In Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
plays a very serious game with the relations between a work of art, the
experiences that underlie it, and the effects it may have upon its readers. The
book's protagonist, narrator, and supposed author, Humbert Humbert, continually
forces us to maintain a double perspective by calling on us to pass moral and
legal judgment upon him as a man and aesthetic judgment upon him as an artist.
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style, Humbert informs us
in the book's third paragraph, and from that point on the murderer, madman, and
pedophile is balanced against the artistic creator, stylist, lover of language,
and master of literary allusion. Although Humbert sometimes tries to separate
his Jekyll and Hyde aspects, as when he assures us that the gentle and dreamy
regions through which I crept were the patrimonies of poets not crime's
prowling ground, his own book proves that the same habits of mind guide both
writer and criminal.
Humbert tells us that he thought
at one time of using his notes for his defense in the forthcoming trial. But
the main impulses of his imaginative recreation are artistic and celebratory.
The artist wants to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets. The lover
wants to write a history which will glorify his beloved for future generations
(it is to be published only after both of them are dead). In his final words,
this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita, Humbert appears as
Renaissance sonneteer, boasting that he will make his love immortal in his
writing, while ruefully admitting that such permanence is no adequate
substitute for possessing the lady, or, as Humbert expresses it, Oh, my Lolita,
I have only words to play with!
Humbert's desire for the literary
immortality of his book reflects his need to stop the passage of time in his
life or at least to pretend it does not exist. His actions, as we shall see,
are designed toward this end, and his language is consistent with his actions.
Twice in a single paragraph he mentions that his interrupted sexual liaison
with Lolita's predecessor took place on an immortal day. He says that his
ultimate quest is for the eternal Lolita. Even when he is on the verge of his
final separation from Lolita, Humbert still pleadingly holds out the hope that
we shall live happily ever after.
Lolita, then, is Humbert's
bid for the immortal future of which he and his nymphet are personally
incapable. But the book is also a memorial of the past, a souvenir of Humbert's
travels, a record of events that have already happened. Humbert is preoccupied
with memory, that dead thing which was once living experience, now resurrected
and transmuted by the imagination. He is a murderer with a sensational but incomplete
and unorthodox memory, the author of essays on Mimir and Memory and The
Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey, and the possessor of
a powerful nostalgia for his Mediterranean past. He is obsessed by his memory
of Annabel Leigh to the point that his entire life becomes an attempt to make
his immortal moment with her in the past eternally present, to possess her
forever. He fails to perpetuate Annabel through Lolita, who effaces her, and he
cannot make his liaison with Lolita permanent, but he does succeed by writing
his memoir. (pp. 421-22)
The experiences of a lifetime
undergo the selective distortions of memory and of artistic shaping and become
a book. So far so good. But the process does not stop there, for a work of art
affects its readers or spectators in turn. As Humbert knows, any art form
consists of a set of conventions and so it tends to develop conventional
expectations in its participants. Dolores Haze is partially molded by the
promises of advertisements and the advice of movie magazines. Charlotte Haze
has her perceptions and her mode of expression shaped by soap operas,
psychoanalysis and cheap novelettes. Humbert is familiar with the patterned
experiences and cliched phraseology of these forms and is able to use his
knowledge to deceive Charlotte. He is similarly aware of the rules of the
movies and tellingly describes the stereotyped plots of musicals,
underworlders, westerners. As a writer, Humbert shows his mastery of such
literary forms as the detective novel, the confessional autobiography, and the
Gothic romance; he parodies them at will. (pp. 422-23)
Yet Humbert is curiously trapped
by his own predilection for seeing his life through a veil of literature. To
begin with, he tends to view himself as a character in a work of fiction. He
first perceives Lolita in the context of a fairy tale and in the same framework
later enters Pavor Manor to murder Quilty. He elaborately stages his
opportunity to masturbate against Lolita (Main character: Humbert the Hummer. Time:
Sunday morning in June. Place: sunlit living room. Props: ...~), and he plots
his subsequent seduction of her, part of which he compares to a cinematographic
scene, with equal care. He rehearses the death of Richard Schiller when he
thinks that unfortunate man is Lolita's abductor. He executes Clare Quilty in a
singularly literal version of poetical justice and then comments to himself,
This ... was the end of the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty. When
Charlotte discovers his diary, Humbert thinks to excuse himself by claiming
that its entries are fragments of a novel, which, in a manner of speaking, they
are indeed. Later, he invents a film on which he is supposed to work as an
excuse to withdraw Lolita from Beardsley School.
