Lolita

[R.F. Schiller]

Resurrecting a fairly old thread, but I want to bring some new discussion to my favourite novel. My question is that do you think Humbert Humbert truly regretted his actions at the end of the novel (some go even further to say that Humbert truly loved Lolita at the end of the novel), or was he still playing his manipulative games?

Reasons Why He Did:

- If we take him strictly by his word
- He returns thousands of dollars to Dolores Haze during their last encounter without any stipulations
- Humbert hears a chorus of children singing and laughing at play leading him to conclude that --> "...and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord."


Reasons Why He Did Not:

- Humbert is naturally an incredibly unreliable narrator who has manipulated us previously, why would he be genuine now?
- Humbert has repeatedly lied to many, many characters - Charlotte, the Farlowes; he also feigned madness to psychiatrists just to mess with them
- Humbert is writing his memoir understanding that he will be evaluated morally ("Gentlemen and Gentlewomen of the Jury!") and is thus trying to make himself look better
- Right after Humbert has his last encounter with Lolita and laments the error of his ways, he returns to Ramsdale and appears to show more questionable behaviour towards young girls:

"All at once I noticed that from the lawn I had mown a golden-skinned, brown-haired nymphet of nine or ten, in white shorts, was looking at me with wild fascination in her large blue-black eyes. I said something pleasant to her, meaning no harm, an old-world compliment, what nice eyes you have, but she retreated in haste and the music stopped abruptly, and a violent-looking dark man, glistening with sweat, came out and glared at me."

I personally was convinced Humbert was still his manipulative self at the end until I read Nabokov's Russian novel Despair (1934) which he later revised and translated in 1965. Despair involves a supposedly mad, unreliable narrator as well, Hermann, who sees a lot of doubling and eventually commits heinous crimes as well; it has been called a precursor to Lolita. In the Introduction to the English version, Nabokov writes:

"Hermann and Humbert are alike only in the sense that two dragons painted by the same artist at different periods of his life resemble each other. Both are neurotic scoundrels, yet there is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year; but Hell shall never parole Hermann."


This leads me to think that Nabokov intended Humbert to be read as a repenting character as he claims that "there is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year; but Hell shall never parole Hermann".

What do others think?

[PeterL]

You really should have started a new thread for this.

But it is my opinion that Humbert was more delusional than anything else. He is a completely unreliable narrator, so we don't know what actually happened, and everything could have happened in his mind.

[R.F. Schiller]

You really should have started a new thread for this.

But it is my opinion that Humbert was more delusional than anything else. He is a completely unreliable narrator, so we don't know what actually happened, and everything could have happened in his mind.

Yeah, but there are degrees of being delusional and it's always been a hotly debated topic among scholars to whether Humbert legitimately regretted his actions or was continuing his manipulative play. I thought the Nabokov quote from Despair was an example of how he tried to control this interpretation but w/e.

[PeterL]

Yeah, but there are degrees of being delusional and it's always been a hotly debated topic among scholars to whether Humbert legitimately regretted his actions or was continuing his manipulative play. I thought the Nabokov quote from Despair was an example of how he tried to control this interpretation but w/e.

There are people who are willing to argue whether blue of green is a better color, but doesn't make the discussion valid or useful. I wonder if those "scholars" ever figured out the difference between fiction and non-fiction.

It is my opinion that Nabokov told the story that he meant to tell, and left it open enough that people could discuss it to their hearts' content. Keep in mind that Nabokov was a professor of literature whose main course was on Ulysses, including the interpretation of Bloom's wandering.

[mona amon]

Resurrecting a fairly old thread, but I want to bring some new discussion to my favourite novel. My question is that do you think Humbert Humbert truly regretted his actions at the end of the novel (some go even further to say that Humbert truly loved Lolita at the end of the novel), or was he still playing his manipulative games?

Reasons Why He Did:

- If we take him strictly by his word
- He returns thousands of dollars to Dolores Haze during their last encounter without any stipulations
- Humbert hears a chorus of children singing and laughing at play leading him to conclude that --> "...and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord."


Reasons Why He Did Not:

- Humbert is naturally an incredibly unreliable narrator who has manipulated us previously, why would he be genuine now?
- Humbert has repeatedly lied to many, many characters - Charlotte, the Farlowes; he also feigned madness to psychiatrists just to mess with them
- Humbert is writing his memoir understanding that he will be evaluated morally ("Gentlemen and Gentlewomen of the Jury!") and is thus trying to make himself look better
- Right after Humbert has his last encounter with Lolita and laments the error of his ways, he returns to Ramsdale and appears to show more questionable behaviour towards young girls:

"All at once I noticed that from the lawn I had mown a golden-skinned, brown-haired nymphet of nine or ten, in white shorts, was looking at me with wild fascination in her large blue-black eyes. I said something pleasant to her, meaning no harm, an old-world compliment, what nice eyes you have, but she retreated in haste and the music stopped abruptly, and a violent-looking dark man, glistening with sweat, came out and glared at me."

