Players of the Game
In Nabokov’s Lolita, the narrator Humber Humbert states that: “I suppose I am especially susceptible to the magic of games” (233). This statement is essential in helping the reader understand not only the mentality of the characters within the book, but how we should read the book as well.
In the first part of “Lolita”, it is was evident that Humber Humbert is in control of the situation. He reveals to the reader the lengths he goes to conceal his sexual tendencies by his made-up identities, the precautions while reserving bedrooms, and even creating stories to compel Dolly to keep quiet about their relationship. However, It is clear when the power relation between Lolita and H.H switches in the second part of the book. When Lolita realizes that she has become an obligation to H.H, and this obligation is mutual (that she has the power to uncover or possibly report his sexual tendencies) she takes advantage of it. H.H writes that “her weekly allowance, paid to her under condition that she fulfill her basic obligations, was twenty one-cents at the start of the Beardsley era—and went up to one dollar five before its end” (184). It is clear that Lolita is already using her “basic obligations” as a leverage to gain power for herself—in this example monetary freedom. H.H writes later that he was actually afraid that Lolita may be accumulating money to run away—transforming the monetary freedom into personal freedom. We see early on how Lolita is using what Foucault would analyze as “reverse discourse.”
It is clear that Lolita begins to become more and more manipulative, almost conniving. Her random disappearances and talks to strangers, along with H.H’s growing insecurity allows Lolita to assume the character of the “witch.” She is no longer the weak, innocent creature, the nymph, she is now the one who can control and even cast spells of reality on others. H.H alludes to this spellcasting as acting, where he states that: “by permitting Lolita to study acting I had, fond fool, suffered her to cultivate deceit…like a hypnotic subject or performer in a mystic rite, produced sophisticated version of infantile make-believe” (230). Lolita’s power to manipulate H.H’s reality consciously or unconsciously through her acts makes it even more confusing for the reader to assess whether H.H is hallucinating, extremely distressed, or just falling directly into Lolita’s “traps.” H.H is no longer the one in control of Lolita’s future—it seems that the opposite has became true. H.H states that: “I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy” (222).
The complexity that arises after the rules of the game between H.H and Lolita changes due to Lolita’s maturing makes the reader question the underlying principles of H.H’s reliability as a narrator. Having discussed this in class, it is not the reliability of H.H that determines the story. Instead, it is the active process in which the reader must look through the lense of the narration in order to arrive at our own perspective. We, the reader, must sift through H.H’s accounts to understand that “Truth” does not exist. There is no one story, for Truth is a compilation of many details, accounts and realities. No one truth can ever determine the love between H.H and Dolly, no one truth can explain H.H’s lack of joy after he murders Quilty, and no one truth, as Nabokov makes extremely clear, can define an individual. Because Lolita matures to become an active individual and not merely a variable that H.H can manipulate, the reader is suddenly aware of H.H’s lack of consistency, lack of reliability, and overwhelming vulnerability. Towards the end when Lolita turns down H.H’s offer to leave with him, and says she would rather go back to Cue, H.H mentally supplies her words to say “He broke my heart. You merely broke my life” (279). Breaking of the heart implies that she loved Cue as well, and this mutual relationship was severed by a participant. Breaking someone’s life may allude to H.H’s almost forceful actions against her, his “modernist” mentality of conserving and preserving Dolly as his Lolita forever.
H.H may have finally realized only after seeing Lolita, pregnant with a child, that he is in love with Lolita not only because she is this static concept, as Sami describes in her post, and as this one, ultimate cluster of idea or “Truth,” but he loves her and will always love her for who she is. H.H writes: “She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past…but thank God it was not that echo alone that I Worshiped…I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almost, still Carmencita, still mine.” (278). We can see that H.H has come to realize and is grateful, that he does not only love Lolita for the static qualities. However, he is still clinging on to what he refers to as his “poor truth,” and still refers to the timeless qualities that Dolly will always have, even when she is beyond her years of Lolita. This contradiction may give us insight to the last sentences of the novel, in which H.H writes: “ 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). Maybe the love that H.H has for Lolita is just the reflection of his obsession with youth, with immortality, and the game of life he wants to outplay.
