Nabokov and *Lolita*.

Nabokov equates “offensive” with “unusual” in Lolita (Vintage International Edition, p. 5) and justifies the repellent personality of his protagonist (his “repellent perfection”; cf. Bend Sinister, p. 69) because art demands “schocking surprise”:

I have no intention to glorify “H.H.” No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. 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. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author! (p. 5)

With these words, it is impossible that Nabokov had understood Joyceʼs Ulysses, a work of infinite originality defending the common life of an ordinary citizen, with much respect and comprehension for others. Nabokov, once again, justifying his perverse protagonists.

In this my new re-reading of the work I have seen new things like the constant presence of H.H.ʼs uncle Gustave Trapp as his possible abuser in his infancy; he is recurrent in pivotal moments; I have seen that Don Quixote is the first literary work mentioned in the narration of H.H., and, like Don Quijote, H.H. is a madman but perverse; that Sade appears with his Justine as a precursor of the erotic plot (defenceless child, adult aggressor); that Lolita put a “spell” on him (p. 15), that Lolita is not human in H.H.ʼs opinion, but demoniac, a “nymphet” (p. 16), a “little deadly demon” (p. 17), only to be compared with the Venus of Boticcelli at the end (p. 270). This image of happy femininity does not relate to the one H.H. gives us at the beginning. Many things happen between these two poles.

That H.H. considers himself a special kind of human (“we lone voyagers, we nympholets … you have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine,” etc., etc. p. 17), something that in the course of the story I do not see. He is a demented mind and has been in and out of sanatoriums (p. 95, p. 255); he is a mixture of Proust and Poe with an snobbism that it is hardly endurable; only the poetry, brilliance and excellence of the prose refrains us from stop listening to his complaints. The first part is much better than the second, and I think that the second part is a flop: the image of Lolita at the end was as credible to me as H.H.ʼs defence in the last pages (pp. 284-285) before the murder of Clare Quilty. A fake and an imposture.

There are many things that do not add up. When Charlotte Haze has been killed by the car, “a pretty child in dirty pink frock” gets the letters from her hand and gives them to H.H., only for him to destroy her revelations that H.H. is a pedophile. Where does this “pretty child” comes from; why does she know that those letters belong to Charlotteʼs husband; and how could “the pretty child” get the letters from the dead womanʼs hands, by the way, when adults where there already? The head of Charlotte is smashed, so how can I believe that a child would have got close to her to retrieve the letters from her hands? This disrupted my suspension of disbelief in the story. A pink child ex machina.

Lolita is an intelligent child (above average, IQ 121, p. 107), but she acts in the second part like she does not want to study at the girl school, for she prefers to go with H.H. on the road again, to be free from him. She could have denounced the man in an instant, and she would have got her allowence from H.H., as the legal father, no matter what H.H. decided to do. The Law here is clear, but Lolita acts like she is alone, defenceless, not intelligent. Again, Lolita is intelligent but H.H. says that “she never doubted the reality of place, time and circumstance alleged to match the publicity pictures of naked-thighed beauties (p. 165).

Lolita is bad at tennis, for she loves acting, but then she is a great tennis player and H.H. dreams of her future as a great tennis player in Wimbledon, for example. This denotes that H.H. dreams things that Lolita is not. The reader is advised to do with the story what H.H. thinks Lolita did not with publicity pictures: doubt the reality of it. After all, the story is H.H. and it is told through him.

So, Charlotte Haze is dead and H.H. goes in search of Lolita and takes her away. He does not go to the funeral. This fact would have sounded as a red alarm for any police. Nobody cares. He says he is the real father of Lolita and Jack and Jane believe him. Another absurdity. And there are many more in H.H. story. He says that Lolita seduced him to have sex for the first time (p. 132), that he is not the first lover of Lolita (p. 135), that Lolita copulated, as her friend Barbara did, with a boy (p. 137) before being defiled by H.H., but then H.H. at the end cries to us that he raped her, that he is to blame for Lolitaʼs destruction, but Lolita is at the end pregnant and has a caring husband (Richard F. Schiller). When they met at the end (why does Lolita need money from his depraved stepfather if she can get access to it by Law, if only she get a lawyer?) Lolita says (p. 272) that H.H. has been a good father (??). I could not reconcile the Lolita of the first part with the Lolita we see in the second, specially at the end.

