Nabokov's Lolita

Introduction - Complicity in Abuse

Lolita is a story of horrific sexual abuse. The book is profoundly subversive and contains elements of pornographic eroticism. Even though the most graphic scenes happen “off-camera,” this book about pedophilia and the abduction and rape of a twelve-year-old girl is understandably difficult for many people to stomach. Unlike other stories that contain extreme sexual abuse (the 2015 movie and 2010 book Room for example), the book’s predator-pedophile Humbert Humbert is also the book’s narrator. Therefore, the perspective and attitude of this book is in the mind of one of the most monstrous characters in all of literature. Every description is slanted by a narrator who is unreliable in his storytelling and actively trying to appear sympathetic to the reader. This gruesome slanting is what most characterizes the experience of reading Lolita and is a big part of what makes it so unsettling.

In one scene, while preparing to molest a drugged Dolores (the given name of the girl that HH calls Lolita), HH asks the reader to participate in his act - to actively bring his abuse “to life” in the reader’s imagination. In this passage, HH calls himself a tenderhearted and sensitive hero and pleads with the reader to imagine this abuse into existence:

Please reader: no matter your exasperation with the tenderhearted, morbidly sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these essential pages! Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own inequity; let’s even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling (129).

Through this technique, the reader is drawn deep into the mind of HH and begins to feel that he or she is almost complicit in the horrors described.

The book evokes horror, disgust and sadness, but perhaps the main achievement of this book is that we also can’t help empathizing with HH. On one level, Lolita is about the abduction and torture of Dolores Haze, but on another, it’s about the anguish of a cultured, well-read, intelligent, and desperate man who can only love little girls.  Many books and movies portray monsters, but this book puts us in the mind of a monster and raises uncomfortable questions.

It's unsettling and pornographic nature notwithstanding, this book is unbelievably well-written and the character Humbert Humbert is an example of Nabokov’s peerless creative genius. Lolita explores themes of love and conscience and it challenges the way we think may about human beings and the very nature of evil.

Plot Summary

The book’s preface tells us that Humbert Humbert (HH) is the pseudonym for the author of this prison memoir titled: “Lolita, or the Confessions of a White Widowed Male.” HH is a French literary scholar in prison in the United States for murder (not the horrific sexual abuse described in his memoir).

HH’s memoir (set in the 1940s) is divided into two parts. In Part One we learn about the early life of HH, his first marriage to a woman named Valeria, his breakup with Valeria, and his immigration to the United States. HH tells us that at the age of thirteen he fell madly in love with a girl he calls Annabel Leigh (also thirteen at the time), who’s family was staying at a summer Vila with HH's family. The two struggled to find privacy under the watchful eye of their parents:

All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other....but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do (12).

Annabel died a few months later of typhus. HH reflects on the significance of this experience and whether or not it can explain the origin of his pederosis:

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?...I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel (13).

Once in the United States, HH rents a room in the house of Charlotte Haze in Ramsdale, New England. Charlotte is the single mother of a twelve-year-old Dolores Haze - a smitten HH calls her Lolita. Eventually, Charlotte confesses that she is in love with HH and HH agrees to marry her as a scheme to stay close to Dolores.

While Dolores is at a summer camp called Camp Q, Charlotte is hit by a car and dies, and HH is left with custody of Dolores. After a funeral for Charlotte, HH picks Dolores up from Camp Q and they go to a Hotel called The Enchanted Hunters where the two first have sex. In the aftermath of this first sexual encounter, the final sentences of Book One describe HH’s complete possession of Dolores Haze:

At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go (142).

In Book Two, HH and Dolores set out on a road trip across the United States. After a year of staying in motels, Dolores convinces HH to settle down and let her enroll in school. They settle in Beardsley, New England for some months, then set off on the road again. This time HH becomes suspicious that they are being followed and Dolores is making secretive phone calls from payphones behind his back. Eventually, Dolores falls sick and HH is forced to check her into a hospital. HH stays at a nearby Hotel and learns that Dolores was checked-out of the hospital by an uncle. HH is distraught to have lost Dolores to this mysterious "uncle,” and embarks on a frantic search for her abductor. HH retraces all his steps and re-visits every hotel he visited with Dolores since Beardsley, but fails to track them down.

