenesque nose shone, having shed or burned up their
ration of powder, and she kept up an elegant monologue anent the local traffic,
and smiled in profile, and pouted in profile, and beat her painted lashes in
profile, while I prayed we would never get to that store, but we did. (51)
During his first sexual
encounter with Lolita, which involves rubbing against the leg of an ostensibly
oblivious nymphet, Humbert describes the act in terms that posit parallels
between its precarious balance and the strategies of his narrative as a whole.
He writes, "Suspended on the brink of that voluptuous abyss (a nicety of
physiological equipoise comparable to certain techniques in the arts) I kept
repeating chance words after her" (60). Among those techniques are his own
equiponderant gestures at "fixing" Lolita through the "chance
words" of his confession, and creating in his temporarily suspended
narrative a fantasy world akin to the Hollywood musicals he so virulently pans.
Like the world of musicals, his ideal realm is "an essentially grief-proof
sphere of existence wherefrom death and truth were banned" and where
"technically deathless" (170) fathers admire lovingly the success of
their aspiring actress daughters. This Hollywood creation, like Humbert's, is a
self-contained world, referring whenever possible to its own ersatz
"reality" or to other fictions.
Humbert's solipsism aims at
near-complete isolation, and the world beyond his insular existence is always
confronted as a threat, as the intrusion of an incipient end into the
precarious story of his time with Lolita. On the night when they first occupy
the same bed, their hotel room is a hall of mirrors, with seemingly every inch
of wall space designed to reflect back on the occupant, reduplicating the
self-imposed limitations of his vision. Later, with her training as an actress,
Dolly learns the value of dissimulation and creates a world apart from Humbert,
guarded by the mirrors that will keep him at bay. During their second journey,
when Humbert interrogates Lolita after a suspicious disappearance, she explains
away her absence with a mirroring of her own: she was speaking with a friend
also named "Dolly." Humbert responds wistfully, recognizing that his
solipsistic world no longer contains Lolita, who has begun to construct and
embody her own fictions. Lolita's conversation with an invented
"Dolly" exh austs his line of questioning and marks the boundary of
his solipsistic realm: it is "'the dead end' (the mirror you break your
nose against)" (225). Humbert's main source of anxiety is the realization
that Lolita maintains an identity outside his self-contained realm, and in his
memoirs he searches for a medium to enforce her isolation while permitting her
singular mannerisms to survive. A liminal figure--half English and half Swiss,
a European living in America--Humbert hopes to bridge his timeless, solipsistic
world and the aging, everyday, suburban life constantly exceeding his attempts
at circumscription. But in moments of despair he realizes the difficulty, even
impossibility of such a project because he is a prisoner not only of his
solipsism but also of his own narrative, a mirror of sorts, which reflects its
author as accurately as its ostensible subject. The more he insists on the
great "pains [he] took to speak Lo's tongue" (149), the more enmeshed
in his own fiction he becomes and the greater his distance from Dolores Haze's
parallel fictions.
