Professor Amy
Hungerford: Last time I
finished up my lectures on
Wise Blood by trying to
draw together three different
ways of reading the novel into
one interpretative framework,
and what I ultimately argued
was that the New Critical formal
unity of the novel that is
epitomized,
I think (in a somewhat,
perhaps, heavy-handed way),
in Chapter 7 of the
novel--that's book-ended by the
symbol of the blinding white
cloud--that it's that unity,
in a sense, that replaces the
bodily unities that are always
blown apart in O'Connor's
fiction.
And, in a certain way,
what you see is a fiction that
is personified in that way,
that it takes on the qualities
and the values of the person,
and for O'Connor that means the
person understood in a religious
framework as something with
transcendent meaning and
transcendent value and,
indeed, a transcendent life.
There is a very different image
of the personified word in
Lolita, and I'm going to
refer now to an essay,
a 1992 essay,
by the British novelist Martin
Amis.
He compares the prose style in
Lolita with a
muscle-bound man,
a man whose body is bulked up
purely for aesthetic reasons,
for only the purpose of looking
a certain way,
that the bodybuilder is not
that person who's going to go
out and use their muscles to do
some job.
It is simply there to be looked
at, to be oiled up and presented
and displayed.
That's how Amos describes the
prose style of Lolita.
So, I want you to keep that
image in your mind.
The question of the
relationship between the person
and the aesthetic in Lolita
is going to be at the heart
of my overarching argument about
the novel.
Today, you're not going to
see much of that.
What I want to do today--since
we have three lectures on
Lolita--what I want to do
today is simply to begin to open
the text for you:
to give you some ways of
reading it;
to alert you to certain kinds
of questions;
to ask you some overarching
questions;
and also to just get you
thinking and into the texture of
the novel.
First, I want to ask you
though, what do you think of
this so far?
I just want to hear from you.
What are you responses?
Who really hates this novel so
far?
Anybody?
Yes.
Okay.
Why do you hate this novel?
Student:
I guess it's because of the
fact that he's doing something
that's really not good,
and it almost seems like he's
trivializing it.Professor
Amy Hungerford:
Uh huh.
What about it trivializes that
crime?Student:
I guess it's just that
there's no moral lens that we're
looking at it through.
It's just his view of the world.
Professor Amy
Hungerford: Uh huh.
Okay.
So, Humbert's lack of a moral
vocabulary to understand what
he's doing makes it seems like
it's trivialized.
Okay.
Other thoughts on this?
Who else is really put off by
this subject matter?
Even if you like the novel,
who else is really put off by
this?
Yes.Student:
I agree with her.
It's disturbing how much we
identify with Humbert,
how we're made to see the world
through his eyes,
and we kind of-- even I--grew
to like him a lot.
At least, the way he's
presented, he's a very likable
character.
And then, it's kind of like the
things that he does are kind of
on the side,
when you think about it in a
veryâ€¦.The whole telling
of the story is not objective at
all,
and when you think of it in an
objective sort of way,
it's a completely different
story.Professor Amy
Hungerford: Okay.
So, you're suggestion is that
what's so disturbing about this
is that we actually like this
guy;
we actually come to like
Humbert.
How many of you-- now,
I asked you this question about
O'Connor's characters--would you
like to sit down to dinner with
any of them?
Would you like to sit down to
dinner with Humbert?
(And I would say this knowing
that all of us are outside the
nymphet age range.) So,
given that, who would like to
sit down with Humbert and why?
Okay.
Yes, you.
Why?Student:
Well, simply because I
would argue that Humbert in fact
does have a moral vocabulary and
tells us how terrible the things
he's doing are.
And yet, you like him anyway,
and I think that's the power of
the novel, and that's why I
think he's such a
character.Professor Amy
Hungerford: Okay.
Do you think that Humbert
really believes that his actions
are terrible?
Do you believe him when he
says, "Oh, I was so ashamed.
I was so awful."
Do you believe
him?Student:
No.
Professor Amy
Hungerford: Oh,
you don't.
Okay.
All right.
Does anyone believe him?
Yes.Student:
Well, sometimes he brings
up these classic figures that,
he argues, would have the same
interest.