Two years later, HH receives a letter from Dolores, now 17, telling him that she is married and pregnant and in desperate need of money. HH visits Dolores at her trailer park home and gives her $4,000 in exchange for the name of the man who took her. She reveals that she ran off with Clare Quilty, an old friend of Charlotte, and a playwright who worked with the children at Camp Q. After checking her out of the hospital, Quilty tried to persuade Dolores to star in pornographic films at his Duk Duk Ranch, but she refused and was eventually kicked out.

In the book’s long and bloody climax, HH tracks down Quilty at his mansion, shoots him dead and allows himself to be arrested by the police. While awaiting trial for murder he writes this memoir. The manuscript's publisher tells us that HH died of coronary thrombosis and Lolita died in childbirth while giving birth to a stillborn girl shortly after.

HH’s Style of Narration

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style (9).

HH’s style is stunningly unique and often cryptic. This memoir alternates between shocking confessional honesty and intentional obfuscation. HH confesses guilt in one breath and professes innocence in another. This, coupled with HH’s unreliability as a narrator and the book’s temporal discontinuities make it non-trivial for the reader to piece together the underlying narrative.

HH's sentences are long and energetic and overflowing with excitement. Typifying his unique style is the way HH injects short in-passing descriptions in parenthesis. A dramatic example of this technique is the long and manic sentence in which HH compacts the whole memory of his mother and references his current incarceration. The description of her death by lightening is a mere two words in parentheses:

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, 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).

From the first word (“Lolita”) to the last word (also “Lolita”), the whole book is permeated with a sense of longing and desperation. At one point, HH’s narrative is interrupted with a chapter describing himself sitting in a jail cell struggling with the act of writing this memoir and a note to the future printer:

This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My calendar is getting confused. That must have been around August 15, 1947. Don’t think I can go on. Heart, head — everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer (109).

HH’s Confession

Lolita is HH’s final confession. In it, HH finds relief in speaking openly about the abuse and aberrant desire whose secrecy he meticulously protected for a lifetime. In this confession, HH is fully aware of the torture he inflicted on Dolores, absent however is any compelling sense of remorse. HH knows that his deeds are monstrous, but he never seems to regret them or seek forgiveness. HH summarizes the tenor of this confession with an image of his defiling the American country-side that he trekked through:

I catch myself thinking that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night — every night, every night — the moment I feigned sleep (176).

HH characterizes his abusive relationship with Dolores as a “parody of incest”:

But the awful point of the whole argument is this. It had become gradually clear to my conventional Lolita during our singular and bestial cohabitation that even the most miserable of family lives was better than the parody of incest, which, in the long run, was the best I could offer the waif (287).

After having lost Dolores, HH seeks some spiritual guidance with the aim: "...to deduce from my sense of sin the existence of a Supreme Being." HH considers turning to God to help him make sense of his guilt and the horror of the cruelty he inflicted:

I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to me — to me as I am now, today, with my heart and by beard, and my putrefaction — that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art (283).

Detective Trapp

Part One of Lolita can be summarized as HH working to gain possession of Dolores Haze, and Part Two can be summarized as HH (in possession of Dolores) being tormented by the yet unidentified pursuer – Clare Quilty. HH doesn’t determine the identity of Quilty until Dolores reveals the name toward the end of the book, but all along he is aware that he is chasing or being chased by a rival who is competing with him for possession of Dolores. We are introduced to Quilty in the beginning of the book as a playwright and friend of Charlotte. Even at this early juncture, HH and Quilty are juxtaposed as similarly looking competitors for the affection of Dolores:

I have all the characteristics which, according to writers on the sex interests of children, start the responses stirring in a little girl: clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice, broad shoulder. Moreover, I am said to resemble some crooner or actor chap on whom Lo has a crush (43).

The first direct encounter between HH and Quilty happens at The Enchanted Hunters hotel toward the end of Book One. HH has just administered sleeping pills to Dolores to molest her while she’s sleeping. While waiting for the sleeping pills to take effect, HH is pacing nervously around the hotel.

