Bibliografía

The Autonomy of Humbert Humbert

Humbert Humbert addresses the reader in a wide variety of voices, ranging from self-incriminating candour to ebullient celebration of his transgressive attitudes and actions.

The key to an understanding of the novel, however, is the fact that, whatever his voice, the reader warmly welcomes engagement with him. The magnetic attraction which draws us, willingly, into Humbert’s orbit has been widely commented on; Lionel Trilling has written “What is extraordinary about Lolita is…the way in which Nabokov enlists us, against our will, on Humbert’s side…Humbert has figuratively made the reader his accomplice in both statutory rape and murder” (14). In a similar vein, Leona Toker draws attention to the way in which the author “lulls us into long spans of sympathy for

Humbert” (200).

It is the attraction engendered between reader and protagonist which renders palatable the extraordinary hauteur of Humbert’s existential autonomy. Humbert is the example par excellence of the existential subject who, at least initially, isolates himself from, and deprecates, virtually all aspects of the society that surrounds him (nymphets and their charms excepted, of course). There is absolutely no implication that his behavior is determined by heredity (so heavy a burden on McTeague), or, as in the case of Clyde Griffiths, by his social environment; indeed, it is of the essence of Humbert’s persona that he holds himself absolutely aloof from the latter.

His fellow humans are consistently subject to a witheringly critical eye; be they intimates (Charlotte’s “phocine” [42] physique is commented on several times, and

Humbert tells us that “her autobiography was as devoid of interest as her autopsy would have been” [80]), or casual acquaintances, such as Humbert’s easterly neighbour in Beardsley: an “odious spinster, trying to conceal her morbid inquisitiveness under a mask of dulcet goodwill” (180). In Part One, the fact that Humbert ignores (to say the least of it) all normal societal moral conventions is attested to, not so much by the brutality of his treatment of his two wives and Lolita, as by the tone of joyous celebration with which he outrages conventional ethical expectations. In a typical comment he tells us that, towards the end of his sojourn in the Haze household “The week of scattered showers and

shadows which elapsed after our last visit to the motionless sands of Hourglass Lake was one of the gloomiest I can recall. Then came two or three dim rays of hope--before the ultimate sunburst” (90)—the last being, of course, the messy automobile accident which kills Charlotte. Humbert also characteristically elevates his intellectual stature to a point at which he rejoices iconoclastically in the belittlement of conventional wisdom; he is particularly hard on Freudian psychoanalysis: “I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists: cunningly leading them on…teasing them with fake ‘primal scenes’; and never allowing them the slightest glimpse of one’s real sexual predicament” (34). By way of art criticism, his references to “cubist trash”

(25) are multiple and acid.

As is evidenced by many of the above passages, a piercing, even vicious, irony is integral to Humbert’s imperious dismissal of the rest of the world. Academic research on humour confirms that the latter is a “status-related activity” and indicates further that individuals who consider themselves of high status often exercise control over others through the use of humour and sarcasm (Martin 120-121). Part One of Lolita is replete

with examples of irony by means of which Humbert minimizes, or denigrates, the stature of others with a consequent enhancement of his own. Consider, for example, his

description of Charlotte Haze after he sees her descending the stairs: “The poor lady was in her middle thirties, she had a shiny forehead, plucked eyebrows and quite simple but not unattractive features of a type that may be defined as a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich” (37)—“damned by faint praise” indeed. He continues to assess her intellect in a similar vein: “She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul” (37).

Humbert consigns her to the category of “women utterly indifferent at heart to the dozen or so possible subjects of parlor conversation, but very particular about the rules of such conversations, through the sunny cellophane of which not very appetizing frustrations can be readily distinguished” (37). The tone hovers ambiguously between condescension and criticism, and the whole description is characterized by artfully diluted venom, the understatement of which serves only to reinforce the tone of hauteur and dismissal, yet elevates the intellectual status of the subject making the judgment.

In his ability to engender empathy in the reader, Humbert contrasts strongly with the two prototype nympholepts who precede him in Nabokov’s oeuvre, Albinus (from Laughter in the Dark), and the Enchanter (protagonist of an eponymous novel fragment).

