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.
No comments:
Post a Comment