Suddenly, I was aware that in the darkness next to me there was somebody sitting in a chair on the pillared porch. I could not really see him but what gave him away was the rasp of a screwing off, then a discrete gurgle, then the final note of a placid screwing on. I was about to move away when his voice addressed me:
"Where the devil did you get her?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said: the weather is getting better."
"Seems so."
"Who's the lassie?"
"My daughter."
"You lie-she's not."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said: July was hot. Where's her mother?"
"Dead."
"I see. Sorry. By the way, why don't you two lunch with me tomorrow. The dreadful crowd will be gone by then."
"We'll be gone too. Good night" (127).

In this interaction, like future interactions between HH and Quilty, Quilty appears as a phantom or hallucinatory figure, cloaked in darkness, and feeding directly into HH’s fears and paranoia. The figure of Quilty provokes HH’s fears of losing Dolores, and of being discovered for his crime and causes HH to doubt his own sanity.

From the time HH and Dolores set out from Beardsley, HH becomes suspicious that Dolores is in contact with a different man or lover. On more than one occasion, at a rest-stop, Dolores would disappear for some-time and then reappear with suspicious excuses. On a different occasion, when HH returned back to his motel where he left Dolores earlier that day:

To my surprise I found her dressed. She was sitting on the edge of the bed in slacks and T-shirt, and was looking at me as if she could not quite place me. The frank soft shape of her small breasts was brought out rather than blurred by the limpness of her thin shirt, and this frankness irritated me. She had not washed; yet her mouth was freshly though smudgily painted, and her broad teeth glistened like wine-tinged ivory, or pinkish poker chips. And there she sat, hands clasped in her lap, and dreamily brimmed with a diabolical glow that had no relations to me whatever (214).

Unsure if Dolores has been "cheating," HH abusively “pursues the scent” and begins to doubt his own sanity:

“What’s the matter, where are you going?” cried Lo from the porch. I said nothing. I pushed her softness back into the room and went in after her. I ripped her shirt off. I unzipped the rest of her, I tore off her sandals. Wildly, I pursued the shadow of her infidelity; but the scent I traveled upon was so slight as to be practically undistinguishable from a madman’s fancy.

Once again, we are not sure and HH is not sure if HH is losing his mind.

While driving west through Appalachia, HH becomes hugely disturbed by the appearance of a red convertible that follows them on the road for days at a time. HH gives the name "detective Trapp” to this mysterious pursuer. After some time, HH stops seeing the red convertible:

In a street of Wace, on its outskirts...Oh, I am quite sure it was not a delusion. In a street of Wace, I had glimpsed the Aztec Red Convertible, or its identical twin. Instead of Trapp, it contained four or five loud young people of several sexes—but I said nothing. After Wace a totally new situation arose. For a day or two, I enjoyed the mental emphasis with which I told myself that we were not, and never had been followed; and then I became sickeningly conscious that Trapp had changed his tactics and was still with us, in this or that rented car....grays, however, remained his favorite cryptochromism, and, in agonizing nightmares, I tried in vain to sort out properly such ghosts as Chrysler’s Shell Gray, Chevrolet’s Thistle Gray, Dodge’s French Gray... (227)

This illusory Trapp appears one night at the door of HH's motel wearing a grotesque mask of a newspaper cartoon detective:

I do not know what she or he, or both had put into my liquor but one night I felt sure somebody was tapping on the door of our cabin, and I flung it open, and noticed two things — that I was stark naked and that, white-glistening in the rain-dripping darkness, there stood a man holding before his face the mask of Jutting Chin, a grotesque sleuth in the funnies. He emitted a muffled guffaw and scurried away, and I reeled back into the room, and fell asleep again, and am not sure even to this day that the visit was not a drug-provoked dream: I have thoroughly studied Trapp’s type of humor, and this might have been a plausible sample (217).

