It's Humbert Humbert's World

I was in a court reporter’s office last week chatting with the owner before setting up for a job, when my copy of Lolita slipped from under my arm to the floor.  Diana, the owner, said, “You are not reading that!” and gave me a knowing look, as if I had been caught with a smutty magazine.  Lolita is one of those books whose reputation far exceeds its reading public.  Everyone knows that Nabokov wrote a book about a pedophile and his pursuit of a 12-year-old girl, and everyone knows that the novel is erotically charged and has been banned by some more prurient groups for fear that readers will be sexually excited and share in the narrator’s lust.  But to say that the novel is about Lolita or about tabooed sexual titillation is to make an erroneous statement.  The novel is about one thing and one thing only: Humbert Humbert.

In my post about Under the Net, I talked about the power and wonder of a well done first person narrative.  In Nabokov’s magical hands, Lolita is the gold standard of first person narratives.  Here you have a narrator who is a brilliant character and can see and describe the world only from his own viewpoint.  Humbert, however, is a worldly traveler, a scholar, a speaker of several languages, highly educated, and aristocratic, so that he gives the illusion of being someone whose viewpoint is anything but limited.  Moreover, he goes through great pains to show us how honest and thorough he is in his portrayal of himself.  He tells us all his nastiness towards Charlotte, his fleeting plan to kill her, his hopes to have children with Lolita so that he can molest them when they too become nymphets.  But like all of us, Humbert can’t see what he can’t see.  He is as taken with himself as he hopes (nay, expects) we are, because Humbert is a sociopath with no emotion or genuine sympathy for anyone but himself.  As one of a million examples, he paints Lolita’s role in their relationship as one of a willing partner, to the point that he begs for sympathy from the reader for how he is cruelly treated by the demon in the body of a nymphet.  All the while he makes references to Lolita’s captivity, to her sobbing to herself after Humbert pretends to be asleep, to his blackmailing her for sexual favors—he references all these horrible things without any sympathy, and it quickly becomes clear that he isn’t even aware that sympathy is called for!  Here’s a sample passage:

I remember the operation [meaning sex] was over, all over, and she was weeping in my arms;--a salutary storm of sobs after one of the fits of moodiness that had become so frequent with her in the course of that otherwise admirable year!  I had just retracted some silly promise she had forced me to make in a moment of blind impatient passion, and there she was sprawling and sobbing and pinching my caressing hand, and I was laughing happily, and the atrocious, unbelievable, unbearable, and, I suspect, eternal horror that I know now was still but a dot of blackness in the blue of my bliss.

Here the word “forced” rings out since it is applied not to his raping of Lolita but to her forcing him to make promises!  That which is “atrocious, unbelievable, unbearable” and “eternal[ly] horr[ible]” is not Lolita's fate but his own.  He is incapable of seeing beyond himself and is unaware that he is doing anything other than garnering his reader’s support.

And that is what makes this novel so captivating.  We are in the poetic mind of a madman who believes that he is sane.  

In his effort to lay a historical and poetical foundation for his love of nymphets, Humbert makes allusions to Sade’s Justine, Dante’s young bride, and Poe’s Annabel Lee.  Of these references, he identifies most with Poe.  His first love is, in fact, Annabel Leigh, and he refers to her “kingdom by the sea” from the first.  While being interviewed by the Ramsdale paper, he gives himself the first name Edgar.  Obviously there is nothing accidental in connecting Humbert with Edgar Allan Poe, but what Humbert doesn’t know is that he is more reminiscent of a character created by Poe than of the poet himself.  In Chapter 13, Humbert has his first sexual encounter with Lolita, but he wants us to appreciate how clever he is to get what he wants without harming Lolita at the same time.  As a lead in to his tale, Humbert says:

I want my learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to replay; I want them to examine its every detail and see for themselves how careful, how chaste, the whole wine-sweet event is if viewed with what my lawyer has called, in a private talk we have had, ‘impartial sympathy.’