In Humbert's story, objects glimpsed in passing, and
photographs in particular, provide a welcome detour for the narrative; but they
also disclose a fragmented record of loss and reflect Humbert's willful evasion
of the partial narratives registered on their surfaces. In his daily
interactions Humbert renames people and reduces them to caricatures; but
because he wants to preserve Lolita's mercurial, gestural idiosyncrasies, a
photographic image is insufficient: he has burned his photographs of Lolita and
laments that remembered images offer up "but an immobilized fraction of
her, a cinematographic still" (44). Humbert's humorously failed experiment
in penning verbal snapshots, his attempt to capture the imperative glint of
images, hints at the ultimately unrealizable goal of his narrative. He writes:
I have
to put the impact of an instantaneous vision into a sequence of words; their
physical accumulation in the page impairs the actual flash, the sharp units of
impression: Rug-heap, car, old man-doll....(97)
Humbert's language strives to
produce the aspect of the photograph that Barthes has called the punctum: the
immediately shocking and poignant detail with both the capacity to
"wound" and "a power of expansion" (Camera 45). According
to Barthes, that momentary expansion bestows life on the photographic image,
whose own history unfolds according to a narrative structure similar to that
outlined by Hartman and Nabokov: the opening and closing of the shutter
rehearses the overdetermined relationship between an elided middle and its
ends, or in Speak, Memory's terms, between a "brief crack of light"
and "two eternities of darkness" (19). As Barthes writes in Camera
Lucida, during his divagation sparked by an 1865 portrait of a condemned man,
every photograph confronts its beholder with both ontological evidence that the
subject "has been" and a premonition that the subject will some day
no longer exist. The photograph forces the beholder to
observe
with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the
absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the
future....I shudder... over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether
or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe. (96)
Photographs in Lolita often
bear this deathly weight. Early in the novel Humbert fetishizes a lone,
now-lost picture, made on "the last day of our fatal summer" (13),
showing himself with Annabel Leigh, the idealized childhood love who died just
four months after striking her pose. He again confronts the photograph's
anterior future while getting a haircut, when in yet another of his rambling
sentences, he writes of the barber:
he
babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, and, at every explodent, spat into my
neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses on my sheet-wrap, or interrupted
his tremulous scissor work to produce faded newspaper clippings, and so
inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize as he pointed to an
easeled photograph among the ancient gray lotions, that the mustached young
ball player had been dead for the last thirty years. (213)
And the Haze household, its
motley and unmatched furnishings a combination of "comedy" and
"tragedy" (37--38), contains its own record of human catastrophes,
most of which are elided in Humbert's usually jocular prose. Most noticeably
absent from the bulk of his narrative is the other Haze child who suffered a
premature death and haunts Humbert's brief marriage to Charlotte, "the
blurred, blond male baby whose photograph to the exclusion of all others
adorned our bleak bedroom" (80). Humbert remains reluctant to pursue these
fragmented stories to their conclusions, loath to insert them within a narrative
that allows them to become more than anomalous images. Although Humbert is
content to foreclose their stories, in retrospect the dashed-line trajectory of
these latent narratives begins to parallel Dolores Haze's own life story. These
photographs are the loose ends that Humbert is unable to tie down.
Because
the photograph is an inadequate or undesirable means of recalling Lolita and
because his story is of necessity textual, Humbert's narrative runs the gamut
of rhetorical strategies for calling forth an absent figure. The nature of his
medium, the necessity of creating images through a string of words in the
indefinite time of reading, confronts Humbert with the paradox of his attempt
to "fix once and for all the perilous magic of nymphets" (134):
although he strives to preserve Lolita's idiosyncrasies, he also risks reducing
and abstracting them, transforming her into a specimen devoid of that
particular "magic." With his snapshots of Lolita already destroyed,
he chastises himself for failing to film her, and in an extended description of
her mannerisms on the tennis court, tries to evoke those idiosyncratic gestures
through prose that aspires to the ontological condition of cinema. In a passage
that invokes and draws together many of Nabokov's personal obsessions (with
cinema, photography, and lepido ptera), Barthes suggests that the forward rush
of the moving picture allows it to escape the deathly associations of the
photo:
the
screen (as Bazin has remarked) is not a frame but a hideout; the man or woman
who emerges from it continues living....When we define the Photograph as a
motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not
move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and
fastened down, like butterflies. (Camera 55-57)
Underlying the plot of Lolita
is a tension between Dolores Haze's enforced stillness, Humbert's retrospective
attempts to bequeath movement to her through prose, and the ultimate revelation
that this regimen left her unable to leave, gave her "absolutely nowhere
else to go" (142). While he dies believing that he has constructed a
"refuge of art" (309) to guarantee his and Lolita's
"immortality," and writes under the illusion that Lolita has been
suspended in a technically deathless protocinematic state, in Nabokov's fiction
she has also become an exhibit in another, contradictory taxonomic project:
although Humbert hopes to "fix" her for posterity, that inevitably
arrested gesture also bears witness to the catastrophe that befalls her, to the
untimely tragedy that Humbert's style strives belatedly to forestall.
