Humbert the Humiliated
The range of psychoses related in Lolita is relentless. The entire text could be a document in Peiss’s textbook, and wading through these murky waters becomes an exercise in suspicion. Humbert’s mixture of paranoia and recklessness makes me root for his success in keeping his and Lo’s anonymiy despite my increasing disgust and fury with what he is subjecting her to. Humbert repeatedly observes the attention of various men that Lolita accumulates during their time together, and he imposes on them the disgust which he feels about his own sexual appetite.
The class discussion on originality and art made me reminisce about the last time I had read Lolita. We were both high school age, though neither of us were enrolled in high school. We sat on the employee stoop at the BN smoking cigarettes, and Anna said to me, “There are only three original artists left in my mind: the Dresden Dolls, Gogol Bordello, and Nabokov.” The Dresden Dolls were soon struck from the list, and I was soon leafing through Nabokov’s books at the information desk instead of shelving books like the good little high school dropout. Humbert and his artificial surroundings didn’t strike me at the time as a parody of anything, because my impressionable little self was convinced that this was a truly original work of art I held in my hands. Nabokov seems to agree in his disclaimer at the tail end of Lolita. He claims that the novel is not to be used as a psychological analysis, a biographical note, or a tale of morality. However, his adoption of the English language is sub-par. “My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses — the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions — which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way” (Nabokov 317). The Parisian critic that incited this passage likened Nabokov’s writing of Lolita to his romance with the American English language. He writes as a sophisticated foreigner clumsily fumbling a young nymphet, beautiful, vulgar and graceless, amidst his own bouts of self-depracation and shame. He chases her everywhere, stows and hides her as he goes cross-country, unable to cultivate her respect for himself or for her native landscape, landing with her in mudslides of conventionality and consumerism.
The ultimate betrayal is her welcome departure from humble Humbert. Her kidnapping, despite its grimy offers, gives Lolita opportunity for refuge. By upping the perverse ante, Lolita is compelled to escape and begin her life presumably anew — as an “adult.” If the metaphor is extended to Nabokov’s romance with English, he still sees it as a child that he has loved, chased, killed for, and has been rejected by. Desire for the unattainable lives on in Humbert’s immortalization of Lolita and his love for her in his memoirs.
Tags: desire, discourse, language, literature, metaphor, perversion