Albinus “bungles his whole life” (Toker, 111) and renders himself ridiculous by his pursuit of a vulgar teenaged girl. At the end of the novel, he is a helpless blind man, cruelly tormented by his companions, and yet, as Toker points out, “we are not really sorry for him” (111). Significantly, we are repulsed by Albinus’s snub to his wife—she

has a nervous habit of “asking questions about things that had already been exhaustively discussed in her presence,” and when she does just this at dinner, Albinus snaps at her, ” ‘Just dropped from the moon?’” (12). On the contrary, we revel in Humbert’s

gratuitous rudeness: “[the hostess] floated up to me to ask if I was Mr. Braddock, because if so, Miss Beard had been looking for me. ‘What a name for a woman,’ I said and

strolled away” (126).

The protagonist of The Enchanter, a humourless and repulsive schemer, horrifies us as much as he horrifies himself. After his nymphet wakes just as he ejaculates over her erstwhile sleeping body, “he was deafened by his own horror, kneeling, catching at the folds, snatching at the drawstring, trying to stop it, hide it, snapping with his oblique spasm” (92). As Leona Toker points out, “The Enchanter fails to ‘enchant’ us out of our consistent disapproval of the protagonist” (200).

How, then, is Humbert’s existential autonomy in Part One, and, crucially, the readers’

empathy that underpins it, established? One crucial issue is that Lolita is a first-person narrative, ostensibly initially prepared to form part of the protagonist’s trial defense, and this yields complete control over the narrative to Humbert. The Enchanter and Laughter in the Dark are, by contrast, third-person narratives in which the protagonists are

distanced by the interposition of an authorial voice that is actively hostile in the case of Laughter in the Dark, or coldly neutral, in the case of The Enchanter.

Humbert takes full advantage of his position as focalizer and narrator. He addresses the reader in a tone of poised, exhortatory pleading: “Ladies and gentleman of the jury, exhibit number one [Annabel] is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns” (9). As the reference to Poe’s

“Annabel Lee” (one of a number) demonstrates, Humbert frequently foregrounds his erudition with the purpose of increasing his authority with the reader. He also deploys a curious sort of self-denigratory humour combined with a posed archaic formality in an attempt to excuse the inexcusable (in this case bribing Lolita financially to perform bizarre sex acts): “O Reader! Laugh not, as you imagine me, on the very rack of joy noisily emitting dimes and quarters, and great big silver dollars like some sonorous, jingly and wholly demented machine vomiting riches” (184). He enlists a kind of false logic to the same purpose; a logic that slyly ignores the obvious. For example, following a discussion of his initial “infection” with nympholepsy through his infatuation with Annabel, he complains “I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open, and soon I found myself maturing amid a civilization which allows a man of twenty-five to court a girl of sixteen but not a girl of twelve [as if the reason for this was not self-evident]” (18). Further he manipulates emphasis, allocating only brief mentions to his spells of insanity and residence in mental institutions.

None of this, however, really explains the extraordinary degree to which we empathize with Humbert; our readiness, as Trilling implies, to forgive him almost anything. The key to an understanding of this strange surrender on the reader’s part is the quality of pure delight that Nabokov has bestowed on the characterization of Humbert, valorized by John Updike in the following perceptive evaluation: “What matters now is that the least of his [Nabokov’s] writings offered a bygone sort of delight: a sorcerer’s scintillating dignity made of every sentence a potentially magic occasion” (39). Nabokov himself, in his

“Afterword” to Lolita, identifies this delight as the most important component of the

writer’s craft: “For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss” (315). In the same afterword, Nabokov makes reference to the possibility that Lolita can be viewed as the culminating outcome of his love affair with the English language, and Updike presciently drew attention in the comment quoted above to the nexus of delight and masterful linguistic artistry. Humbert entrances us with a “rare verbal exuberance” (Jan Stephen Parker 71) that is a unique combination of wit and wordplay. Puns, lyricism, controlled bathos, irony, these are all part of his armoury, and the enchantment that derives therefrom is the platform that truly sustains his

extraordinary autonomy.

