This will be my presentation for 10/22.
Theme or motif for my study: uniqueness, resemblance, and replication in Lolita
Structure:
- Introduction: why write this essay - justification
- Setting the scene: how can we interpret Lolita? Use of quotes from criticism.
- Introduction of idea: tracing it through passages from text, quoting with discussion.
- Conclusions
Introduction: justification
- Most criticism of Lolita focuses on its typically Nabokovian qualities: penchant for games, undermining of fictive reality, concern with aestheticism. Otherwise, authors treat it as a "realistic" novel, searching for themes or finding fault with its cavalier treatment of hebephilia. New criticism should go beyond this, to a deeper understanding of the book.
- Lolita is one of the most admired and imitated novels of the postwar era: by understanding its design, we can understand the genre of literature it spawned.
Critics have always distinguished between Lolita and a realistic novel, which means that Nabokov's masterwork does not attempt to reproduce or represent reality. As Nabokov has said (quote from interviews?) it is a self-contained reality unto itself. Furthermore, Nabokov's contempt for reductive interpretation is well known - he despises Freudian, Marxian, and other "formulaic" approaches to literature. At the same time, he has built a psychological explanation for Humbert's deviance into the novel, and, while constantly mocking those who would reduce literature to an interpretation, he presents a character in many ways ripe for exegesis. He has placed the reader in a double-bind.
Phyllis A. Roth comments on this dilemma:
[quote (28) "Nabokov's relationship to his art... reverses the aim of much fiction... a change of consciousness."]
While it is frequently said that satire attempts to hold a mirror up to the reader, forcing him or her into an uncomfortable position, I believe this is overstated with Lolita. The reader, however, finds him/herself in the position of having to uncover patterns rather than mining for "deep meanings." [Alfred Appel commented on Nabokov's use of surfaces, viewing this "flatness" as an American quality that appealed to Nabokov - but I am saving this for the part of the plot that involves America.] Roth goes on:
[(29) Simply speaking, what Nabokov gives the reader is not reality, but a way of perceiving reality.."]
This way of perceiving reality is structured, I would argue by patterns and games. [Here I quote Nabokov's comment on chess puzzles - I can refer back to my own post. It is a contest between reader and writer.]
In chess, one must imagine the other player's point of view. Similarly, when reading Lolita, the point of view of the character echoes that of the writer. Roth comments:
[(29) "VN presents characters who are engaged in the working out of the same problem: how most successfully...]
The intricacies of the character/writer's attempt to create a fictional world, an attempt which fails in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, and Lolita - among others, structures the reader's experience as well. If H.H. is an artist, Lolita is the story of his failure:
[Roth (30) "Most of the central characters are artists, or artists in disguise."]
But Humbert, unlike V. in Sebastian Knight, is not an artist, but an artist manqué a failed artist [describes himself this way on p. 15] whose frustrations lead him to attempt to mold his life into a work of art. Lolita is therefore both the creation of a failed world, the more elaborate for its failure, and the story of this world's creation, as Roth concludes: "readers of Nabokov will attest, to know the world of his novels is no slight accomplishment" (33).
When we attempt to understand Humbert, we are actually describing his artistic method; and his goals as an artist are to - not reproduce, but - rediscover a unique original. This goal is a key to Humbert's method of self-justification, his claim that he is an artist rather than a killer (Lolita 88); his conceit that he is, unlike the average child-molester, extremely discerning (16-17); and his psychological explanation that he has spent his life attempting to recover a lost or interrupted experience.
[possible quote: Winston 424: quotes from Lolita: we expect people to be as stable as fictional characters..." This assumption of a fixed, if not necessarily unique, identity is part of the process of writing fiction.]