While writing Lolita and
living through the experiences it relates, Humbert repeatedly imagines literary
parallels to whatever situation he finds himself in. His references, allusions,
and quotations reveal that Lolita suggests to him Petrarch's Laura at one
moment, Proust's Albertine at another, and Merimee's Carmen at regular
intervals. One of the most important equations he makes is between his
childhood love, Annabel Leigh, and the heroine of Edgar Allan Poe's poem
Annabel Lee. The name and early death of the former seem to suggest the
parallel to Humbert, although it is probable that Annabel Leigh's name, like
Humbert's own, is his creation. In any case, once he has made the association,
Humbert continues to see himself as a version of Poe in many other
circumstances as well. Such a fusion of life and art may be merely the harmless
game of a literary mind, but it is an exercise which must necessarily distort
the narrator's memory of events as they happened and which, insofar as it
shapes his perceptions and understanding, influences his actions as well.
The most serious danger of
subjugating life to literature in this way is that one may begin to regard the
people one knows as literary characters and to treat them accordingly. Humbert
reflects on this process in a passing comment about John Farlow:
I have often noticed that we are
inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary
characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen King
Lear, never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high
revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and
their lapdogs.... Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone
through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly,
we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern
we have fixed for them. Thus ... Y will never commit murder. Under no
circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and
the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check
how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any
deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous
but unethical.
Humbert's casual remark about what
we are inclined to do accurately describes a limitation of his own
perceptions and a consequent tendency of his actions. He sees his first wife,
Valeria, as a comedy wife and so treats her as a brainless baba; he is
overwhelmed when she acts quite out of keeping with the stock character she was
supposed to impersonate by breaking out of her assigned role and deserting him
for a taxi driver. Since Humbert needs to impose upon his life the fixity of a
literary work, he later attempts to force Lolita into the invariable pattern of
a literary character, and therein lies his crime and his sin.
Who is Lolita? She was Lo, plain
Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks.
She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she
was always Lolita. Humbert wishes to negate Lo, Lola, Dolly, and Dolores and,
just as he wants her always in his arms, he wants her to be always and only
Lolita. My Lolita, he keeps insisting, my own creation. Humbert's
solipsistic imagination refuses to acknowledge the individuality of the girls
he loves or to allow them freedom to shape their own lives. First, his
unorthodox memory converts his childhood love into a Poe-etic Annabel Lee.
Then, he tell us, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another. He
reincarnates Annabel in Dolores Haze, whom he makes into a creation he names
Lolita. It was the same child, he claims, Annabel Haze, alias Dolores Lee,
alias Loleeta.
Humbert recreates Annabel Leigh
only in his memory and imagination, but he directly interferes with the life of
Dolores Haze when he imposes on her the stability of type of a literary
character called Lolita, a creature not human, but nymphic. He wants to turn
his life with Lolita into a revision of Annabel Lee with a happy ending in
which she will be immutably young and forever his and they will live happily
ever after. Humbert desperately and pitiably attempts to stop the movement of
time, which presents to him the threat of his enchanting nymphet metamorphosing
into an ordinary woman. Of course he cannot succeed, for people stubbornly
persist in changing and even, as John Ray's foreword reminds us, in dying. The
past was the past insists Lolita after she has managed to escape from Humbert
and to redefine herself as Clare Quilty's mistress and then as Mrs. Richard F.
Schiller. But Humbert must ignore the passage of time as best he can: I could
have filmed her! I would have had her now with me. He needs the stability of
type that equates Lolita with Annabel Leigh and through time in his imagination
to an eventual Lolita the Third who will merrily cavort with Grandfather
Humbert.
Eventually Humbert begins to
acknowledge the evil and the futility of the web of multiple entrapment he has
spun about Lolita and the cruelty of keeping her from a life in which, as she
puts it in Nabokov's screenplay of the novel, everything was sooh, I don't
knownormal. He gradually learns that he knew nothing about her thoughts or
feelings and, in fact, carefully avoided any recognition of her personality
which might interfere with the satisfaction of his own physical and
psychological needs. He is able to feel for the first time the full pathos of
her sobs in the night, every night, every night. He discovers, in short, that
Dolores Haze is a person and not a character.