In the first part we see the danger, the duplicity, the eroticism, the game, the scheme to murder, the tragic moment of Charlotte Hazeʼs discovery of the truth, the accident, the moment before Lolita goes to sleep in the room at The Enchanted Hunters, the moment of suspense, the return to the room, the surprise when Lolita is not drugged by sleeping pills (H.H.ʼs doctor fooled him), the moment of sex in the morning, and then the second part, where the plot goes down and boring.

They go travelling, and then return (at last) to a house to let Lolita get educated. The scenes of Mrs Pratt at the school sound like a bad parody, with those Nabokovian similes that get you asking what the hell was the author thinking about when he wrote these words in the mouth of a female teacher saying what the institution is trying to do in education (“We are still groping perhaps, but we grop intelligently, like a gynecologist feeling a tumor”, p. 177). When the school tells H.H. to let Lolita be free and get out with their friends and meet other boys, the author thinks of boys coming to his house where Lolita is his sex object, and telling them: “Welcome, fellow, to this bordello” (p. 185). This schocking suprise seems justified, Nabokov says, by originality. If only he had read Göngora to know what wit can do with taste without grossness (cf. Göngoraʼs Poem 149).

There are those moments with Gaston Godin (G.G.), which is a specular inversion (he is “inverted,” a pedophile of boys) of H.H. Both playing chess and Nabokov trying to get the story moving. Then that line where H.H. bemoans that he should have filmed Lolita to now have her alive in his mind (p. 231), which makes him sound like someone with a poor imagination and memory, which are the only things that he is good at and valuable.

Another flaw in the plot, akin to “the pretty girl” and the letters she gave to H.H. is that moment when Lolita is taken from the hospital while her legal father is away. No hospital would ever have allowed a person to remove a minor (14 years of age) from their building without the legal consent of the parents, in this case, H.H. This, again, disrupted my faithful suspension of disbelief as a reader. The rest is madness, Rita, lots of pages to fill in and his revenge on Clare Quilt, which sounded to me like H.H. killing himself. After all, Lolita decided to follow him and go away from H.H. The reason to kill Clare Quilt, then?

Lolita tells H.H. that she loved Clare Quilt and did not want to share him with others (!), that she wanted to be an actress but Clare Quilt abused her confidence by having her and other boys have sex with adults (Sade again here appearing as an influence). Well, Lolita is not a fool, so she was free to move and get an education, her money from her dead mother and her stepfather as a minor running away from a depraved stepfather, etc., etc. Many, many more possibilities than putting only a man as the cause of her ruin. Finally, ignoring the fake last pages where H.H. (where Nabokov) wants to sound humane for the jury (and us readers), I center on that quite Nabokovian paragraph where he says that H.H. wrote an essay for the Cantrip Review where he

suggested among other things that seemed original and important to that splendid reviewʼs benevolent readers, a theory of perceptual time based on the circulation of the blood and conceptually depending (to fill up this nutshell) on the mindʼs being conscious not only of matter but also of its own self, thus creating a continuous spanning of two points (the storable future and the stored past).

All this to say: without memory we are nothing. Sounds quite post-modern in style, which could be the joke Nabokov is making here (let us hope this is so). In the end, part one is great and part two sounds fake. Like H.H. himself playing chess with G.G., or a man playing with his reflected inversion, the story may well be in the end only fiction. Among the many implausibilities is that a girl of twelve should be interested in a man as mad, snob, and dangerous as H.H., and that her mother should not note the peril. Nabokov has used the incest theme before (King, Queen, Knave; aunt and nephew), but here he points at the possibility that the whole story of Lolita is the tale told by an idiot in love with a girl (and how he saved her “honour” by killing the man who “defiled” her with Sadistic sex). The play where Lolita is interested in as an actress has the same name of the hotel where H.H. and Lolita had their first sexual encounter:

The Enchanted Hunters was a quite recent and technically original composition … The red-capped, uniformly attired hunters … went through a complete change of mind in Dollyʼs Dell, and remembered their real lives only as dreams or nightmares from which little Diana had aroused them; but a seventh Hunter (in a green cap, the fool) was a Young Poet, and he insisted, much to Dianaʼs annoyance, that she and the entertainment provided (dancing nymphs, and elves, and monsters) were his, the Poetʼs invention (p. 201).

This play is written by Clare Quilt, whom H.H. kills to revenge Lolita. It makes sense for a madman to kill the poet who says that her beloved is the product of his imagination. For a madman in love with a child actress he has seen and fell in love with, that could be too much. The playwright must die. And the story ends.