This pseudo-critical apparatus and defensive, distancing posturing cannot simply be put down to the prudery of an earlier time. Humbert Humbert is one of the trickiest narrators in all of literature, and the reader who opens the first chapter of Lolita will immediately be faced with his complicated wordplay:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. 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.The magnificent opening passage contains the book’s technique in microcosm: the masterful prose style, with its elegant variations and irresistible alliterative lilt; the contrast between lyrical sensuousness and precise detail; the skilful implication of the reader in the story’s telling (try reading this passage without saying the name yourself); and the stealthy way in which disturbing, creepy hints (loins? four foot ten? school?) are threaded throughout the perfectly crafted sentences.
Not the least of the tricky questions facing the reader is this: what type of book is Lolita exactly? Is it a “poignant personal study”, as J.R. Jr promises us? We are teased at the outset with the prospect of a neat Freudian unresolved-childhood-issue case study as Humbert reminisces over his unconsummated love for a doomed childhood sweetheart (the origin, he claims, of his obsession with “nymphets”). Humbert refers to the narrative as his “sinister memoir”, and the book begins with pseudo-autobiographical reminiscences about his French childhood, but the odd glimpses of dark humour strike a different tone: “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.” Boyd observes that the book is structured as an inverted detective story: Humbert confesses to being a murderer in the opening pages – “you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” – and the suspense of the plot consists in identifying his victim.
Is the novel perhaps a satire on bourgeois American values, as we might begin to suspect during the comic fish-out-of-water situation that develops when reserved European Humbert unexpectedly finds himself lodging with a suburban New England mother and her prepubescent daughter? Much of the first third of the book is a very dark and very nasty joke at the expense of Dolores/Lolita’s mother, the unsuspecting and hopelessly aspirational Charlotte, described as “the rather ridiculous, though rather handsome Mrs. Haze, with her blind faith in the wisdom of her church and book club” (words which also hint at Nabokov’s contempt for bad or lazy readers). Indeed Charlotte fails utterly to “read” Humbert’s designs and soon we find him suffering his way through a sham marriage, contemplating murder in the midst of home improvements and dinner parties while the real object of his lust is away at summer camp (it is Humbert’s great success as a narrator that he portrays himself as a helpless victim “on the rack of joy” and manages to make his dilemma amusing and even sympathetic). Another freak accident – Charlotte runs in front of a car after reading Humbert’s shocking diary entries, an early sign of the powerful relationship between words and action that Nabokov would soon explore further in Pale Fire – leaves the narrator’s new wife dead and the road to realisation of his evil designs free of obstacles.
Humbert now finds himself as his stepdaughter’s sole guardian, and takes full advantage. After bringing her from camp to a hotel, another convenient twist of fate saves him from having to take responsibility for his plans. He insists that “it was she who seduced me” and in another uncomfortable inversion, portrays his child victim as his corruptor: “Sensitive gentlewomen of the jury, I was not even her first lover.” The following portion of the book takes the form of a depraved road trip, as Humbert spends his days in “guilty locomotion” and enjoys his newfound power in a series of motels. The couple’s relationship oscillates between one of co-conspirators – Bonnie and Clyde on the run from the law – and one of terrorist and hostage. Their “extensive travels all over the States” could be read as a dark reflection of the classic American road narrative and their “wild journey” a sinister counterpoint to Kerouac’s On the Road, written and published more or less contemporaneously with Lolita. Humbert’s grip on reality seems to loosen here as his prose stretches into rhapsodic reveries and ecstatically aestheticised paeans to the “quick-silverish water and harsh green corn”, the “mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream ...”
Humbert, showing a creepily fastidious concern for his captive’s “formal education”, eventually decides to settle in a small college town where Lolita can return to school. There is more queasy domestic comedy here as Humbert plays the dual roles of jealous lover and disapproving dad struggling to prevent his increasingly assertive “daughter” from going on dates and taking part in the school play. Soon they decide to hit the road again, and this is where the plot really thickens; the novel mutates into an extended paranoid chase scene as obsessive, gun-toting Humbert, whose lust has by now deepened into an obsessive and doomed urge for control (Martin Amis described the novel as “a study in tyranny”), starts to become aware of a mysterious presence trailing, tracking and perhaps even pre-empting his movements. We sense that we may be leaving the expected confines of the realist novel here, and several questions begin to present themselves. Who is the enigmatic playwright Quilty, and why does he seem to have an almost supernatural status in the plot? Is Lolita making a break for her own freedom, or is this all the work of Quilty, who may be even more malign and depraved than Humbert? What do we make of the metafictional hints dotted here and there, and why does our narrator feel that he is a character in “the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty”? And why is Quilty in league with the enigmatically (and anagrammatically) named Vivian Darkbloom? As the mirror imagery multiplies and Lolita’s world fractures, we realise we have wandered into the centre of the funhouse.
by Tim Groenland, DRB | Read more:
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