He mentions Virgil and Dante,
and it seems like the
desperation of bringing up such
grand figures makes me think
that he does have
doubts.Professor Amy
Hungerford: About what he's
doing.
Uh huh.
Uh huh.
So, the authority of the canon
that he invokes to defend
himself in fact suggests perhaps
that he has some doubts?
Yes.Student:
That's interesting.
I took those same references
the exact opposite way,
'cause I thought that
essentially he's referring to
the temporality of our moral
structure,
and how it's just this
arbitrary code which our society
has decided upon.
And, at one point in time,
he laments the end of the old
Latin world and the B.C.
world, when people could have
these child
slaves.Professor Amy
Hungerford: Right.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, this evidence is very
possible to see in diametrically
opposed ways,
and you're certainly not the
first two students that I've
seen have those two different
reactions to the same thing.
What else does this novel bring
out in you: what other thoughts,
what other responses?
Does anyone absolutely love
this novel?
Okay. Lots of you. Good. Why?
Who wants to tell me why?
Yes.Student:
The beauty of the language
and symmetry,
the sentence structure,
the word choice:
I guess going away from the
theme, more of just the
language.Professor Amy
Hungerford: Uh huh.
Okay.
The language,
yeah, absolutely.
Student:
Even more about the
language: it's not just that
it's beautiful.
It sort of draws attention to
the power of words,
because you've tried to ask us
whether or not we find him
sympathetic,
and I think in this book we're
sort of reminded of how words
can make us feel things and make
us believe things that are
repugnant to us,
and sort of mask--it sort of
takes the mask off literature
and shows us the way we are
convinced.Professor Amy
Hungerford: Okay.
"Takes the mask off literature."
I actually want to change that
around, if I might,
and play with that,
because that's a really useful
image for us:
"takes the mask off literature
and reminds us how we come to be
sympathetic or how we come to
think something."
Think back to Richard Wright,
who wants words to disappear,
to be completely transparent
and to leave you just with your
response.
In a certain way,
I would want to flip your image
around.
It's as if Nabokov allows us to
see the mask of
literature, to actually see it
there palpably doing its work,
so we can become self-aware of
how we respond.
But, how many of you didn't
experience it as understanding
why you were having that
response to Humbert,
but just having it?
Were any of you sort of
experiencing this more like
Wright wants us to experience
literature, to just have the
response?
Anyone really seduced?
Yes.Student:
Well, I found that,
while I might have found the
prose more or less
relentlessâ€¦it was very
difficult to escape into my own
reaction, and I was more or less
in his head.
Professor Amy
Hungerford: Okay.
Yes.
Do we ever escape from his head?
You're saying that you don't-
you didn't feel like you ever
could, in the world of this
prose.
This is going to be an
important question for us as we
think about what happens to
Lolita over the course of the
novel.
Do we ever escape from the
subjectivity of Humbert?
Is there any way to access the
subjectivity of Lolita herself?
So, this is one question you
want to ask yourself.
And, if there are moments when
something like Nabokov's voice
or point of view shades into
Humbert's,
what are those moments,
if you think there are some?
What are the moments when that
subjectivity,
the sort of prison of that
subjectivity,
wavers?
Where do you see those?
I'll leave that as a question
for you.
Well, let me give you a
little bit of background.
It's very helpful for me,
as I address you,
to think about what you're
seeing in the text,
and that helps me to think
about what I want to say to you.
So, before I get in to that,
let me just give you some
background.
Some of you probably know a
little bit about Nabokov's life.
He was born in 1899,
and his life,
to me, is fascinating because
he was one of the last
generation raised in the old
aristocratic chateau life of
Russia.
And it wasn't just a Russian
aristocracy;
it was really a very
cosmopolitan European
aristocracy.
He lived in the summers on a
country estate outside St.
Petersburg, in a beautiful
chateau.
And his uncle owned the chateau
down the road,
and actually left it to him
when he was a very young man.
So, he actually owned for a
short time this huge chateau,
and other relatives and friends
lived in estates surrounding
theirs.
It had huge parks as part of
its land, where he first learned
to hunt butterflies and mount
them.