Tracing the idea through the text[
[use opening passage with name to argue that Lolita is unique only to Humbert when she is called "Lolita" rather than other versions of her name?]
p. 16-18: uniqueness of nymphet-seekers and nymphets - but irreducible uniqueness of Annabelle ("no nymphet but my equal") italics mine
[note images of isolation: deserted beach 12-13 (unity of H. and A.), 14, 16, garden of Eden 20]
Uniqueness of Humber/Annabelle opposed to the trite, vulgar (i.e. common) Valeria (25-26) and the conventional Charlotte (37) [brief quotes only, with commentary highlighting the nature of their "vulgarity"]
p. 39 "it was the same child" - H.H. refuses to distinguish between individuals, later acknowledged when he says he had "safely solipsized" (60) Lolita.
This is a math problem. The isolation of two which leads to them being one is opposed to the plurality and repetitiveness of the real world. Nabokov's interest in mathematician/pedophile Lewis Carroll inspired the book; and we should also remember his description of himself as an "indivisible monist" (SO 85).
But Humbert is a copy: not only because he is a "type" as much as Charlotte as shown by her letter (67), but, even to Lolita, he resembles "some actor or crooner chap" (Quilty) (43).
Other relevant passages: Nabokov's use of lists (51-52) and interest in names: both emphasize the uniqueness of the important person in the list (Lolita); names, of course, indicate the individuality of any person, although the morphic names (for instance, Lolita's Spoonerisms 120) in Lolita demonstrate how unreliable this uniqueness is.
Other relevant scenes: masturbation scene (57) shows Humbert's belief that he and Lolita remain "solipsized" together - i.e. in his world - as long as they don't touch.
[bring in more Lewis Carroll]
"Rabbit hole" scene (122-124): by making contact with Lolita and therefore between the adult world and world of children, Humbert makes a terrible mistake - he enters reality.
"the Enchanted Hunter is blind by definition - is hunting an illusion or a delusion: when, after they leave the hotel, Lolita becomes a real person, her distinctness from the Annabelle image becomes more obvious..."
Lolita's adventures: 136-137 - separates her from the pristine image he had for her and connects her to "girls of her time" ruined by "modern co-education" (133): she is therefore one of many, not another of one
The Charlie to whom she lost her virginity is also one of many - Charlie-types appear everywhere as they drive around America. Once Lolita moves into the real world, she must be protected from - the real world so that Humbert can maintain his sense of her as singular.
Quilty appears in hotel (127) and as anyone who looks like Humbert or his lecherous uncle Gustave (123, 139, 202, 218, 237, 246, 359, 380, 406, 423). All these Gustaves are not only Quilty, but they resemble Humbert through kinship, which separates him from oneness with Lolita or uniqueness in himself. His real self is pursuing his "ideal" or Platonic self, which is pursuing its lost other half.
His "kingdom by the sea" is now mass-produced and mobile in the form of the "motor courts" (146) in which Humbert stays with Lolita - he continues to stay in them after he has lost Lolita.
210: "We consider our guests to be the finest people in the world" - emphasizes the anonymity of the guest.
218-219 pursued by Quilty, whom he generally sees in the car mirror
In general, they are in a world of industrial reproduction in which every roadside attraction is a copy of something else. This, for Appel, is part of the "Americanization" not only of Humbert, but of Nabokov. The world of surfaces in the experimental fiction of the day (Robbe-Grillet), films like "Last Year at Marienbad," celebrated by Nabokov, and the "flatness" of the American landscape, enacts a rejection of "the old myths of depth" (23) and a flatness epitomized by Dick Tracy cartoon strips: a surface that cannot be interpreted.
269-276: Humbert's encounter with Lolita destroys any illusion of her uniqueness or oneness with Annabelle: she is a mother, a reproduction of Charlotte, and a mother - the cycle of biological reproduction goes on. It is Quilty who, at camp, held a "coronation ceremony" (276), theatrically dramatizing Lolita as a princess, whereas Humbert merely tried to view her as a rebirth of his original princess.
When Humbert confronts Quilty - (295-305): he does not to preserve his own uniqueness by killing his double [295: "une femme est une femme, mais un Caporal est une cigarette"], but to preserve the idea of Lolita's oneness with Annabelle long after the reality is extinct (cf. last passage 309).
