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.