LOLITA
by Hafid Bouazza
In popular speech the eponym Lolita is more often than not used for
any pubescently budding and sexually attractive girl. However, avid readers of
the book know that despite Humbert Humbert’s magic and by dint of Vladimir
Nabokov’s art, his creator, matters are more complicated than
that.
When Humbert sees Lolita for the first time, half-naked on “a mat in
a pool of sun,” he thinks (“and then, without the least warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my
heart”) he has found an incarnation of his young
This rediscovery and recognition of a lost girl has all the trappings
of a fairy-tale.
“And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess (lost,
kidnapped, discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at the
king and his hounds), I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her
side.”
Humbert tries to make us believe that his obsession with
twelve-year-old Lolita is a Freudian relonging for the young Annabel, that it
was she who fed him the venom of nympholepsy or pederosis, a word coined by Nabokov
himself that literally means “pathological love for girls” (erosis, love as an illness, eros as an
affliction), but readers familiar with Nabokov’s dislike of “the Viennese quack”
will immediately perceive that they are being hoodwinked. Psychiatrists and
therapists are mocked; as he says,
only a nice spacing distinguishes therapist from the rapist. What is more, when Humbert
and Lolita visit a beach, a sentimental
journey to the past, he does not feel for the first and only time any desire
for her: she arouses him as much as a manatee, as he expresses it rather
crudely.
At the same time Humbert contradicts himself. When introducing the
word nymphet, he writes as follows: “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." […] 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.” An island, because unspied by social norms.
In order to recognize these special creatures the traveler has to
possess a special gift: “You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite
melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous
flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine in order to discern at once, by
ineffable signs […] the little deadly demon among the wholesome
children”
Gone is Annabel’s incarnation in Lolita. What we have here is a
pedophile speaking, expounding to us how to discern nymphets on the basis of
certain details, not how he finds again and again his Riviera love in those
girls. The obsessive attention with which Humbert describes every inch of
Lolita’s skin, her every movement, smell, and stippled armpits may convince the
reader that she is indeed a demonic girl hailing from an enchanted world.
Witness the famous davenport scene in which Lolita resting her legs athwart
Humbert’s lap induces the longest orgasm “man or monster had ever
known.”
He says, “Lolita was safely solipsized.” This neologism implies that
outside of Humbert’s will Lolita has no consciousness of her own.
Humbert himself explains it to us: “What I had madly possessed was
not she, but my own creation, another , fanciful Lolita – perhaps more real than
Lolita…having no will, no consciousness- indeed, no life of her own.” “The child knew nothing. I had done nothing to her. And nothing prevented me from repeating a
performance that had affected her as little as if she were a photographic image
rippling upon a screen and I a humble hunchback abusing myself in the dark.”
(The hunchback is an allusion to the bell-ringer in Notre-Dame de Paris and indirectly to Lo
as Esmeralda, a gypsy just like Carmen.)
Philosophically speaking, this is the exact opposite of
solipsism!
After this, Humbert proceeds with what I cannot but define as his
humorous and moving cynicism: “…I intended, with the most fervent force and foresight, to protect the
purity of that twelve-year-old child.’ (There is an ithyphallic thrust in the
string of alliterations: ‘fanciful, fervent, force,
foresight.’)
But the attentive reader will see what a tour de force Nabokov pulls. In spite of
all the heartbeat-stopping lyricism and magically evocative imagery there is no
doubt that we are dealing with a child, a normal twelve-year-old girl, with
“pale-gray vacant eyes, five asymmetrical freckles on her bobbed
nose,” “auburn-brown hair, lips as red as licked red candy, the lower one
prettily plump;” a girl “of tender dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie
vulgarity.” A teenager with her whims and fancies and fondness for teen
magazines.
One moving instance occurs in the hotel when, having given her a
sleeping pill, he tries to possess her. Matters take a different course, though,
and when she wakes up and asks him for a drink she “with an infantile gesture
that carried more charm than any carnal caress,” wipes her lips against his
shoulder and falls back asleep “with the neutral plaintive murmur of a child
demanding its natural rest.”
But the pièce de
résistance is the moment when she and Humbert quarrel: “From that moment, I
stopped restraining my voice, and we continued yelling at each other, and she
said unprintable things. She said she loathed me. She made monstrous faces at
me, inflating her cheeks and producing a diabolical plopping sound […] and all
the while she stared at me with those unforgettable eyes where cold anger and
hot tears struggled.”
Witness the powerlessness of a waif, who cries herself every night
into sleep, and makes faces to express her anger.
Lolita dies in childbed at the age of seventeen, immortally sung like
woman has never been sung, let alone a girl. For she was a child, and
ironically, thanks to
not, see in her.
I disregard the “epiphany” above the small mining town, because Brian
Boyd has already shown how deceptive it is.
The question that preoccupied Nabokov remains: crime and art. Humbert
is a pedophile and a murderer, but is he also an artist? We encounter the same
theme in Despair and Laughter in the Dark. Is mastery of the
word also the word’s mercy? This is an ethical, not to say a religious, issue.
And yet: whether or not Humbert has our sympathy has nothing to do with his
verbal gift (not to mention his dark and wistful humor), that depends on us. In
the final analysis, it is the writer Vladimir Nabokov who gives us genius and a
moral dilemma –besides a masterpiece.