Conclusion
The patterns in Humbert's failed artistic endeavor show the conflict between his desire to preserve the stillness of time. Only in this stillness can the sense of oneness between two people, similar to the unchanging figures in Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," be preserved.
However, this stillness is opposed by the nature of language: we know characters and figures through comparisons with other characters; and, in fiction, we know them as types to some extent. Characters situated in the modern world are subject to a universe of copies and comparisons. More importantly, the Humbert who writes Lolita from prison is distinct from the Humbert who is a character in Lolita - the distinction between the "real" person and his fictional version of himself results in the confrontation between Humbert and Quilty.
Ultimately, Lolita is about the failure of art to reproduce memory. The "depth model" of traditional art creates a surface that conceals meanings, but these meanings are generally ideas, not lost experiences. The surfaces of Lolita evoke the failed enterprise of the artist who wishes to recreate (according to the Romantic model in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) life. Rather than representing such a recreation, it evokes the comic tension between the artist's goals and the unreliable medium of language.
In chess, one must imagine the other player's point of view. Similarly, when reading Lolita, the point of view of the character echoes that of the writer. Roth comments:
[(29) "VN presents characters who are engaged in the working out of the same problem: how most successfully...]
The intricacies of the character/writer's attempt to create a fictional world, an attempt which fails in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, and Lolita - among others, structures the reader's experience as well. If H.H. is an artist, Lolita is the story of his failure:
[Roth (30) "Most of the central characters are artists, or artists in disguise."]
But Humbert, unlike V. in Sebastian Knight, is not an artist, but an artist manqué a failed artist [describes himself this way on p. 15] whose frustrations lead him to attempt to mold his life into a work of art. Lolita is therefore both the creation of a failed world, the more elaborate for its failure, and the story of this world's creation, as Roth concludes: "readers of Nabokov will attest, to know the world of his novels is no slight accomplishment" (33).
When we attempt to understand Humbert, we are actually describing his artistic method; and his goals as an artist are to - not reproduce, but - rediscover a unique original. This goal is a key to Humbert's method of self-justification, his claim that he is an artist rather than a killer (Lolita 88); his conceit that he is, unlike the average child-molester, extremely discerning (16-17); and his psychological explanation that he has spent his life attempting to recover a lost or interrupted experience.
[possible quote: Winston 424: quotes from Lolita: we expect people to be as stable as fictional characters..." This assumption of a fixed, if not necessarily unique, identity is part of the process of writing fiction.]
Tracing the idea through the text[
[use opening passage with name to argue that Lolita is unique only to Humbert when she is called "Lolita" rather than other versions of her name?]
p. 16-18: uniqueness of nymphet-seekers and nymphets - but irreducible uniqueness of Annabelle ("no nymphet but my equal") italics mine
[note images of isolation: deserted beach 12-13 (unity of H. and A.), 14, 16, garden of Eden 20]
Uniqueness of Humber/Annabelle opposed to the trite, vulgar (i.e. common) Valeria (25-26) and the conventional Charlotte (37) [brief quotes only, with commentary highlighting the nature of their "vulgarity"]
p. 39 "it was the same child" - H.H. refuses to distinguish between individuals, later acknowledged when he says he had "safely solipsized" (60) Lolita.
This is a math problem. The isolation of two which leads to them being one is opposed to the plurality and repetitiveness of the real world. Nabokov's interest in mathematician/pedophile Lewis Carroll inspired the book; and we should also remember his description of himself as an "indivisible monist" (SO 85).
But Humbert is a copy: not only because he is a "type" as much as Charlotte as shown by her letter (67), but, even to Lolita, he resembles "some actor or crooner chap" (Quilty) (43).
Other relevant passages: Nabokov's use of lists (51-52) and interest in names: both emphasize the uniqueness of the important person in the list (Lolita); names, of course, indicate the individuality of any person, although the morphic names (for instance, Lolita's Spoonerisms 120) in Lolita demonstrate how unreliable this uniqueness is.