And he became a serious
lepidopterist as he grew older,
and was very early in his life
passionate about collecting and
classifying butterflies.
In the winters he lived in the
city in a beautiful town house
in St.
Petersburg, and he attended
school only later in his life.
When he was young,
as was the custom,
he had tutors.
So he had a French tutor who
lived with the family for a long
time.
He had Russian and English
tutors that came in succession;
he had drawing masters and so
on, to cover the range of
education thought to be
appropriate to a young man of
his station.
His father was a democrat
in czarist Russia,
and he was quite a reformer.
At the time that the Bolsheviks
took over in 1919,
there was a brief window of
time prior to the family's
flight.
The family left Russia in 1919.
So, the revolution,
I think, starts in 1917.
And things are quite complex in
those early days,
so there's more than one
anti-czarist factor.
And his father was a democrat
but not a Bolshevik;
so, he was anti-czarist,
but he was not a Bolshevik.
His father wrote for
revolutionary newspapers,
and he continued to write and
publish a newspaper even as an
émigré.
He was assassinated in 1922 in
Europe on account of his
publishing activities.
Nabokov was very,
very fond of his parents.
He has these luminous,
luminous essays about his life
as a child in this sort of
perfectly intact aristocratic
world,
and in that picture his mother
and father loom very large and
in a very fond light.
Nearly invisible are his
siblings.
He had two brothers and two
sisters, and it's amazing,
when you read his memoirs,
how invisible they are.
This is one thing I find
striking about those memoirs,
but it's an interesting thing
to ponder as we think about
Lolita.
It's the image of a person
who is profoundly--at least in
his representation of
himself--profoundly occupied
with what's going on in his own
mind.
His parents were very much
absent from his growing-up life.
He spent a lot of time with his
nannies and tutors and nurses
when he was younger.
His parents would travel,
and his father was often away
in the city on political
business when they were in the
country.
So his parents loomed large:
but not so much as physical
figures, people he would
interact with in a daily sense,
but almost as icons,
or as figures of the
imagination, for him.
The real people he was,
sort of, with--certainly his
brother, Sergey,
who he was educated with (his
sisters were educated in a
different way and were somewhat
younger than him)--even Sergey
is sort of invisible to him.
He wrote literature in
Russian, novels in Russian,
when he was in Europe.
And then, when he moved to the
United States,
he began to write in English,
and took America as his adopted
land and English as his adopted
language.
English was a native language,
in a certain way,
because English was spoken in
his household all the time,
and he was trained by an
English governess as a young
child.
So, it's a language that goes
deep in his upbringing.
It's not really
analogous--well,
I'm not going to get in to
that--it's not analogous to,
say, Conrad,
who is Polish and learned
English.
And you can see the marks in
Conrad's fiction of his having
learned English and then,
it comes across as a sort of
clotted style in Conrad.
Some of the difficulty of
Conrad's style is the difficulty
of writing in this acquired
language.
Nabokov has none of
that.So, what I want to do
now is, with that background in
mind, I want to take this up and
just open up the first few
pages.
And I urge you not to neglect
the foreword by John Ray Jr.,
so I hope you read it,
the little italicized foreword.
And I want to focus especially
on pages 4 and 5.
Now, a foreword is of course
supposed to suggest how you
should read the text that's
coming.
And so, if we take it on in
that role, let's see what we
see.
I'm going to read a little bit
of this.
This is on page 4 and 5: 
For the benefit of
old-fashioned readers who wish
to follow the destinies of the
real people beyond the true
story,
a few details may be given,
as received from Mr.
Windmuller of Ramsdale,
who desires his identity
suppressed, so that the long
shadow of this sorry and sordid
business should not reach the
community to which he is proud
to belong.
His daughter,
Louise, is by now a college
sophomore.
Mona Dahl is a student in Paris.
Rita has recently married the
proprietor of a hotel in
Florida.
Mrs.
Richard F.
Schiller died in childbed
giving birth to a stillborn girl
on Christmas day in 1952 in
Graystar, a settlement in the
remotest Northwest.
Vivian Darkbloom has written a
biography, My Cue,
to be published shortly,
and critics who have perused
the manuscript call it her best
book.
The caretakers of the various
cemeteries involved report that
no ghosts walk.