When I read this line, I instantly thought of another narrator who was desperate to prove to his soundness of mind and character:

Now this is the point.  You fancy me mad.  Madmen know nothing.  But you should have seen me.  You should have seen how wisely I proceeded—with what caution—with what foresight—with what dissimulation I went to work!

Thus declares the narrator of Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart.”  To me, Nabokov is clearly echoing Poe's structure and language to unite the two narrators.

So what we get from Nabokov’s construction is the twin pleasure of being immersed in Humbert’s mind and seeing through it at the same time as though it were a cellophane wrapping.  Humbert is a monster of a human being who is simultaneously charming, witty, and at times downright hilarious (I particularly loved his fist fight with Quilty at the end), and we can experience the charm and the horror, the intellectual and the emotional, simultaneously.  

Seeing his tale as his defense, Humbert wants his readers, above all else, to understand that because he loves Lolita with a love that is endless and pure he is neither a monster nor a rapist.  No other nymphet does to him what Lolita does.  Even when Lolita is 17, well beyond the age of nymphets, and round with her pregnancy, he still wants her to come away with him.  What more proof do we need of his love?  Because in Humbert’s world, what more is love than the rapacious and consuming desire for someone?  He is as much a victim in his tale as Lolita—nay, an even greater victim!  Never mind (because he cannot mind) that when he overhears Lolita talking to a friend about death, Humbert reflects how little he knew Lolita’s mind.  This observation is a mere passing curiosity for him, an aside in his narrative.  Why would it be important for him to know Lolita?  He couldn’t tell you.

This tension between Humbert’s narrative and the real story that plays out unbeknownst to him between his words is the power that makes Nabokov’s novel so compelling.  And that tension is in the very title, because to Humbert, his tale is all about Lolita, but we know that through the cellophane of Lolita is the looming figure of Humbert Humbert, the only subject Humbert Humbert really has any interest in. 

Lord of the Flies: Lord of the Narrative

Sometimes when you approach something you loved as a child, you prepare yourself for the inevitable disappointment.  Your original experience is unrepeatable; you cannot step in that same river twice, as the saying goes, because it is not the same river, and you are not the same person.  So it was with both excitement and fear that I picked up my copy of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies to read it for this list.

I may have mentioned in one of my other posts that I was not much of a reader as a child.  Reading was not something I typically chose to do on a Saturday afternoon, or even before bed.  So I don’t have a slew of children’s books that compete for my memory's affection.  The first book I remember being compelled by was Where the Red Fern Grows in 4^th grade.  And the book that stands out in my memory after that is Lord of the Flies, which I believe I read in 9^th grade.  That makes for a very short list of childhood favorites.

For how important the book was to me, I was surprised at how poorly I remembered it, and while I knew the large events that shook the plot, rereading the book was a lot like discovering it for the first time.  It was every bit as riveting as I remember, only now I was able to appreciate the language, the movement of plot, and the strength of character.  The book may be thought of as a Young Adult novel nowadays because every high school student in America reads it and discusses its symbolism, but in 1954, it was a novel written for an adult audience, and it rewards its adult reader with its masterful storytelling.

The story is about a group of British school boys (ranging from six to twelve years old) whose plane crashes on an island after it is stuck down, presumably due to a third world war.  With no adults around, the boys come together and form a plan for survival and, hopefully, rescue.  Ralph, the protagonist, is voted “chief,” and Jack becomes the leader of the “hunters,” the choir boys who were with him.  Through the course of the novel we watch as the boys’ “civilization” collapses and the schoolboys devolve into “savages.”  “Mankind’s essential illness,” as one character in the novel calls it, and the thin line that separates civilization from animal ferocity are rather heady topics for such a short novel, and there are a million ways to botch the story.  To make the story both believable and compelling, Golding has to show us the movement both within the individuals and the group that leads from Ralph’s rule to Jack’s.  We need to see Jack’s hunger for death and power grow.  We need to see fear spread throughout the group to lead them to Castle Rock.  And Golding does it all.  He cuts no corners in giving us the push and pull of Jack’s and Ralph’s respect for and antagonism of each other.  The characters’ developments are directly tied to the plot and the two move hand in hand. 