I personally was convinced Humbert was still his manipulative self at the end until I read Nabokov's Russian novel Despair (1934) which he later revised and translated in 1965. Despair involves a supposedly mad, unreliable narrator as well, Hermann, who sees a lot of doubling and eventually commits heinous crimes as well; it has been called a precursor to Lolita. In the Introduction to the English version, Nabokov writes:

"Hermann and Humbert are alike only in the sense that two dragons painted by the same artist at different periods of his life resemble each other. Both are neurotic scoundrels, yet there is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year; but Hell shall never parole Hermann."


This leads me to think that Nabokov intended Humbert to be read as a repenting character as he claims that "there is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year; but Hell shall never parole Hermann".

What do others think?

It's been a while since I read Lolita, but I didn't get the feeling that HH tries to deliberately manipulate the reader. It is a highly subjective account of what goes on in his twisted mind and he's so poetic, witty and self-deprecating that many readers, especially first time readers, are charmed into sympathizing with him, but the hints are all there for the anyone who reads between the lines - the girl is no irresistible super-seductive Nymphet. Above all, she is not 'Lolita'. She is a normal twelve year-old girl by the name of Dolores Haze, and it is only in the narrator's twisted mind that she undergoes her demonic transformation. What I'm trying to say is, HH gives us the facts as well as his subjective viewpoint. It is up to us whether we get manipulated or not.

As for regret, he never at any point felt his actions were justified, so in a way he was always regretful, but as long as the girl was with him, the obsessive nature of his love and overpowering lust for her overcome his conscience, and he becomes her tyrant. It is only when she leaves him that he is able to reflect on his actions in a more objective way.

[RecoveringScot]

I personally was convinced Humbert was still his manipulative self at the end until I read Nabokov's Russian novel Despair (1934) which he later revised and translated in 1965. Despair involves a supposedly mad, unreliable narrator as well, Hermann, who sees a lot of doubling and eventually commits heinous crimes as well; it has been called a precursor to Lolita. In the Introduction to the English version, Nabokov writes:

"Hermann and Humbert are alike only in the sense that two dragons painted by the same artist at different periods of his life resemble each other. Both are neurotic scoundrels, yet there is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year; but Hell shall never parole Hermann."


This leads me to think that Nabokov intended Humbert to be read as a repenting character as he claims that "there is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year; but Hell shall never parole Hermann".

What do others think?

Hi folks, My first post. so be gentle with me.

I think Nabokov was (again) wrongfooting the hopeful interpreter in this last quote you gave.

Re-read the quote, and ask yourself 'How can there be time in Paradise?' Humbert is obviously in Paradise, I would say.

I've always noted a jarring thing in the very first words that Humbert writes:

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul."

Notice that in this first incantation Humbert alliterates the first phrase describing Lolita, and the concluding sentence. However his alliteration deserts him when he claims that sexual power that Lolita allegedly has over him. Why? It's a kind of stumble. It's his first untruth. Such a literary genius as Humbert could surely have found a suitable phrase (I've invented some mediocre ones myself today). What we are then left with if we delete that phrase is this:

"Light of my life. My sin, my soul."

Doesn't this sound more like a sort of religious affirmation than anything sexual? (I note you used the word 'repent' which is religious in origin).

Humbert's tale, as told by him, is a lie, in one sense, from start to finish. But it's also true in another way, and doesn't resemble the everyday 'bare facts' which is the story without his 'interpretation'. I have my views on this, but they're still at the 'nymph' stage at the moment, and I don't know if they'll grow wings and fly. Surely Humbert is a butterfly, and as Nabokov mentions in 'Speak, Memory' the adult butterfly evades its enemies through the means of 'enchantment and deception' and displays an 'aesthetic beauty'. But Humbert will fly and wander down that green lane in Paradise most certainly, if I'm right.

Nabokov's estimation of 'The Metamorphosis' of Kafka (one of the greatest works of the 20th C he said) is very interesting to me, as Gregor Samsa and Humbert are sort of related. Both are imprisoned for one thing, though in apparently different ways. So is Hermann, but he'll never get 'parole'. That again is very suggestive of a particular 'spiritual' interpretation to me.
Think gnostic.

