years, never less than ten I should say, generally thirty or forty, and as many
as ninety in a few known cases, between maiden and man to enable the lat-
ter to come under a nymphet’s spell. It is a question of focal adjustment, of a
certain distance that the inner eye thrills to surmount, and a certain contrast
that the mind perceives with a gasp of perverse delight. When I was a child
and she was a child, my little Annabel was no nymphet to me [. . .]. (17)Here Humbert’s theory of nymphets gets thoroughly exposed as a highly
wrought rationalization of his pederasty. By having Humbert emphasize the
difference in age, Nabokov calls attention to the differences in size and power
between “maiden and man.” By having Humbert extend the range of the gap
between “maiden and man” to ninety years, Nabokov calls attention to the
implausibility of Humbert’s claims. As a result, the idea of the man com-
ing under the spell of the nymphet becomes misreporting, misreading, and
misevaluating, and the overall effect of the passage is to estrange rhetorical
readers from Humbert and from one of the chief planks of his defense in
part 1.
Humbert, of course, continues to try to defend himself in part 1, and
Nabokov allows him intermittent passages of bonding unreliability, though
he also continues the pattern of complex coding. However, as I have argued
in Living to Tell about It, from the end of part 1 on, Humbert’s own engage-
ment with the task of narrating his experiences with Dolores leads him to see
more clearly the irreparable harm he has done to her. As a result, he eventually
cannot sustain his purpose of exonerating himself, so he stops rationalizing
his behavior and starts taking responsibility for ruining her life. Accompany-
ing these changes is Nabokov’s increased use of bonding unreliability through
partial progress toward the authorial norm. The clearest example of this strat-
egy is his statement, “Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert
at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges” (308).
Humbert, of course, is not accused of rape but rather of the murder of Clare
Quilty. His willingness to dismiss the murder charge shows that he is still an
unreliable evaluator of his own actions. But his willingness to sentence himself
to at least thirty-five years for rape—indeed, his willingness to use the term
rape for the first time—shows how far from the rationalizations about being
bewitched by a nymphet he has traveled. As I try to demonstrate in Living
to Tell, Nabokov’s ability to plausibly represent Humbert’s change from the
beginning of his narration to this end, and to guide his rhetorical readers to
feel moved by his alteration, is a remarkable ethical and aesthetic achieve-
ment, even as that achievement has its own dark side.
114 • CHAPTER 5