818 Naipaul, V. s.
him unable to have normal sexual relations with
adult women; any pleasure he gets depends on how
closely they resemble little girls. Monique appeals
to him because “her young body . . . still retained
. . . a childish something”; he is attracted to Valeria
because of “the imitation she gave of a little girl”;
in order to have sex with Charlotte, he “evoke[s]
the child while caressing the mother”; and after
Lolita leaves him, he takes up with Rita, who has
a “prepubescent” body. By lusting after little girls,
Humbert is violating one of Western society’s stron-
gest taboos, so he tries to prove that these taboos are
relative. He also tries to redefine the notion of what
being sexually “normal” means and to overturn the
conventional picture of pedophiles, arguing that “the
majority of sex offenders . . . are innocuous, inad-
equate, passive, timid.” In reality, he is none of these
things. His feelings for Lolita are suspect, too. He
may claim that he is “not concerned with so-called
‘sex’ at all” and that the attraction he feels for her
transcends such vulgarity, but the novel’s first sen-
tence indicates that the sexual aspects of his obses-
sion are as important as the emotional: Lolita is not
only the “light of [his] life,” she is also the “fire of
[his] loins”—that is, the source of his sexual arousal.
Lolita’s first experience with sexual intercourse
involves someone in her own age group: 13-year-
old Charlie Holmes. Despite his having “as much
sex appeal as a raw carrot,” she finds it “sort of fun.”
The same cannot be said for her sexual relation-
ship with Humbert, who is 37 years old when they
meet: Even if she does initiate sexual intercourse,
as Humbert claims, over time her feelings shift
from “rash curiosity” to “amused distaste” to “plain
repulsion”; indeed, reacting to her habitual lack of
response, Humbert dubs her “The Frigid Princess.”
Initially, Humbert has trouble persuading Lolita to
have sex, but once she begins to realize the extent of
her power over him, she starts to prostitute herself
in order to earn pocket money. She also uses sex as
a form of threat: When she argues with Humbert,
“she said she would sleep with the very first fellow
who asked her.” Sex soon becomes divorced from
feeling for Lolita, and it is disturbing how blasé
she becomes about it. It is ironic that Headmistress
Pratt believes that Lolita is “morbidly uninterested
in sexual matters”: The truth is, her sexual growth
has been irreparably damaged by her relationship
with Humbert. In taking up with Quilty, she thinks
her circumstances will improve, but Quilty has even
less compassion than Humbert, and he kicks her
out when she refuses to perform in one of his por-
nographic movies.
Quilty casts himself in the role of Lolita’s hero,
who “saved her from a beastly pervert,” but he is no
better, for he, too, treats her as a sexual object. Like
Humbert, Quilty is “a complete freak in sex mat-
ters,” but the fact that he is “practically impotent”
implies that sex is a sterile, voyeuristic sport for him.
Because of this, some readers think that he embod-
ies Humbert’s degenerate side (a monster minus
a conscience), and argue that when Humbert kills
Quilty, he is symbolically destroying his evil self.
Nevertheless, both men are beyond redemption. At
their last meeting, when Humbert asks Lolita what
sexual acts Quilty tried to persuade her to take part
in, she is vague: “Weird, filthy, fancy things.” He
presses her for a precise answer, but “she refused to
go into particulars with that baby inside her.” Her
reluctance reflects her wish to protect the purity of
her unborn child: Simply to speak of these sordid
acts would be to sully its innocence. As it transpires,
her baby dies with her in childbirth, a poignant sym-
bol of how Lolita’s own innocence and growth were
stunted by Humbert’s sexual obsession. This seems
to suggest that sex without love, without a sense of
morality and responsibility, is, as Humbert finally
acknowledges, nothing but “sterile and selfish vice.”
P. B. GrantNaiPauL, v. S. A Bend in the River
(1979)
First published in 1979, A Bend in the River was
short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, the most
prestigious literary prize in the United Kingdom,
that year. In the novel, V. S. Naipaul (b. 1932) takes
up topics such as the impact of cultural, ethnic, and
political ideology and indoctrination on individual
psychology and the complexities of postcolonial
nationhood in Africa.
A Bend in the River uses as its background the
descent of a Central African nation from postcolo-
nial disruption through New African corruption to