Alfred Appel describes Humbert’s prose style as “colloquial baroque” (136), but although this phrase acknowledges its delightful complexity, it perhaps fails to capture its rich multi-layered variety—baroque is, after all but one style, Humbert touches

effortlessly on many. He is, for example, quite capable of evoking an astonishingly lyrical note, as evidenced by his descriptions of pastoral American land- and sky-scapes, and by his evocation of the quality of his remote memory of his deceased mother with its passing echoes of Keats’s “To Autumn”: “you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges” (10).

Undoubtedly, however, the unifying thread of Humbert’s discourse is his wonderfully cerebral irony and wit. Puns, for example, can be the dullest form of humour, but in Humbert’s hands they are fresh and piquant; witness his description of the pre-adolescent Mabel, who wears a “halter with little to halt” (73), and his boast that in the interests of

developing his skills as a father, he “read and reread a book with the unintentionally biblical title Know Your Own Daughter” (174). Sparkling word-play often features in sentences which topple from the banal to the outrageous: “I…spent a fantastic night on the train, imagining in all possible detail the enigmatic nymphet I would coach in French and fondle in Humbertish” (35). Humbert’s neologisms are vibrant with meaning; in Champion, Quilty (in swimsuit) ogles Lolita: “his tight wet black bathing trunks bloated and bursting with vigor where his great fat bullybag was pulled up and back like a padded shield over his reversed beasthood” (237). Part of the appeal of Humbert’s prose is

indeed his seemingly instinctive deployment of euphony and alliteration; he recalls how

“Psychoanalysts wooed me with pseudoliberations of pseudolibidoes” (18), and he plans to “mauvemail” Charlotte into letting him establish intimacy with Lolita (71).

Humbert’s humour can amuse in a straightforward situational way: “ ‘Our double beds are really triple,’ Potts cozily said tucking me and my kid in. ‘One crowded night we had three ladies and a child like yours sleep together. I believe one of the ladies was a

disguised man (my static)’ ” (118). Often, however, his wit is based on two very powerful devices. First, the contrasting of sophisticated and erudite phraseology with mundane, or even trivial subject matter; for example: “Another time a red-haired school girl hung over me in the metro, and a revelation of axillary russet I obtained remained in my blood for weeks” (20), and “The days of my youth…seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car” (15).

Peter Quennell has described the second device as the “delicately suggestive choice of detail” (7), and, for reasons to which I shall soon return, I believe the selection of

detail which is both telling and amusing to have been very central to Nabokov’s concept of literary delight. For example, we learn everything there is to know about Valeria’s inane delight at having both a lover and a husband from the following: “She was by now preening herself, between him and me, rouging her pursed lips, tripling her chin to pick at her blouse-bosom, and so forth” (28). Similarly, when we read of the “horribly

experienced flies zigzagging over the sticky sugar-pour on the ignoble counter” (155), what remains to be learned about the humble eateries of the American road?

To return to the issue of Nabokov’s delight, in his afterword “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” Nabokov identified the passages of the novel that afforded him the greatest pleasure—the Mr. Taxovich section, and the class-list from Ramsdale school, for

example. These he calls “the nerves of the novel” (316), but it is remarkable that in many cases they are essentially narrative “grace notes,” bearing no relationship to the trajectory of Humbert’s self-discovery, or even to the simple mechanics of the plot. This speaks to the essential joyousness of Nabokov’s art, and thus, of Humbert’s narrative. They are not so much inconsequential passages, as passages which are so delightful that it does not matter if they are consequential or not. Their value is to form part of a rich and satisfying unified texture (similar, perhaps, to the illustrations and initial letter ornamentation in mediaeval illuminated manuscripts, which simply by their very presence impart value to the texts which they enhance). We might cite in this category the following completely inconsequential aside from Humbert regarding the book he sets down during Charlotte’s attempt to ingratiate herself with him after their argument regarding a visit to England: “it attempted to send forth a rotation of waves, but an inserted pencil stopped the pages”