Other relevant scenes: masturbation scene (57) shows Humbert's belief that he and Lolita remain "solipsized" together - i.e. in his world - as long as they don't touch.
[bring in more Lewis Carroll]
"Rabbit hole" scene (122-124): by making contact with Lolita and therefore between the adult world and world of children, Humbert makes a terrible mistake - he enters reality.
"the Enchanted Hunter is blind by definition - is hunting an illusion or a delusion: when, after they leave the hotel, Lolita becomes a real person, her distinctness from the Annabelle image becomes more obvious..."
Lolita's adventures: 136-137 - separates her from the pristine image he had for her and connects her to "girls of her time" ruined by "modern co-education" (133): she is therefore one of many, not another of one
The Charlie to whom she lost her virginity is also one of many - Charlie-types appear everywhere as they drive around America. Once Lolita moves into the real world, she must be protected from - the real world so that Humbert can maintain his sense of her as singular.
Quilty appears in hotel (127) and as anyone who looks like Humbert or his lecherous uncle Gustave (123, 139, 202, 218, 237, 246, 359, 380, 406, 423). All these Gustaves are not only Quilty, but they resemble Humbert through kinship, which separates him from oneness with Lolita or uniqueness in himself. His real self is pursuing his "ideal" or Platonic self, which is pursuing its lost other half.
His "kingdom by the sea" is now mass-produced and mobile in the form of the "motor courts" (146) in which Humbert stays with Lolita - he continues to stay in them after he has lost Lolita.
210: "We consider our guests to be the finest people in the world" - emphasizes the anonymity of the guest.
218-219 pursued by Quilty, whom he generally sees in the car mirror
In general, they are in a world of industrial reproduction in which every roadside attraction is a copy of something else. This, for Appel, is part of the "Americanization" not only of Humbert, but of Nabokov. The world of surfaces in the experimental fiction of the day (Robbe-Grillet), films like "Last Year at Marienbad," celebrated by Nabokov, and the "flatness" of the American landscape, enacts a rejection of "the old myths of depth" (23) and a flatness epitomized by Dick Tracy cartoon strips: a surface that cannot be interpreted.
269-276: Humbert's encounter with Lolita destroys any illusion of her uniqueness or oneness with Annabelle: she is a mother, a reproduction of Charlotte, and a mother - the cycle of biological reproduction goes on. It is Quilty who, at camp, held a "coronation ceremony" (276), theatrically dramatizing Lolita as a princess, whereas Humbert merely tried to view her as a rebirth of his original princess.
When Humbert confronts Quilty - (295-305): he does not to preserve his own uniqueness by killing his double [295: "une femme est une femme, mais un Caporal est une cigarette"], but to preserve the idea of Lolita's oneness with Annabelle long after the reality is extinct (cf. last passage 309).
Conclusion
The patterns in Humbert's failed artistic endeavor show the conflict between his desire to preserve the stillness of time. Only in this stillness can the sense of oneness between two people, similar to the unchanging figures in Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," be preserved.
| Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard | |
| Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; | |
| Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, | |
| Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: | |
| Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave | 15 |
| Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; | |
| Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, | |
| Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve; | |
| She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, | |
| For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! |
However, this stillness is opposed by the nature of language: we know characters and figures through comparisons with other characters; and, in fiction, we know them as types to some extent. Characters situated in the modern world are subject to a universe of copies and comparisons. More importantly, the Humbert who writes Lolita from prison is distinct from the Humbert who is a character in Lolita - the distinction between the "real" person and his fictional version of himself results in the confrontation between Humbert and Quilty.
Ultimately, Lolita is about the failure of art to reproduce memory. The "depth model" of traditional art creates a surface that conceals meanings, but these meanings are generally ideas, not lost experiences. The surfaces of Lolita evoke the failed enterprise of the artist who wishes to recreate (according to the Romantic model in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) life. Rather than representing such a recreation, it evokes the comic tension between the artist's goals and the unreliable medium of language.
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