After Quilty takes Dolores from the hospital and from the life of HH, HH desperately retraces his steps and begins searching through the guest-logs of hotels along his journey to determine the identity of his rival. In this maddening pursuit he finds that Quilty has deliberately left clues for him at various places. HH describes the prosecution of this frantic search:

I could not hope, of course, he would ever leave his correct name and address; but I did hope he might slip on the glaze of his own subtlety, by daring, say, to introduce a richer and more personal shot of color than strictly necessary, or by revealing too much through a qualitative sum of quantitative parts which revealed too little. In one thing he succeeded: he succeeded in thoroughly enmeshing me and my thrashing anguish in his demoniacal game. With infinite skill, he swayed and staggered, and regained an impossible balance, always leaving me with the sportive hope — if I may use such a term in speaking of betrayal, fury, desolation, horror and hate — that he might give himself away next time….The clues he left did not establish his identity but they reflected his personality, or at least a certain homogenous and striking personality; his genre, his type of humor — at its best at least — the tone of his brain, had affinities with my own. He mimed and mocked me. His allusions were definitely highbrow. He was well-read. He knew French. he was versed in logodaedaly and logomancy. He was an amateur of sex lore. He had a feminine handwriting. He would change his name but he could not disguise, no matter how he slanted them, his very peculiar t’s, w’s and l’s. Quelquepart Island was one of his favorite residences (250).

In the above passage, HH asserts that “the tone of his brain, had affinities with my own.” As readers, we can recognize that Quilty is as much a projection of HH’s inner daemons as he is an external foe. Quilty is a ghostlike phantom because he is, in-part, a creation of HH’s imagination and is operating in a mental space hovering between reality and unreality. The torments of Clare Quilty are in-part the torments of HH’s own fears and conscience.

To HH, Quilty is a vulgar American pornographer – an embodiment of the most grotesque and detestable parts of his own being. The climatic murder of Clare Quilty is both a murder and an attempt to expiate his own sins – a bloody purge of the evil in himself. HH’s murder of Quilty is not merely the vanquishing of an enemy, but the exorcism of an inner daemon and the climax of extreme inner turmoil.

Hellfire-Paradise

Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise — a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames—but still a paradise (166).

In his telling, HH’s inner-experience is characterized by a complex interaction between pleasure and pain, satisfaction and suffering – what HH calls: “a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames.” It’s this unresolvable paradox and the persistent tension between sin and ecstasy, love and abuse, heaven and hell that lies at the heart of this book and gives it its unique character. The juxtaposition between “sin” and “soul” in the first sentences of the memoir set this tone:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul (9).

This fractured mode of experience is exemplified in HH's following recollection from his sex-life with Dolores:

I recall certain moments...when after having had my fill of her—after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred — I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever — for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation) — and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again — and “oh, no,” Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure — all would be shattered.

Getting in the car with Dolores after their first sexual encounter at the Enchanted Hunters, HH describes the oppressive gravity of his crime and an experience that is simultaneously the fulfillment of a lifelong dream and horrific nightmare:

It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed. … As she was in the act of getting back into the car, an expression of pain flitted across Lo’s face….Foolishly, I asked her what was the matter. “Nothing, you brute,” she replied. “You what?” I asked. She was silent. Leaving Briceland. Loquacious Lo was silent. Cold spiders of panic crawled down my back. This was an orphan. This was a lone child, an absolute waif, with whom a heavy-limbed, foul-smelling adult had had strenuous intercourse three times that very morning. Whether or not the realization of a lifelong dream had surpassed all expectation, it had, in a sense, overshot its mark — and plunged into a nightmare (140).

In the throes of his devotion, HH says he knew how Dolores suffered and "it was hell to know it":

...oh my poor, bruised child. I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais [but I loved you, I loved you]! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller (284).

In one of the book's most stunning and poetic passages, HH describes how he would have painted the murals in the Enchanted Hunters hotel. In this incredible vision, HH captures the magical and surreal universe of his private experience, but also Dolores' torture in the words: "choking," "stinging," "smarting," and "a wincing child."

Had I been a painter, had the management of the Enchanted Hunters lost its mind one summer day and commissioned me to redecorate their dining room with murals of my own making, this is what I might have thought up, let me list some fragments: There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies – a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping the callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have been all kinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group, Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child (134).

Conclusion

For me, Lolita is the memoir-genre taken to its logical extreme. The book asks: what does it mean to be evil? What experiences are worth imagining and trying to understand? In addition to being a masterpiece of language, the book is a masterpiece of human psychology and an experiment in extreme empathy. Lolita demonstrates the shocking power of the memoir-genre as a tool for communicating and immortalizing a human experience in the medium of language. 

HH's concluding entreatment to Dolores:

Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C.Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. 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).