Golding rushes nothing in the dissolution of order, using Roger as the measure of the grip society exerts even across the ocean.  Roger is described as “a slight furtive boy whom no one knew, who kept to himself with an inner intensity of avoidance and secrecy.”  He follows a six-year-old who wanders along the beach, watching him from the jungles edge.  When nuts fall from a tree above him, he notices the rocks on the ground.  He picks one up

and threw it at Henry—threw it to miss.  The stone, that token of preposterous time, bounced five yards to Henry’s right and fell in the water.  Roger gathered a handful of stones and began to throw them.  Yet there was a space round Henry, perhaps six yards in diameter into which he dare not throw.  Here, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of old life.  Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and schools and policemen and the law.  Roger’s arm was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins.

These small stones are the heralds of the avalanche that will follow when Roger, perched at the top of Castle Rock throws first small stones at Piggy and eventually launches the boulder that will cause Piggy’s death.  Roger is a terrifying presence, and the arc of his arm describes the vanishing hold of civilization over the boys.

Things fall apart so logically and smoothly, that you never feel like you are being forced to swallow a sermon or a sleight-of-hand prophet.  On the level of simple plot and character—if the novel were trying to say nothing about people and our world—this work would be a resounding success.  But add to that the echoes, imagery, and subtleties of social commentary, and you have an incredible story, one that can be relished at any level of engagement.  Rocks are falling throughout the story.  The dead parachuter does an incredible amount of work in both the worlds of plot and symbolism.  As a manifestation of the beast, he is that which is rotten in human beings.  He is a symbol of the adult war that is merely a large and unseen version of what is happening on the island.  He is dressed in the clothes of society, but he is an “ape-like” figure.  The desire to control the lives—and deaths—of other creatures is present from Henry’s playing with the translucent miniscule creatures on the beach to the killing of the pigs and to the deaths of Piggy and Simon.  The destruction of society plays in every detail, even in the killing of the sow, whose head becomes the Lord of the Flies.  She is the sole image of femininity, of maternity, and the killing of her is incredibly graphic and rape-like: “The hungers followed, wedded to her in lust, excited by the long chase and dropped blood. . . .  The sow collapsed under them and they were heavy and fulfilled upon her.”  And when Roger removes his spear from her, all the boys delight in seeing that he got her “right up her ass.”  Golding is in control of all his details and descriptions so that it all unfolds effortlessly and unpretentiously. 

How wonderful to rediscover something that I have loved and find that it is richer than I remember!  If you have not read the novel since you were young, I urge you to take it up again.

Accepting the Dance: A Look into Book III of A Dance to the Music of Time

The time has come again to revisit the ever-evolving epic, A Dance to the Music of Time.  In 1955, Powell published Book III, titled The Acceptance World.

At the end of my last post about the series, I posed a question concerning Powell’s titles.  Here at last we have a title that makes perfect sense, capturing the heart of the novel.  In The Acceptance World, Nick Jenkins, our narrator, now brings us into the 1930s.  The roaring ‘20s are behind us and there is much talk of the “slump.”  Jenkins and his contemporaries are now in their late twenties and early thirties, no longer in the bloom of youth, weathered and battered about a bit by the world.  The title comes from a phrase delivered by Templer (one of Nick’s university friends and one of the central figures of the series) when he describes the profession that Widmerpool is moving into.  When Nick asks what the Acceptance World is, Templer replies:

If you have goods you want to sell to a firm in Bolivia, you probably do not touch your money in the ordinary way until the stuff arrives there.  Certain houses, therefore, are prepared to ‘accept’ the debt.  They will advance you the money on the strength of your reputation.  It is all right when the going is good, but sooner or later you are tempted to plunge.  Then there is an alteration in the value of the Bolivian exchange, or a revolution, or perhaps the firm just goes bust—and you find yourself stung.