First, let me point you to this
notation about Mrs.
Richard F.
Schiller.
I'm not going to tell you who
that is, but I want you to
figure it out.
Okay?
So make a note in your notebook.
By the end of the novel,
I would like you to know who
this is.
Vivian Darkbloom:
if you take those letters,
you can spell Vladimir Nabokov.
Vivian Darkbloom is one of
Nabokov's palindromic versions
of his name.
He inserts these even in his
autobiography,
by the way.
He attributes certain things to
Vivian Darkbloom and other kinds
of characters of such names.
So, here, you can't avoid the
sense that, even though this is
attributed to John Ray,
in fact there is some other
voice here, and it's a voice
that can't help but drop the
name of Vladimir Nabokov into
the prose.
So, right away,
in this moment of layered
narratives, a framed narrative
around another narrative,
there is a sort of instability
in the layers.
Where is Nabokov here?
There is also the question of
what kind of reader we are that
this preface brings up and sort
of puts in front of us.
Are we the kind of reader who
is interested in the real
persons?
Well, it gives the story that's
to follow that sense of being
true, because it suggests its
fictionality as a thin veneer
and that the real is something
that we can know about.
And I would suggest to you that
we can connect this with
Humbert's moment of wondering
what happens to the little girls
whose images he is excited by.
This is on page 21,
the beginning of chapter 6:
I have often wondered
what became of those nymphets
later in this wrought-iron world
of criss-cross cause and effect.
Could it be that the hidden
throb I stole from them did not
affect their future?
I had possessed her,
and she never knew it.
All right, but would it not
tell sometime later?
Had I not somehow tampered with
her fate by involving her image
in my voluptas?
Oh, it was and remains a source
of great and terrible
wonder.
Both Humbert and John Ray
suggest that the tissue between
the fictional,
between the imagination and the
real,
is very light:
that it can be pierced somehow,
that one can affect the other.
And I want to point you to a
kind of language that also
permeates between the preface
and the story proper.
And this is on page 5;
this is the middle paragraph: 
This commentator may be
excused for repeating what he
has stressed in his own books
and lectures,
namely that 'offensive' is
frequently a synonym for
'unusual,' and a great work of
art is,
of course, always original and
thus by its very nature should
come as a more or less shocking
surprise.
I have no intention to glorify
HH.
No doubt he is horrible.
He is abject.
He is a shining example of
moral leprosy,
a mixture of ferocity and
jocularity that betrays supreme
misery,
perhaps, but is not conducive
to attractiveness.
He is ponderously capricious.
Many of his casual opinions on
the people and scenery of this
country are ludicrous.
A desperate honesty that throbs
through his confession does not
absolve him from sins of
diabolical cunning.
He is abnormal.
He is not a gentleman.
But how magically his singing
violin can conjure up a
tendresse,
a compassion for Lolita that
makes us entranced with the book
while abhorring its
author.
Do you see that word "throbs"?
"A desperate honesty that
throbs through his confession."
"Throbs" is a word that Nabokov
brings out over and over again,
in multiple contexts,
always connected somehow with
this novel.
So, I'm going to ask you to
read the afterword,
"On a Book Entitled
Lolita." When you
read that,
you'll notice that the word
"throbs" comes back.
The first impulse to write this
novel is described as a throb.
The throb is of course
undeniably associated with
Humbert's rising desire in that
physical way,
and there is that emotionalized
version of that,
the throbbing heart of romantic
cliché.
It comes back and forth in his
memoirs too.
In Speak,
Memory that word appears.
It's interesting.
As the essays move
chronologically--they were
written over a period of
time--as the essays that were
written near Lolita come
into the book,
that word appears,
also, describing various
things.
It's as if that word really
embodies the feel of this novel,
and so, like "Vivian
Darkbloom,"
that word suggests the
permeability--not just of
fiction and the real--but of
these narrative layers.
Where is Nabokov?
And I think he's there in that
throb.
Now, I want to ask a
question that we're going to
need to think about,
and addresses the response
of--actually--the two of you
sitting up front here,
when I was asking you how you
responded to it.
Can we have a moral response to
this novel?
And what would that look like?