[R.F. Schiller]

Hi folks, My first post. so be gentle with me.

I think Nabokov was (again) wrongfooting the hopeful interpreter in this last quote you gave.

Re-read the quote, and ask yourself 'How can there be time in Paradise?' Humbert is obviously in Paradise, I would say.

I've always noted a jarring thing in the very first words that Humbert writes:

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul."

Notice that in this first incantation Humbert alliterates the first phrase describing Lolita, and the concluding sentence. However his alliteration deserts him when he claims that sexual power that Lolita allegedly has over him. Why? It's a kind of stumble. It's his first untruth. Such a literary genius as Humbert could surely have found a suitable phrase (I've invented some mediocre ones myself today). What we are then left with if we delete that phrase is this:

"Light of my life. My sin, my soul."

Doesn't this sound more like a sort of religious affirmation than anything sexual? (I note you used the word 'repent' which is religious in origin).

Humbert's tale, as told by him, is a lie, in one sense, from start to finish. But it's also true in another way, and doesn't resemble the everyday 'bare facts' which is the story without his 'interpretation'. I have my views on this, but they're still at the 'nymph' stage at the moment, and I don't know if they'll grow wings and fly. Surely Humbert is a butterfly, and as Nabokov mentions in 'Speak, Memory' the adult butterfly evades its enemies through the means of 'enchantment and deception' and displays an 'aesthetic beauty'. But Humbert will fly and wander down that green lane in Paradise most certainly, if I'm right.


Nabokov's estimation of 'The Metamorphosis' of Kafka (one of the greatest works of the 20th C he said) is very interesting to me, as Gregor Samsa and Humbert are sort of related. Both are imprisoned for one thing, though in apparently different ways. So is Hermann, but he'll never get 'parole'. That again is very suggestive of a particular 'spiritual' interpretation to me.
Think gnostic.

First of all, thanks for your opinion. This was the kind of response I was looking for several months ago, when I wrote my post. I re-read the quote, and I'm quite convinced that Nabokov is implying that Humbert is in Hell with Hermann but is allowed to leave Hell and enter Paradise once a year, not that Humbert is in Paradise. I believe he is alluding to mythology (there is actually a story in Chinese Mythology that is very similar and I'm guessing there is an equivalent in the West). Also, why can't there be time in Hell/Paradise? Nabokov did not believe in time altogether, although his fiction was very precise in dating. However, I've read many, many interview of Nabokov, mostly from Strong Opinions, and it's not inconceivable that he is deliberately misleading his reader. It wouldn't be the first, nor the last. I'm not sure what you're really getting at with the bit after that, so I won't comment. However, Nabokov was an agnostic who had little care for religion (looked through his letters/interviews and he never mentions it at all), so I'm not sure a spiritual reading would be effective here.

I highly disagree with your penultimate point of characterizing Humbert as a butterfly. I believe it is Lolita who Nabokov characterizes as a butterfly - I actually wrote a paper for my undergraduate class last year on this and there is a similar essay in the Garland Companion to Nabokov. If you think about the word "nymphet" it alludes to the word "nymph" which is the juvenile form of the butterfly. You're right about the similarities in Speak, Memory, but once again, it seems to associate Lolita with butterflies and not Humbert (who is more in-line with Nabokov himself). The descriptions of Nabokov in the open grass enjoying the butterflies around him are very, very similar to Humbert "enjoying" Lolita. In some sentences, you could literally replace the word "butterfly" with "little girl" and the passage from Speak, Memory would sound like it was from Lolita. If anything, Humbert is associated with spiders, which is a natural predator of butterflies. From Lolita:

"I am like one of those
inflated pale spiders you see in old gardens. Sitting in the middle of a
luminous web and giving little jerks to this or that strand. My web
is spread all over the house as I listen from my chair where I sit like a
wily wizard. Is Lo in her room? Gently I tug on the silk."

Again, later on:

"My arms and legs were
convex surfaces between which--rather than upon which--I slowly progressed
by some neutral means of locomotion: Humbert the Wounded Spider."

[JCamilo]

just a note, one could easily argue, that in the sentence, life conects to fire and loins to sin (not to mention to Lolita and soul). The tale still a lie from first line...

[R.F. Schiller]

just a note, one could easily argue, that in the sentence, life conects to fire and loins to sin (not to mention to Lolita and soul). The tale still a lie from first line...

