mirrory beaches and rosy rocks—of an enchanted island haunted by those
nymphets of mine and surrounded by a vast, misty sea. Between those age
limits, are all girl-children nymphets? Of course not. Otherwise, we who
are in the know, we lone voyagers, we nympholepts, would have long gone
insane. Neither are good looks any criterion; and vulgarity, or at least what
a given community terms so, does not necessarily impair certain mysterious
characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious
charm that separates the nymphet from such coevals of hers as are incompa-
rably more dependent on the spatial world of the synchronous phenomena
than on that intangible island of entranced time where Lolita plays with her
likes. (16–17)Having used the playful comparison to dispose us to accept Humbert’s
interpretations, the implied Nabokov uses that disposition to his advantage
here. The earlier bonding unreliability and Humbert’s play with metaphor
combine to encourage rhetorical readers to consider whether he is metaphori-
cally reliable. Perhaps Nabokov wants his rhetorical readers to think that the
perceptive Humbert is onto something; surely many of us, male and female,
have entertained ideas about special subgroups of the opposite sex. Enter-
taining this possibility also means recognizing that the appeal of Humbert’s
narration is that it can do more of what it does here, namely, explain the mys-
teries of this group and the effect its members have on those travelers whom
they bewitch. To bond with Humbert here, in other words, would not mean
becoming a bewitched traveler but rather seeing the world through such a
traveler’s eyes.
But Nabokov constructs the narration of Humbert’s theory of nymphets
so that it is ultimately estranging rather than bonding. In the passage above,
the main signal is the utter elusiveness of the qualities, those “certain mysteri-
ous characteristics” that make one girl a nymphet and another merely human.
Even if “nymphets” are not obvious to the unbewitched, surely this bewitched
witness should be able to offer a more precise account of their characteristics
than the vague and grandiose designations he offers here. Indeed, the gap
between Humbert’s lofty rhetoric and the reality of the situation it obscures—
his pederasty—exposes Humbert’s nymphet defense as ultimately an elaborate
rationalization of his lust. Yes, that lust is selective, but Humbert’s explanation
of that selectivity is ultimately a sham. Nabokov includes even stronger signals
of estrangement in the next paragraph.
Furthermore, since the idea of time plays such a magic part in the matter, the
student should not be surprised to learn that there must be a gap of severalESTRANgINg UNRELIABILITY, BONDINg UNRELIABILITY • 113