Humbert's apologia ends with an
apostrophic invocation--in his final address to "my Lolita" (309)-as
he resorts almost desperately to the most archaic device for diverting
narrative and reviving an absent figure. Culler argues that apostrophe in
poetic speech "works against narrative and its accompaniments:
sequentiality, causality, time, teleological meaning" (148). In classical
rhetoric, a courtroom apostrophe marks an address to someone other than the
judge; in poetic discourse it constructs a "special temporality" in
which the writer can "say 'now'" in a "timeless present" or
"temporality of writing" (149). Humbert's repeated deviations from
his ongoing appeal to the "ladies and gentlemen of the jury" (9), his
attempts to summon a timeless Lolita through apostrophe, underscore the
contradictions between his desire and duty: any evocation of Lolita in the
timeless present inevitably resolves into a "Confession" charged with
explaining her ultimate
absence and a novel that alludes to the untimely, irrevers ible
nature of that absence. Culler writes that despite its attempt to address
another person or object, apostrophe can be read instead as "an act of
radical interiorization and solipsism" because it suggests that the object
of the address can exist only "as a product of poetic intervention"
(146). As Johnson argues in her study of the relation between "apostrophe,
animation, and abortion," uses of apostrophe exist within a continuum,
with a celebration of the poet's capacity to bestow presence occupying one
extreme, and at the other, mourning for the absent figure who can only be
invoked through rhetorical gestures (30-32). The complexity of Nabokov's novel
lies in its treatment of the dynamics identified by both Culler and Johnson,
its acknowledgment of both the power and the limitations of rhetoric. Humbert's
early apostrophic lament, which purports to address Lolita but at the same time
bemoans her loss, becomes symptomatic of the contradictions inherent in all his
attempts to construct a textual proxy fo r Dolores Haze: "Oh, my
Lolita," he writes, "I have only words to play with!" (32). This
tension between the presence of Lolita and the absence of Dolores Haze, who
ultimately dies "in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl" (4),
underscores the difference between the powerful but solipsistic life-giving
strategies of Humbert
Humbert and a subject hoping to pursue a separate life, one outside
the confines of Humbert's art.
Humbert's solipsism and
Lolita's ultimate absence put the lie to his claim that "this book is
about Lolita" (253); or more accurately, his constant invocation of the
name "Lolita," from his narrative's famous opening lines, belie the
fact that the girl with a life of her own--the Dolores and Dolly Haze, and the
Mrs. Richard F. Schiller who crop up in the speech of others--is only a bit
player in his elaborate construction. Barthes writes of "the Name: in the
novelistic regime (and elsewhere?) it is an instrument of exchange: it allows
the substitution of a nominal unit for a collection of characteristics by
establishing an equivalent relationship between sign and sum ..." (S/Z
94). In Humbert's narrative only the moniker "Lolita" acquires any
value as referent, while her other names remain foreign currency; again, only
on rereading does her married name acquire its full significance as a sign of
foreshortened childhood and tragic death. As Kauffman writes in her search for
a woman in the text, Nabokov "is wr iting a book that elides the female by
framing the narrative through Humbert's angle of vision.... The victim's
viewpoint in Lolita is elided" (141). Add childhood to her observations
and the list of Humbert's most salient elisions is complete. Humbert admits as
much when he writes: "What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own
creation, another, fanciful Lolita ... having no will, no consciousness--indeed
no life of her own" (62). And that is the novel's ultimate tragedy:
Humbert's arabesque takes place in the real time of Dolores Haze (itself a
pseudonym); he may have chosen the fantastic form of his narrative, but it
requires the Procrustean transformation of a precocious "girl-child"
into a timeless fiction called "Lolita."