(93), or his bemoaning of the fact that “We are not surrounded in our enlightened era by

little slave flowers that can be casually plucked between business and bath as they used to be in the days of the Romans; and we do not, as dignified Orientals did in still more luxurious times, use tiny entertainers fore and aft between the mutton and the rose sherbet” (124). The entrancing mix of lyricism, eclecticism and sophisticated humour in Humbert’s narrative is, perhaps above all else, the key to understanding the reader’s readiness to suspend judgment and grant our protagonist the existential autonomy in which, at least in Part One, he revels so freely.

Feux d’Artifices—The Centrality of Art

But, in our analysis of the irresistible fireworks of Humbert’s narrative, we have really revealed that all is, after all, artifice– feux d’artifices indeed, to ape our

protagonist’s frequent francophone interpolations. And this essential artifice speaks to the fact that Humbert is overtly positioning his narrative as a retrospective work of art, over which, as the creative artist, he exercises self-conscious control. Lolita shows us not life, but life seen through the prism of art.

Humbert’s frequent overtly narratological comments make it very clear that he considers himself to be crafting a literary work. As David Rampton has written, “the insertion of phrases like ‘diary resumed’ and ‘Oh God’ indicate that Humbert’s

‘Confessions’ are, like Rousseau’s, not a spontaneous outpouring of emotion, but a carefully-crafted, multi-leveled text” (84). Humbert inserts retrospective comments on his own behavior, for example the following concerning Charlotte’s plan to send Lolita to Camp Q, “ ‘Are you sure,’ I said at last, ’that she will be happy there?’ (lame, lamentably lame!)” (64). Further he makes his meta-narratological manipulations very obvious,

telling the reader that he has placed clues regarding the identity of Lolita’s “liberator”

throughout the narrative. After Lolita has revealed Quilty’s name, Humbert adds in internal monologue “Quietly the fusion took place, and everything fell into order, into the pattern of branches that I have woven throughout this memoir with the express purpose of having the ripe fruit fall at the right moment” (272).

Peter Quennell considers that Humbert’s purpose in producing his text was to re-order his chaotic experience into a meaningful pattern, and points out the parallel with Proust’s narrator (elsewhere he draws attention to the fact that Nabokov was a great admirer of Proust): “The personal fulfillment [Humbert] could not achieve on earth may still be reached in a secondary world of recollection and imagination. Like Proust’s Narrator, who is also nearing his end, he watches all the chaotic experiences of his previous life fall at last into a comprehensive pattern” (10). Humbert’s project seems to constitute an attempt to transcend sequential everyday reality--in his Afterword Nabokov describes reality as “one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes” (312)—and touch, though the exercise of artistic re-creation, the inner core of meaning that lies behind surface reality: “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita” (309). A number of commentators have drawn attention to the fact that such an endeavor lies very much at the heart of Nabokov’s oeuvre. Page Stegner, for example, attributes to Nabokov a belief that “the prison of time …can be escaped only through art”

(59), and Laurie Clancy has written that “Each of [Nabokov’s] novels in part is devoted to exploring the same belief that the supreme form of reality resides in the imagination”

(8).

However, the issue of artistic creation in Lolita is complex, since it is not only in retrospect that Humbert seeks to turn his experience into art. Chapter 11 of the novel consists of Humbert’s reproduction, virtually verbatim (“by courtesy of a photographic memory” [40]), of a diary he kept from the point he first entered the Haze household—

“the little diary which I now propose to reel off (much as a spy delivers by heart the contents of the note he swallowed) covers most of June” (41). From this it emerges that Humbert is being presented as actually living his life in real time as though it were a work of art, considering every event through the distancing lens of erudition and irony.

He actually conceptualizes his actions using this prism, as indicated by this entry that traces second-by-second experience and analyzes the sequence of his thoughts:

He actually conceptualizes his actions using this prism, as indicated by this entry that traces second-by-second experience and analyzes the sequence of his thoughts: