On Tuesday and Thursday we will go from the idea of the nymphet to H.H.'s early struggles, to his failed marriage, essentially up to the point where he meets Dolores Haze daughter of the widow Charlotte Haze. This post lists the issues or motifs (you can start pursuing one) and the passages we will discuss in class.
The assignment:
1. after reading the issues and passages, pick an issue
2. comment on two passages that relate to that issue
3. find a third passage from anywhere in the book that relates to the same issue
Got it? Okay. These are the
issues. Pick one and find two passages that seem to illustrate it, then find a third.
- the paradox of memory as lost yet irrecoverable
- conflict between the classes
- conflict between the cultured and uncultured
- Humbert as a "wise fool" or trickster
- Humbert's rationality and belief in the supernatural
- satire of psychoanalysis
- use of scientific, technical, or specialized language to describe emotional or interpersonal events
- how puns and wordplay affect the tone of the narration
- the physicalization of intangible things (such as feelings, memories)
- Humbert's methods of self-justification
- transformation
- deliberate use of trite or banal language
- the two types of memory: ordinary (unreliable) and objective re-creation (p. 11)
- the use of indirect language to describe "crude" physical events
- animal language
- evidences of synesthesia: the confusion of one sense (like sight) for another (like smell)
- "obvious" fiction vs. the assumption that this is all true
- metaphors of travel
And these are the passages:
pp. 12-13:
I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the
rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the
first evidence of an inherent singularity? When I try to analyze my own
cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of
retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless
alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork
without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel.
pp. 14-15:
I have reserved for the conclusion of my "Annabel" phase the account of
our unsuccessful first tryst. One night, she managed to deceive the vicious
vigilance of her family. In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the
back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall.
Through the darkness and the tender trees we could see the arabesques of
lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive memory,
appear to me now like playing cards--presumably because a bridge game was
keeping the enemy busy. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of
her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely
glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant
sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the
sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her
legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand
located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure,
half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than
I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head
would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful,
and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and
her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion,
with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to
relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine;
then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then
again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a
generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my
entrails, I have her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.
p. 15:
The days of my youth, as I look back on them, 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. In my sanitary relations with women I was practical,
ironical and brisk. While a college student, in London and Paris, paid
ladies sufficed me. My studies were meticulous and intense, although not
particularly fruitful. At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry
and many manquè talents do; but I was even more manquè than
that; a peculiar exhaustion, I am so oppressed, doctor, set in; and I
switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as
pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movies
with expatriates. I sat with uranists in the Deux Magots. I published
tortuous essays in obscure journals.
pp. 16-17:
Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of
nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers,
twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not
human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose
to designate as "nymphets."
It will be marked that I substitute time terms for spatial ones. In
fact, I would have the reader see "nine" and "fourteen" as the
boundaries--the mirrory beaches and rosy rocks--of an enchanted island
haunted by those nymphets of mine and surrounded by a vast, misty sea.
Between those age limits, are all girl-children nymphets? Of course not.
Otherwise, we who are in the know, we lone voyagers, we nympholepts, would
have long gone insane. Neither are good looks any criterion; and vulgarity,
or at least what a given community terms so, does not necessarily impair
certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty,
soul-shattering, insidious charm that separates the nymphet from such
coevals of hers as are incomparably more dependent on the spatial world of
synchronous phenomena than on that intangible island of entranced time where
Lolita plays with her likes.
pp. 17-18:
Furthermore, since the idea of time plays such a magic part in the
matter, the student should not be surprised to learn that there must be a
gap of several years, never less than ten I should say, generally thirty or
forty, and as many as ninety in a few known cases, between maiden and man to
enable the latter to come under a nymphet's spell. It is a question of focal
adjustment, of a certain distance that the inner eye thrills to surmount,
and a certain contrast that the mind perceives with a gasp of perverse
delight. When I was a child and she was a child, my little Annabel was no
nymphet to me; I was her equal, a faunlet in my own right, on that same
enchanted island of time; but today, in September 1952, after twenty-nine
years have elapsed, I think I can distinguish in her the initial fateful elf
in my life.
p. 18
I am ready to believe that the sensations I derived from natural fornication were
much the same as those known to normal big males consorting with their
normal big mates in that routine rhythm which shakes the world. The trouble
was that those gentlemen had not, and I had, caught glimpses of an
incomparably more poignant bliss. The dimmest of my pollutive dreams was a
thousand times more dazzling than all the adultery the most virile writer of
genius or the most talented impotent might imagine. My world was split. I
was aware of not one but two sexes, neither of which was mine; both would be
termed female by the anatomist. But to me, through the prism of my senses,
"they were as different as mist and mast."
pp. 19-20
But let us be prim and civilized. Humbert Humbert tried hard to be
good. Really and truly, he did. He had the utmost respect for ordinary
children, with their purity and vulnerability, and under no circumstances
would he have interfered with the innocence of a child, if there was the
least risk of a row. But how his heart beat when, among the innocent throng,
he espied a demon child, "enfant charmante et fourbe," dim eyes,
bright lips, ten years in jail if you only show her you are looking at her.
So life went. Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it
was Lilith he longed for. The bud-stage of breast development appears early
(10.7 years) in the sequence of somatic changes accompanying pubescence. And
the next maturational item available is the first appearance of pigmented
pubic hair (11.2 years). My little cup brims with tiddles.
pp. 25-26
Although I told myself I was looking merely for a soothing presence, a
glorified pot-au-feu, an animated merkin, what really attracted me to
Valeria was the imitation she gave of a little girl. She gave it not because
she had divined something about me; it was just her style--and I fell for
it. Actually, she was at least in her late twenties (I never established her
exact age for even her passport lied) and had mislaid her virginity under
circumstances that changed with her reminiscent moods. I, on my part, was as
naive as only a pervert can be. She looked fluffy and frolicsome, dressed
a la gamine, showed a generous amount of smooth leg, knew how to
stress the white of a bare instep by the black of a velvet slipper, and
pouted, and dimpled, and romped, and dirndled, and shook her short curly
blond hair in the cutest and tritest fashion imaginable.
After a brief ceremony at the mairie, I took her to the new
apartment I had rented and, somewhat to her surprise, had her wear, before I
touched her, a girl's plain nightshirt that I had managed to filch from the
linen closet of an orphanage. I derived some fun from that nuptial night and
had the idiot in hysterics by sunrise. But reality soon asserted itself. The
bleached curl revealed its melanic root; the down turned to prickles on a
shaved shin; the mobile moist mouth, no matter how I stuffed it with love,
disclosed ignominiously its resemblance to the corresponding part in a
treasured portrait of her toadlike dead mama; and presently, instead of a
pale little gutter girl, Humbert Humbert had on his hands a large, puffy,
short-legged, big-breasted and practically brainless baba.
p. 27
When I informed her we were shortly to sail for New York, she looked
distressed and bewildered. There were some tedious difficulties with her papers.
She had a Nansen, or better say Nonsense, passport which for some reason a
share in her husband's solid Swiss citizenship could not easily transcend;
and I decided it was the necessity of queuing in the prèfecture, and other formalities, that
had made her so listless, despite my patiently describing to her America,
the country of rosy children and great trees, where life would be such an
improvement on dull dingy Paris.
p. 28
"There is another man in my life."
Now, these are ugly words for a husband to hear. They dazed me, I
confess. To beat her up in the street, there and then, as an honest
vulgarian might have done, was not feasible. Years of secret sufferings had
taught me superhuman self-control. So I ushered her into a taxi which had
been invitingly creeping along the curb for some time, and in this
comparative privacy I quietly suggested she comment her wild talk. A
mounting fury was suffocating me--not because I had any particular fondness
for that figure of fun, Mme Humbert, but because matters of legal and
illegal conjunction were for me alone to decide, and here she was, Valeria,
the comedy wife, brazenly preparing to dispose in her own way of my comfort
and fate. I demanded her lover's name. I repeated my question; but she kept
up a burlesque babble, discoursing on her unhappiness with me and announcing
plans for an immediate divorce. "Mais qui est-ce?" I shouted at last,
striking her on the knee with my fist; and she, without even wincing, stared
at me as if the answer were too simple for words, then gave a quick shrug
and pointed at the thick neck of the taxi driver. He pulled up at a small
cafè and introduced himself. I do not remember his ridiculous name but after
all those years I still see him quite clearly--a stocky White Russian
ex-colonel with a bushy mustache and a crew cut; there were thousands of
them plying that fool's trade in Paris. We sat down at a table; the Tsarist
ordered wine, and Valeria, after applying a wet napkin to her knee, went on
talking--into me rather than to me; she poured words into this
dignified receptacle with a volubility I had never suspected she had in her.
And every now and then she would volley a burst of Slavic at her stolid
lover. The situation was preposterous and became even more so when the
taxi-colonel, stopping Valeria with a possessive smile, began to unfold
his views and plans. With an atrocious accent to his careful French,
he delineated the world of love and work into which he proposed to enter
hand in hand with his child-wife Valeria. She by now was preening herself,
between him and me, rouging her pursed lips, tripling her chin to pick at
her blouse-bosom and so forth, and he spoke of her as if she were absent,
and also as if she were a kind of little ward that was in the act of being
transferred, for her own good, from one wise guardian to another even wiser
one; and although my helpless wrath may have exaggerated and disfigured
certain impressions, I can swear that he actually consulted me on such
things as her diet, her periods, her wardrobe and the books she had read or
should read. "I think," - he said, "She will like Jean Christophe?"
Oh, he was quite a scholar, Mr. Taxovich.
You should have finished the novel by Thursday of next week. We will go on discussing the ending while reading the critical articles noted on the syllabus. While your post does not have to relate directly to your "theme" - you should indicate your choice of theme in your post.