What a wonderful phrase to seize on!  Clearly, Powell knew how good the phrase was too, not simply because he made it the title of his novel.  He couldn’t resist drawing the connection between the phrase and the content of the novel in plain bold lines.  He begins the final chapter thus:

When, in describing Widmerpool’s new employment, Templer had spoken of ‘the Acceptance World’, I had been struck by the phrase.  Even as a technical definition, it seemed to suggest what we are all doing; not only in love, art, religion, philosophy, politics, in fact all human activities.  The Acceptance World was the world in which the essential element—happiness, for example—is drawn, as it were, from an engagement to meet a bill.  Sometimes the goods are delivered, even a small profit made; sometimes the goods are not delivered, and disaster follows; sometimes the goods are delivered, but the value of the currency is changed.  Besides, in another sense, the whole world is the Acceptance World as one approaches thirty; at least some illusions are discarded. The mere fact of still existing as a human being proved that.

That discarding of illusions is largely central to this novel.  In the earlier volumes, Nick falls in love with great passion, but little comes of it.  There are marriages and affairs and promising futures.  There is love in The Acceptance World, and much discussion of love, but it is a sadder and wiser narrator who tells the tale, one more concerned with the limitations and deficiencies of love than its promise and power.  Stringham, who has only a small role in this volume, appears as an alcoholic after the dissolution of his marriage with Peggy Stepney.  Anne Stepney leaves Barnby for Dicky Umfraville.  Mona leaves Templer for Quiggin.  Even Mrs. Erdleigh has moved from Uncle Giles to Jimmy Stripling.  None of the relationships seem to be holding up, and there is not much hope for the new relationships that have formed.

Even beyond the world of love relationships are dodgy.  Quiggin and Members are friends from university, rival poets and philosophers.  Members has been working as secretary to St. John Clarke, an elderly popular novelist who has, under Members's tutelage, lately become political.  Members is unseated as secretary by Quiggin as Clarke’s preferences shift.  And by the end of the novel, Quiggin himself is ousted and replaced by Guggenbuhl, a Trotskyist. 

Nick himself finds love with Templer’s sister, Jean.  He fell in love with her in the first novel, but she was distant and his love was unrequited.  In the second novel, Jean married one of Templer’s friends for whom Nick didn’t much care, Bob Duport.  In this third novel, Duport has fallen on hard times due to the “slump,” and his marriage has suffered as well.  Duport is having an affair with another woman, and Jean takes up with Nick.  By the end of the novel however, Duport is looking to have a change in his finances with the help of Widmerpool, which means rough waters ahead for Nick and Jean. 

In short, this is a world of personal upheaval and unrest.  And it is only with this novel that I can truly appreciate Powell’s skill and plan.  All the strands that have been laid out in the last two novels are intertwining and forming an impressively complex and riveting world.  All the storylines are coming together and moving in the same direction with all the depth of Tolkien’s Middle Earth.  There is not the heroism, magic, or adventure of Tolkien’s tale, but there is the same epic scope.  It is a realist’s epic without crossing into the tawdriness of a soap opera.  Moreover, the story of these individuals, as I speculated in my earlier posts, mirrors the movement of London society and culture between the wars.  The shift in class that I referenced in my discussion of A Buyer’s Market continues to play out here, as Widmerpool becomes a man of greater power, even as he remains something of an ass.  In the final scene, the aristocratic Stringham is forced by Widmerpool to stay in bed to sleep off his drinking, and Nick reflects:

I was thinking of other matters: chiefly of how strange a thing it was that I myself should have been engaged in a physical conflict designed to restrict Stringham’s movements; a conflict in which the moving spirit has been Widmerpool.  That suggested a whole social upheaval: a positively cosmic change in life’s system.

This was by far my favorite book in the series so far, and I am looking forward to reading more.  I will pick up the series again in a few books when we reach 1957.  For now, it is on with 1955 and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a book I am very excited to reread after all these years.