Interesting... I've always assumed that "light of my life" was referring to the angelic and heavenly while "fire of my loins" was referring to sin and hell. Duality is a prominent theme in the novel and Lolita herself is characterized both ways, as Humbert wonders about "the nature of this twofold nymphet". He sometimes describes her as akin to an angel, yet othertimes as a demonness. On one hand, his love for her has given him new life, yet it has also condemned him to hell.

[JCamilo]

well, I didn't mean as conected by the meaning, but about RecoveringScot suggesting that 'fire of my loins" could be removed due the lack of alliteration, so we could interpret the sentence because of this. My idea is that "fire of my loins" actually links "Light of my life" to "my sin, my soul", because the "alliteration" is there still. In fact "my loins" seems to be an almagam of "my sin, my soul".

You are probally right about Lolita duality in the sentence, I would add that there is a strong "air" element in the sentence, or at least something ephemeral (light, loins, soul), so we may be seeing a reference to her, perhaps even stages of the nymph transformation. Or perhaps it was just a cleaver way to start a book

[RecoveringScot]

First of all, thanks for your opinion. This was the kind of response I was looking for several months ago, when I wrote my post. I re-read the quote, and I'm quite convinced that Nabokov is implying that Humbert is in Hell with Hermann but is allowed to leave Hell and enter Paradise once a year, not that Humbert is in Paradise. I believe he is alluding to mythology (there is actually a story in Chinese Mythology that is very similar and I'm guessing there is an equivalent in the West). Also, why can't there be time in Hell/Paradise? Nabokov did not believe in time altogether, although his fiction was very precise in dating. However, I've read many, many interview of Nabokov, mostly from Strong Opinions, and it's not inconceivable that he is deliberately misleading his reader. It wouldn't be the first, nor the last. I'm not sure what you're really getting at with the bit after that, so I won't comment. However, Nabokov was an agnostic who had little care for religion (looked through his letters/interviews and he never mentions it at all), so I'm not sure a spiritual reading would be effective here.

I highly disagree with your penultimate point of characterizing Humbert as a butterfly. I believe it is Lolita who Nabokov characterizes as a butterfly - I actually wrote a paper for my undergraduate class last year on this and there is a similar essay in the Garland Companion to Nabokov. If you think about the word "nymphet" it alludes to the word "nymph" which is the juvenile form of the butterfly. You're right about the similarities in Speak, Memory, but once again, it seems to associate Lolita with butterflies and not Humbert (who is more in-line with Nabokov himself). The descriptions of Nabokov in the open grass enjoying the butterflies around him are very, very similar to Humbert "enjoying" Lolita. In some sentences, you could literally replace the word "butterfly" with "little girl" and the passage from Speak, Memory would sound like it was from Lolita. If anything, Humbert is associated with spiders, which is a natural predator of butterflies. From Lolita:

"I am like one of those
inflated pale spiders you see in old gardens. Sitting in the middle of a
luminous web and giving little jerks to this or that strand. My web
is spread all over the house as I listen from my chair where I sit like a
wily wizard. Is Lo in her room? Gently I tug on the silk."

Again, later on:

"My arms and legs were
convex surfaces between which--rather than upon which--I slowly progressed
by some neutral means of locomotion: Humbert the Wounded Spider."

But there you go believing Humbert again. Everything Humbert says is loaded, loaded in a particular way. He's telling you a very simple story dressed up under so much multi-layered and multi-functioned camouflage - and that for a very particular reason.

In the gnostic belief the physical world is a prison (an alternative reading of the 'fall from Paradise'). The soul of humans is held in the grip of evil spirits who attempt to prevent the soul from reaching paradise for eternity. However in Gnostic beliefs what the soul has to do to reach Paradise is to fool the evil spirits into thinking it is still captive while escaping their clutches.

The layers of Humberts story represent this in three ways.

1. The basic story of the realm of the physical and death, Humbert, Charlotte and Dolly Haze. All are implicated in the realm of death - the book is full of dead children, including Dolly's sibling, and many other dead children e.g. Annabel Leigh and the son of the Kasbeam barber, and Dolly's own baby. Living only in the physical brings death. Note how all the people (many parodic grotesques) who are involved with Dolly are all concerned with trapping her in wordly concerns - conventional 'good' behaviour (Charlotte), marriage and kids (Shirley Holmes), mechanical physical sexual behaviour (Quilty), marriage (Dick Schiller) cupidity (advertisers).

2. Humbert's parody mythological realm - the 'princedom by the sea' which nonetheless intimates the truth about Layer 3, but deceptively.