Separated from Lolita, alone in a
psychopathic ward and then in prison, afflicted by his heart in more ways than
one, Humbert turns to 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 mortal sense of beauty'. In his supposed quotation Humbert plays moral
values against aesthetic ones. Humbert has been a monster, as he himself
confesses. He has tried to fix Dolores Haze within the unchanging boundaries of
a literary character he has created. Repentant and remorseful, he glorifies her
and compensates himself by writing a book about his love for her. The corollary
of this process, of course, is that both of them are converted into the literary
characters we encounter in Lolita, a book which, as we have seen,
endeavors to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets. Humbert's
greatness as a writer lies in his success at fixing Lolita within the pages of
a book, but the identical process in his life constitutes his greatest crime as
a human being.
The novel Lolita makes its
readers question the possibility of valid judgment and the ambiguity of value.
Our questioning begins with John Ray's condescending foreword, which treats the
book as a case history, as a work of art, and as an ethical treatise. It is
continued by Humbert's frequent attacks against and defenses of himself.
Humbert sees and presents himself in different lights as a degenerate, as a
faunlet trapped in an aging body, as a father and a lover, as a poet and a
madman. Sometimes he claims he is innocent, or at least as naive as only a
pervert can be. He begins with good intentions and is initially determined to
preserve what he thinks is Lolita's purity, although it turns out that she
seduces him. (Ironically, his admirable intent may only prove that he is no
longer a faunlet, since he made no such attempt to keep Annabel chaste.) At
other times, and increasingly as the book progresses, he condemns himself as
guilty. It is possible to take either perspective, as is shown in Humbert's
climactic encounter with Quilty:
Concentrate, I said, on the
thought of Dolly Haze whom you kidnapped
I did not! he cried. You're all
wet. I saved her from a beastly pervert.
Who is the protective guardian
and who the selfish sex fiend? Handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the
thief?
The ultimate judgment on Humbert
is up to us. In order to help us arrive at it (or perhaps to further hinder
us), we are presented with various kinds of evidence: numbered exhibits one and
two, a reconstructed diary, a few letters, a class list, a diagram of an
automobile accident, some poems. We are also given examples of famous writers
who loved young girls and statistics about the sexual maturation of females in
different parts of the world. Comparative sexual customs and the varying
attitudes and laws at different times, in several countries, and even in
separate states of the United States emphasize the point that there is no
single standard of judgment and no trustworthy norm either for Humbert or for
us to be guided by. Is Humbert innocent or guilty? And of what? Can we
determine whether he is sane or mad? Is he the creator of a splendid character
or the despoiler of a young girl's life?
We are made into Humbert's judge
and jury and are accordingly addressed as your honor and as ladies and
gentlemen of the jury, for Humbert presents his legal and moral case to us.
Beyond that, we are also the astute reader who is called upon to appreciate
Humbert's artistry. Although Humbert asks his learned readers to view his
history with impartial sympathy, he also wants us to recognize how much we have
in common with him: Reader! Bruder! Our dilemma is that we
simultaneously have to evaluate a man's life and criticize his artistic
creation. Our identities as judges and as readers come together when Humbert
implores us, Human beings, attend!
A further complication in the
reader's situation emerges when Humbert invokes our aid: please, reader, he
begs, imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me. By reading the
book we bring Humbert and Lolita back to life. We transform the past incidents
of Humbert's life into the present as they take place anew for us. We also help
to provide Humbert the literary immortality he hopes for from the future. As
past and future merge within the reader's consciousness, we enable the lovers
to transcend time and achieve the timeless present which Humbert so ardently
desires. But we do so at the cost of trapping them eternally within an unchangeable
pattern. Each time we read the book we participate in the seduction at The
Enchanted Hunters, in Lolita's desertion of Humbert, and in Humbert's grotesque
murder of Clare Quilty by reenacting these events in our minds. Just as King
Lear will never be merrily reunited with all his daughters, so Humbert and
Lolita will never live together happily ever after.
If we do not read the book, then
Humbert and Lolita are dead and forgotten, even nonexistent. But if we do, we
compel them to repeat the identical events, and so we fix them as literary
characters. The reader relives the experience of Humbert as writer, which in
turn recapitulates the manner in which Humbert has led his life. And far off in
time and space, Vladimir Nabokov grins, assumes his alias of Aubrey McFate, and
makes it all happen. (pp. 423-27)
(Source:
Mathew Winston, “Lolita and the Dangers of Fiction,” in Twentieth
Century Literature, Vol. 21, No. 4, December, 1975.)