Well, John Ray asks us to,
and I want to just read part of
that language of morality that
he uses.
I'm going to start on 4,
and then I'm going to skip down
to the bottom of 5:
Viewed simply as a novel,
Lolita deals with
situations and emotions that
would remain exasperatingly
vague to the reader,
had their expression been
etiolated by means of
platitudinous evasions.
True: not a single obscene term
is to be found in the whole
work.
Indeed, the robust Philistine
who is conditioned by modern
conventions into accepting
without qualms a lavish array of
four-letter words in a banal
novel will be quite shocked by
their absence here.
If, however,
for this paradoxical prude's
comfort, an editor attempted to
dilute or omit scenes that a
certain type of mind might call
aphrodisiac [And then he makes
reference to the court case in
which Ulysses was ruled
not to be obscene in 1933],
one would have to forego the
publication of Lolita
altogether,
since those very scenes that
one might ineptly accuse of
sensuous existence of their own
are the most strictly functional
ones in the development of a
tragic tale tending unswervingly
to nothing less than a moral
apotheosis.
The cynic may say that
commercial pornography makes the
same claim.
The learned may counter by
asserting that HH's impassioned
confession is a tempest in a
test tube,
that at least 12% of American
adult males (a conservative
estimate according to Dr.
Blanche Schwarzmann,
verbal communication) enjoy
yearly in one way or another the
special experience of HH that HH
describes as such despair,
that, had our demented diarist
gone in the fateful summer of
1947 to a competent
psychopathologist,
there would have been no
disaster, but then,
neither would there have been
this book.
In this part,
he suggests the possibility of
the tale ending in a moral tale,
a moral apotheosis.
But that's grounded,
also, or hedged around by the
sense of psychiatry offering
other ways of understanding what
we think of as deviance.
But this is hard to take
seriously for a number of
reasons, not least the Dr.
Blanche Schwarzmann who is
referred to here.
It is, of course,
Dr.
"White Blackman," and it's
referring to the Kinsey Report,
the famous Kinsey Report on the
sexual habits of Americans.
It came out in the 1950s.
Dr.
Black Whiteman:
it suggests that these are
matters of the heart that have
been reduced to a
black-and-white set of
statistics,
and you feel the absurdity of
that 12%, that number,
appearing in that sentence
right here.
And I'm just going to skip down
to the bottom of 5 now:
As a case history,
Lolita will become no
doubt a classic in psychiatric
circles.
As a work of art it transcends
its expiatory aspects,
and still more important to us
than scientific significance and
literary worth is the ethical
impact the book should have on
the serious reader.
For, in this poignant personal
study, there lurks a general
lesson: the wayward child,
the egotistic mother,
the panting maniac.
These are not only vivid
characters in a unique story.
They warn us of dangerous
trends.
They point out potent evils.
Lolita should make all
of us--parents,
social workers,
educators--apply ourselves with
still greater vigilance and
vision to the task of bringing
up a better generation in a
safer world.
Well, aren't those ringing
words from John Ray?
Nabokov ensures that the very
idea of taking a moral lesson
from this novel is unavailable
to us because it's already been
ridiculed.
He not only makes us see the
psychiatric evasion of morality
as ridiculous,
as banal, as reductive,
reductive to the black and
white;
he ensures, too,
that the language of morality
is the language of
cliché.
The status of cliché
in this novel is one with which
we're going to have to struggle,
and I want to move in that
direction,
now, by turning to our first
hearing of Humbert's voice.
What can we say about Humbert's
style?
If John Ray's style is full of
certain kinds of clichés
that we can classify in the ways
that I have just done,
what about Humbert's style?
Where does it come from,
and why is it so enchanting?
So, let's just begin with that
first chapter,
the tiny chapter,
Chapter 1.
"Lolita, light of my life,
fire of my loins.
My sin, my soul.
Lo-li-ta.
The tip of the tongue taking a
trip of three steps down the
palate to tap at three on the
teeth: Lo-li-ta."
The first thing he does is make
us feel words in our bodies,
and especially in the mouth and
in the tongue,
in that very sensuous way.