Though remarkably consistent in
his domination of the narrative
voice, Humbert does allow Lolita's perspective to sneak through on
occasion. Her precocious awareness reveals that she is never, as Humbert
believes early on, "safely solipsized" (60). Her attitude toward ends
is the polar opposite of Humbert's, as he must counter his own itinerant ways
with the "impression of 'going places'" (152). He accedes to her
wishes, creating daily micronarratives to satisfy her desire for a purpose, an
end to anticipate and achieve. Humbert writes:
Every
morning during our yearlong travels I had to devise some expectation, some
special point in space and time for her to look forward to, for her to survive
till bedtime. Otherwise, deprived of a shaping and sustaining purpose, the
skeleton of her day sagged and collapsed. (151)
Having been raised on Hollywood
films and romance novels, Lolita's desire for her life
narrative resembles the Brooksian approach to traditional
storytelling; fittingly, the objectives that Humbert invents often include
Hollywood films, whose manner of plotting likely reinforces the desire for
endings Humbert tries in vain to suppress. Humbert's characterization of Lolita
as the "ideal consumer," the "subject and object" (148)
upon whom advertisers prey, reveals his misunderstanding of her burgeoning
sophistication. Her surprisingly perspicacious attitude toward her camp experience
parallels Humbert's own distaste for educational systems designed to
manufacture ideal housewives; she says with a clarity that indicates
understanding and irony,
Ansooit,
I was taught to live happily and richly with others and to develop a wholesome
personality. Be a cake, in fact.... My duty is--to be useful. I am a friend to
male animals. I obey orders ... I am thrifty and I am absolutely filthy in
thought word and deed. (114)
As Kauffman points out from a
materialist-feminist perspective, her society works to create not only an ideal
consumer but also a compliant product for consumption (141); in this way,
Humbert's self-centered objectives work in tandem with the consumer society he
condemns. That Lolita rebels through her lies, her counterfictions, hints at
her capacity for independence; and her "sobs in the night--every night,
every night" (175-76) are haunting both for their inherent sadness and for
their narrative belatedness: Humbert's "confession" fails to report
her reaction until over a hundred such nights have passed. Again, only in
retrospect does the totality of Humbert's deception emerge, along with the
scope of Dolores Haze's tragedy.
If Humbert attempts to elide
Lolita's narrative, he quashes Clare Quilty's. He displays an almost paranoid
hyperawareness of a shadow tailing him across the country; and though he
relates these experiences from a position of feigned ignorance, allowing the
reader to experience with him this peripatetic coming to consciousness, the
narrator himself is a rereader and rewriter of the text. His manner of
retelling suggests that in hindsight he has acquired a panoptic, authorial
perspective: in the chesslike patterning of his story, he "sees the
board" (233)--or more of it than the naive reader. Retrospectively, he
leads the reader on his original itinerary across the country, retracing his
initial path to experience, ultimately arriving at the end Quilty once crafted
outside his awareness. The playwright's relationship with Lolita actually
predates Humbert's arrival at 342 Lawn Street, and its continuation represents
the temporary survival of Lolita's life beyond Humbert. Seemingly omnipresent,
Quilty remains in cognito as he dips in and out of Humbert's story, leaving a
tantalizing trail of telltale signs; he goes so far as to ask directly (though
cryptically) about Lolita, but Humbert initially dismisses it as a case of
mishearing. By tailing Humbert's car across the country, Quilty issues a
challenge to his "double" and rival; and by eventually usurping control
of the narrative he escalates this conflict, ratcheting up Humbert's desire for
both a final revelation of his rival's identity and a cathartic endgame.
Reading Freud into Lolita, Bloom sees their conflict as the interaction of
primal psychological forces: he identifies Humbert as the figure of Eros,
shadowed all along by Quilty's Thanatos (3). The novel thus constructs a
classic case of triangular desire, an allegorical conflict between
psychological drives and an epistemological maze to bring protagonist and
antagonist together. Despite his aversion to the narrative logics of the
various plots he starts and stops, Humbert finds himself inextricably embroi
led in the most archetypal plots, with conflicting desires and a string of
clues begging for resolution. After their many near misses, the paths of the
two rivals are bound to intersect because the conflicts and mysteries must
achieve partial resolution for both the reader and Humbert, himself now a
reader of the cryptogrammic path of paper left behind him. Humbert's change in
consciousness parallels this change of status: no longer the center of the web
of plot lines surrounding him, Humbert the reader returns to the text in order
to discover the truth that evaded him during his first pass. But as the novel
demonstrates, the return to is always accompanied by a return of. If Humbert
strives always to prolong the meandering middle of his tale, to lapse at every
opportunity out of narrative and into moments of expansion, Quilty serves as a
constant reminder that unsettled questions impel that narrative toward some
resolution.