3. Reality for Humbert. Eternity in Paradise as his soul, "Lolita"

The process by which Humbert negotiates his way from 1 to 3 is enchantment (his descriptions of the paradisal, cliched and metaphorical of course by necessity - Paradise as a garden, a 'kingdom', the spiritual actors as fairytale analogues, Kings, Queens, Knaves, flunkeys etc.) and deception (the tale-telling method he uses, his 'camouflage').

The timing of Humbert's narrative is crucial in understanding what's happening. To evade the 'Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury' (the wordly spirits) he has to get them to believe that, far from being destined for heaven he's one of them. Lustful, carnal, jealous, revengeful, a controlling 'spider' with his hoped-for prey. His joke, in asking for 35 years for rape, is that he has already served that 'sentence' in the physical world. Since his tale has to end with his death and release from the evil of 'worldly reality' he tells it and dies before any judgment (it's no accident that Dolly Haze, Humbert and Quilty all die in 1952 - in my view at the same instant - but I think only Humbert escapes the world). Humbert is cousin to the girl in 1001 Nights (read: an eternity) who has to tell tales to evade the evil ruler's plan for her 'death' (she can be read as an analogue to Humbert).

This parabolic telling of a truth in the guise of deceptive fiction is expressed by a previous religious figure as follows:

"And he said unto them, Unto you is given the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all things are done in parables: that seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest haply they should turn again, and it should be forgiven them."
(Gospel of Mark Ch.4 vv.11-12)

We have to always remember that Nabokov was a Russian, of an aristocratic Orthodox background. In the 19C gnostic ideas had flourished in literary circles, particulary aristocratic ones, thanks to people like Mme. Blavatsky. Gnosticism was always more popular in the Eastern Christian environment than the Western, which was mainly Catholic then Protestant ('creation is good'). Impetus to this renascence of Eastern beliefs had been given by the translation of eastern religious texts in the early 19C (Upanishads etc.) and the discovery of Gnostic gospels at Oxyrhynchus in the late 19C. These ideas were very influential. Some of Kafka's aphorisms show similarities to distinct gnostic ideas (the world as prison, the physical world as the domain of evil). In ancient Gnostic thought sexual revulsion (nothing to do with everyday 'morality') was a consequence of the view of material, physical reality as a trap for the soul (therefore procreation and sexual desire were the instruments of the evil spirits of the world who used them to hold the soul in the world - too much attachment to the physical was the problem). The soul was 'bewitched' and 'trapped' by being in thrall to sexual desire.

Now there are clear signs that Humbert, despite his protestations of carnal lust towards the female sex, was actually not what he claimed to be. His relations with homosexuals like Gaston Godin, and the 'Uranists' in the 'Deux Magots' in Paris suggest, not necessarily that he was homosexual, but that he might be asexual or 'denatured' in some way, hence his 'pedophlia' (note that Dolly is pre-pubescent, i.e. not in herself distinctively 'female' or to be distinguished from similarly-aged 'asexual' young boys except by trivial physical indicators). Notice also that at a crucial moment in the plot, just before he goes to rescue Lolita and shoot Dick Schiller, whom he thinks is his persecuting enemy, he shaves his beard and his chest (!), and dresses in silk. The denaturing of the sexual characteristics is typical of gnosticism (some early Gnostics castrated themselves). Many of the authors that come and go by allusion in Lolita are sexually odd or ambivalent: Poe, Proust, Wilde ('Hi Melmoth, thanks a lot, old fellow'), Petrarch, Housman, Shakespeare, Dante. Kafka, whom Nabokov admired, was sexually tormented and suffered revulsions at 'normal' male-female relationships and never achieved one. One of my favourites bits in Lolita is when a ('queerly observant') friend of Dolly's says to Humbert that he'd never seen a man actually wearing a smoking-jacket before, except in films, where it is frequently associated with sexually odd characters (Noel Coward being a particularly well-known example). Now I'm not suggesting Nabokov intended Humbert to be a straight one-to-one 'Freudian' version of himself in worldly terms, but that Humbert is cueing (no pun intended, or is there?) us to Nabokov's best side and by extension ours, with his discernment and advocacy of the eternal and beautiful under the dying and dead physical unreality of life.

Now, quite by accident, after my initial post I have discovered (only last night) that my original suspicion that Nabokov was in fact a 'gnostic' of a sort (perhaps not directly Christian) turns out to be not only my idea. The proposition is advanced in a book by V. E. Alexandrov "Nabokov's Otherworld" (Princeton UP). I have not read it, but look forward to doing so.

[axolotl]

i really liked lolita! but now i'm feeling pretty disturbed.