The American Century: Literature since 1945 747journey, loss, pursuit, and revenge. The love plot is propelled forward in a straight
line, in accordance with whose unrelating extension Charlotte loves Humbert, who
loves Lolita, who loves Quilty, who seems to love no one at all. And, as in the courtly
love story, the desire of the narrator becomes a metaphor for other kinds of daring,
transgression, and retribution. “Oh, My Lolita, I have only words to play with!”
Humbert declares early on in the novel. And that discloses another kind of artfulness.
The narrator is telling his story as he awaits trial for murder. A “foreword” by one
“John Ray Jr. Ph.D.” informs us that Humbert died “in legal captivity” after writing
this “Confession of a white Widowed Male” “a few days before his trial was scheduled
to start.” Humbert is a peculiarly knowing narrator. “I shall not exist if you do not
imagine me,” he tells the reader. Using a style both outrageously lyrical and
outrageously jokey, he is constantly teasing, eluding his audience. Undercutting
what might seem predictably valid responses, he plays on the whole literary history
of dubious antiheroes and duplicitous first-person protagonists from Diderot to
Dostoyevsky. “I am writing this under observation,” Humbert admits. Within the
narrative, this is literal, since he is in the psychiatric ward of the prison and his cell
has an observation window. But Humbert is additionally, acutely aware of being
under our observation as well. That helps make his story slippery, his character
protean, and his language radically, magically self-referential. Like all Nabokov’s
novels, but even more than most, Lolita is a verbal game, a maze – what one character
in Pale Fire christens a “lexical playfield.”
The lexical playfield belongs, of course, to the author eventually rather than the
narrator. It is Nabokov who discovers pleasure and difficulty in the complex web of
allusion and verbal play – “the magic of games,” as Humbert calls it – that constitutes
the text. There is, in any event, a distinct difference between the games of the narrator
and those of the author; or “Lolita” the confession and Lolita the novel. It is this.
Humbert remains so trapped in his words, the “signposts and tombstones” of his
story, that he does not realize he is using Lolita. Nabokov does. A great deal of
intercultural fun is derived from the contrast between the “old-world politeness” of
Humbert and what he perceives as the intriguing banality of America. This is an
international novel, in one of its dimensions, and it offers a riotously comic contrast
between different languages, different voices. The verbal hauteur of Humbert
(“You talk like a book, Dad,” Lolita tells him) collides, in particular, with the
unbuttoned slangy creativity that is a verbal element of the girl he pursues and
possesses (“Yessir! The Joe-Rea marital enigma is making yaps flap”). And that
collision has the dramatic advantage of allowing Lolita, as she is to herself, to escape
through the chinks of the narrative. “Lolita had been safely solipsized,” Humbert
claims, after he has used her as an unsuspecting aid to masturbatory fantasy. But he
does not really solipsize her, turn her as he puts it into “my own creation, another,
fanciful Lolita,” even for the period that he writes or we read the text. Perversely,
Nabokov once claimed that “one day a reappraiser will come and declare that I was
a rigid moralist kicking sin ... and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent,
and pride.” That reappraisal is clearly required here, for what we as readers witness
is Humbert committing the cardinal sin in the subjective idealistic moral lexicon:GGray_c05.indd 747ray_c 05 .indd 747 8 8/1/2011 7:31:43 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 43 PM