Also note that in Nabokov's intro to Despair he consigns Humbert to hell along with Hermann Karlovich, though unlike Karlovich, Humbert does at least merit an hour's reprieve from the great furnace of Christian fear once a year for a sunset walk, I think I recall. Meaning that Stadlen's reading is quite sensible. There's something very funny in the idea that in real life one could kill someone and then turn around and justify it, saying in court, "Gee judge, I was just killing my dark half. He represents my guilt." Lolita toys with the absurdity of this. And is Quilty really worse than Humbert? At least Quilty's not a bourgeois fake; he helps Lolita escape and gives the girl a few choices, if paltry--she's allowed to leave him whenever she pleases. Humbert, however, reduces the girl to the status of a live-in whore, whose money he regularly thieves in order to
keep her chained to him by material need. While Quilty may have wanted to film the girl in sex movies, is this really worse than someone who tried to put her to sleep with pills so he could rape her in her sleep? despite the way he pretends to finesse the subject. Someone who might not have murdered the girl's mother, but wanted to; whose cruelty and fraudulent matrimony to that woman certainly got her killed--a fatality Humbert exploits to the fullest, which he justifies by claiming Charlotte didn't love Lolita and that she didn't love her mother just because they were at the awkward phase parents and kids often get into during the onset of adolescence. Quilty didn't do any of these things--I'm not even sure that bribing police and paying to watch criminal executions, as Quilty creepily does, is really worse than Humbert's actions, if we can even fully trust Humbert's crazy characterization of the man as a conveniently reptilian decadent. Humbert
certainly allows himself to recall some huge monologues for Quilty, then tells us that whole garish affair was staged by Quilty himself, as Ahab at the end of Moby Dick tells us that God made him do all things he did, when he was supposedly trying to defy God the whole time! Humbert is clearly a piece of work.
--- On Sat, 2/25/12, Nabokv-L <nabokv-l@UTK.EDU> wrote:
From: Nabokv-L <nabokv-l@UTK.EDU>
Subject: [NABOKV-L] [Fwd: Re: post]
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Date: Saturday, February 25, 2012, 8:19 PM
The point is that, if Humbert were truly repentant, either after
hearing the children's voices, or, later, after visiting Mrs Schiller,
he would not immediately rush off to murder another pervert whom, by
the narcissism of small differences, he judges to be infinitely more
criminal than himself (Clare Quilty is the pseudonym he gives
him, "clearly guilty"). In his splendid poem imitating Eliot's Ash
Wednesday which Humbert hands to Quilty, he accuses Quilty of
taking advantage of Humbert, who is, admittedly, a "sinner", but a
"sinner" who is at a "disadvantage", namely, his "inner / essential
innocence". Humbert does not even claim to be justly ridding the world
of an evil man, but, rather, makes the point that Quilty has to die
because he has "cheated" Humbert.
Nabokov thought Eliot a "fake". He could hardly make it more plain
that he thinks Humbert's self-justification, his phoney repentance
which justifies murder, is also fake. And not just fake, but far, far
worse. Eliot was bad to his first wife, but he was not a child rapist
or murderer.
Note that Humbert, in gaol, says that he would give himself a long
sentence for his crime against Lolita, but would "dismiss the other
charges". Does anyone suppose that Nabokov endorses this trivialising
of murder, even the murder of a bad man like Quilty? Nabokov knew what
murder was. I need not spell out why. I well remember one of the first
English reviews of "Lolita", I think in the New Statesman, by
the fine critic V. S. Pritchett, who wrote: "Mr Nabokov's murder is
horrible. Murder is horrible." (I quote from memory, but this
is almost exact, I think.) If Nabokov thought Raskolnikov was a "filthy
murderer", then why would he not have thought the same of Humbert?
I agree with Jansy Mello that the passage she quotes is, together
with the passage about the children's voices, the closest Humbert gets
to the truth of what he has done to Lolita. But if we, as readers, end
up accepting his rationalisation of his murder, then are we not just
settling for a kind of frivolous pornography? Nabokov's "aesthetic
bliss" is not amoral. Rather, his position seems akin to Wittgenstein's
in the Tractatus, that "ethics and aesthetics are one". Not
for nothing did Nabokov envisage the "reappraiser" who would see him as
a "rigid moralist". We should not let his wonderful humour mislead us.
Anthony Stadlen
Anthony
Stadlen
"Oakleigh"
2A Alexandra Avenue
GB - London N22 7XE
Tel.: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857
Email: stadlen@aol.com
Founder (in 1996) and convenor of the
Inner Circle Seminars: an ethical, existential, phenomenological search
for truth in psychotherapy
See "Existential Psychotherapy & Inner
Circle Seminars" at http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/
for programme of future Inner Circle Seminars and complete archive of
past seminars
Isn't Quilty guilty (sorry) of the same
crimes as Humbert, or worse? Even Lo eventually finds C. Q. a little
too creepy and abandons him. I don't know that I'd call the murder of
Quilty "filthy" or even most foul and unnatural--as these things go.
I'm not sure that I quite understand your initial question. Frankly,
I'd find it easier to shoot Frank Langella than Peter Sellars, if a
choice had to be made. I think a one-day parole is fair enough for H.
H.
RSG
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