In their final confrontation
Quilty is threatened with death and embarks on a rambling, dilatory attempt to
save his life; proposing to buy a reprieve with a bank-financed bribe, he
quotes "the Bard" with a head cold: "to borrow and to borrow and
to borrow" (301). Faced with retribution and with his own unhappy ending,
Quilty, like Humbert before him, tries to "borrow" time, to avoid the
inevitable end and force tomorrows to creep on indefinitely. A born dramatist,
Quilty arranges their death scene according to the dictates of familiar
narratives, in strokes so obvious that "elderly readers will surely recall
at this point the obligatory scene in the Westerns of their childhood"
(299). They begin to struggle for a gun and roll around on the floor as
Humbert's prose flip-flops pronouns and identities, confirming that the two
characters are essentially doubles, two sides of the same coin. Earlier,
Humbert feels that a towline, produced by another spinneret, has affixed itself
to his unraveling tale. As he late r reveals, that thread connected Quilty,
a.k.a. Detective Von Trapp, to Humbert's Melmoth and his elaborate structure of
interlacing genres. Quilty, hunter and hunted, sower and seeker of clues,
propels Humbert's narrative to its conclusion by his insistence on the
overarching detective ur-genre. And as their situations are reversed, as
Humbert is caught up in the need for truth about Lolita, his tale spirals off
in initially unintended directions; he loses himself in a narrative of someone
else's making, in "the end of the ingenious play staged for me by
Quilty" (305).
As Humbert's detective
doppelganger, Quilty initiates the closure necessary for his genre, although he
eventually regrets the consequences. Ray's concluding "apotheosis"
has wrestled with "Nabokov's" less purposive poetic license, and
Humbert's acknowledgment of artistic limitation is realized in the tension. As
Humbert himself realizes, purpose is the "duty" poetry owes on its
creative freedom. In another one of his periodic sentences, willfully
prolonging its own end but arriving inevitably at resolution and judgment, he
writes:
Unless
it can be proven to me--to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard,
and my putrefaction--that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a
North-American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood
by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I
see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local
palliative of articulate art. To quote an old poet:
The
moral
sense in mortals is the duty
We
have to pay on the mortal sense of beauty. (283)
The difference between the
moral and the mortal, as Humbert discovers, is the insertion of a single
letter; and again that confection implies the fundamental relatedness of the
two words: only after some terminus can the pursuit and creation of beauty be
evaluated in a moral matrix. Because of the lucidity of his statement, because
of his frank admonition that absurdity is an unworthy alternative, Humbert's
recognition becomes more than just an acknowledgment of his "duty";
he does more than merely dash off a check to forgive a bookful of pedophilia.
Humbert must also allow the readers to fulfill their role as jurors, and for
that reason he must reluctantly present a concluding argument; he must allow them
to respond to the text as he did to Quilty's.
Lo, Lola, Dolly, and Dolores
all make cameos in the novel, but Humbert allows them to pass out of his
fiction with barely a glance; Mrs. Richard Schiller occupies a few pages before
she is sent to the Alaskan hinterlands. But Lolita is another matter, occupying
a different category of existence altogether. As Richard Bullock points out,
"Lolita is ... not only a girl, a fantasy, and a book, it is the
constitutive element of all three: a word" (200). And significantly for
Humbert, that word both begins and ends his narrative, creating a closed
circuit, an endlessness, a perfection of form redolent of his earlier narrative
goals. For Humbert she has become safely textualized, and he concludes his
"Confession" confident in Lolita's immortality, if not in body then
in words. The novel as a whole, however, with its bookend commentaries, betrays
the half-truth of her immortality; as with all art representing human subjects,
the separate life of the art object contradicts the "overspecified
ends" (Hartman 339) inhe rent in the subject. Nabokov has created in Humbert
Humbert a narrator who
strives with great alacrity, even desperation, to capture perfectly in words a
human form; the tragedy of the novel is his eventual, overdetermined, costly
failure. Lolita exists as a subject and object somewhere in Humbert's prose,
but nowhere beyond that text. But in order to become a work of "articulate
art," Nabokov's narrative must extend beyond "only words" (32)
by sharing one self-evident feature of life outside his fiction: the unshakable
poles of birth and death. In negotiating the space between two more
overdetermined ends--writing and reading--Nabokov has created the possibility
of a return to, return of, and rereading of Lolita or Dolores Haze or Mrs.
Richard Schiller. Nabokov has created a desire for the middle through an end
that serves less as a revelation than an invitation to return, allowing the
narrative to escape the false closure of Mrs. Schiller's new beginning in
Alaska. Contrary to the assurances of John Ray, Jr ., Ph.D., Lolita is a novel
in which "ghosts" do walk. That haunting return provides the
perspective Nabokov writes of in the final line of Speak, Memory, the hindsight
through which emerges clarity, the total picture that "the finder cannot
unsee once it has been seen" (310). One continued value of Lolita emerges
from the never-ending patterns woven into the text, patterns that allow the
novel to outstrip its commentators, to exceed even its own last words. The
novel leads us back through the sad haze of a girl-child's life, forcing us to
confront the contradictions inherent in Humbert's representation and his
desperate attempts to conceal those contradictions. Nabokov's work still
teaches us with great tenacity the value of reading closely, of reading again,
of observing a textual and social reality with the intensity necessary to
discover immanent truths in some of their complexity, to see in the
"scrambled picture," "among the jumbled angles of roofs and
walls" (Speak, Memory 310), the hidden details that together emerge as the
whole.
WORKS CITED
Appel, Alfred. Introduction.
The Annotated Lolita. Ed. A. Appel. New York: Vintage, 1991.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida.
Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill, 1981.
-----. The Pleasure of the
Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Noonday, 1975.
-----. S/Z. Trans. Richard
Miller. New York: Hill, 1974.
Bloom, Harold. Introduction. Vladimir
Nabokov. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1987.
Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov:
The American Years. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the
Plot. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.
Bullock, Richard. "Humbert
the Character, Humbert the Writer." Philological Quarterly 63:2 (1984):
187-204.
Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit
of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.
Frosch, Thomas R. "Parody
and Authenticity in Lolita." Wadimir Nabokov. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York:
Chelsea, 1987. 127-42.
Hartman, Geoffrey. "The
Voice of the Shuttle: Language from the Point of View of Literature."
Beyond Formalism. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. 337-55.
Hollander, John. "The
Perilous Magic of Nymphets." Partisan Review (Fall 1956): 557-60.
Jameson, Fredric. The Seeds of
Time. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
Janeway, Elizabeth. "The
Tragedy of a Man Driven by Desire." New
York Times Book Review 17 Aug. 1958: 4.
Johnson, Barbara.
"Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion." Diacritics (Spring 1986):
29-39.
Kauffman, Linda. "Is There
a Woman in the Text?" Refiguring the Father: New Feminist Readings of
Patriarchy. Ed. Patricia Yaeger and Beth Kowaleski-Wallace. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois UP, 1989. 131-152.
Lubin, Peter. "Kickshaws
and Motley." Triquarterly 17 (1970): 187-208.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New
York: Vintage, 1991.
-----. Pale Fire. New York:
Vintage, 1989.
-----. Speak, Memory. New York:
Vintage, 1989.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The
Fantastic. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993.
Trilling, Lionel. "The Last
Lover: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita." Encounter 11 (Oct. 1958): 9-19.
JAMES
TWEEDIE[1]
[1] JAMES
TWEEDIE is a PhD candidate studying English and film at the University of Iowa.
He has an essay forthcoming in Cinema Journal and is writing a dissertation on
the neo-baroque tendency in contemporary culture.