So, that's the first thing that
his style does for us:
it makes us align ourselves--in
the way that some of you were
talking about earlier--not just
to identify our minds with the
point of view of this particular
person,
this particular character,
but actually to move your body,
and to feel something bodily
that he wants you to feel,
to share that sensuous
experience with him.
It's just the first little
temptation.
He wants to draw us into the
"special experience" that he
documents in his story:
She was Lo,
plain Lo, in the morning,
standing four feet ten in one
sock.
She was Lola in slacks.
She was Dolly at school.
She was Dolores on the dotted
line.
But in my arms she was always
Lolita.
Did she have a precursor?
She did.
Indeed she did.
In point of fact,
there might have been no Lolita
at all had I not loved one
summer a certain initial
girlchild in a princedom by the
sea.
Oh, when?
About as many years before
Lolita was born as my age was
that summer.
You can always count on a
murderer for a fancy prose
style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the
jury, exhibit number one is what
the seraphs--the misinformed
simple noble-winged
seraphs--envied.
Look at this tangle of
thorns.
I'm seduced.
Are you?
He's feeding us questions.
This is another thing to notice.
He's not just making us
experience Lolita's name the way
he does;
he's assuming that there are
certain kinds of questions that
we will ask.
"Did she have a precursor?"
Why is this the first question
that you would ask?
If someone was telling you this
story, is that the first
question you would ask?
So did she have a precursor?
No, probably not.
Okay.
Why?
Why does he want to plant this
question with us?
Well, he's working towards
something that he will also in
some ways backhandedly
discredit.
He's counting on us to analyze
him in somewhat Freudian terms.
So, even though he will make a
habit later on of playing with
psychiatrists--staying at
clinics extra weeks just to
bother the newcomers by giving
them made-up dreams and primal
scenes to read and
interpret--even though he's
going to do that,
he's still manipulating us,
because he knows how deeply
those kinds of exculpatory
narratives run with his
audience.
So, she had a precursor.
So what?
Does that make any difference?
Does that make any difference
to how we're to judge him?
And we are the judges:
"ladies and gentlemen of the
jury."
We are, in a way,
invited to judge,
even though he's begging us not
to at every moment.
So, it's a choice on
Nabokov's part to foreground the
question of judgment from moment
one,
and then for him to invoke
multiple kinds of exculpatory
narratives.
He's planting them in there for
us to find.
"Oh, when?"
In childhood.
By safely locating that
precursor in his own childhood
when, as he says,
he was her equal,
where there was no crime,
only a kind of infantile
passion that nobody would blame
him for,
he invites us to think of
Humbert as somehow still
retaining a kind of innocent
purity,
that that passion itself is the
innocent purity that flames at
the heart of childhood.
Then we get these allusions,
and if you have the annotated
Lolita or if you already
know Poe,
Annabel Lee is a famous
poem by Edgar Allan Poe,
and "the princedom by the sea"
is a feature of it.
And so, I'm going to read this
to you, and there's a reason why
I want to read the whole thing.
So, it'll just take a minute,
but here we go.
This is Annabel Lee:
It was many and many a
year ago,  In a kingdom by
the sea, That a maiden there
lived whom you may know  By
the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived
with no other thought  Than
to love and be loved by me.
She was a child and I was a
child,  In this kingdom by
the sea,But we loved with a
love that was more than
love-- I and my Annabel
Lee-- With a love that the
winged seraphs of Heaven 
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason
that, long ago,
 In this kingdom by the
sea, A wind blew out of a
cloud by night chilling my
Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn
kinsman came  And bore her
away from me,
To shut her up in a
sepulchre  In this kingdom
by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy
in heaven,  Went envying her
and me:Yes!
that was the reason (as all men
know,  In this kingdom by
the sea) That the wind came
out of a cloud,
chilling And killing my
Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by
far than the love  Of those
who were older than we--  Of
many far wiser than we-- And
neither the angels in heaven
above Nor the demons down
under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul
from the soul Of the
beautiful Annabel Lee:
For the moon never beams,
without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise
but I see the bright eyes 
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide,
I lie down by the side Of
my darling, my darling,
my life and my bride, In
her sepulchre there by the
sea-- In her tomb by the
side of the sea.
So, that's the whole poem.
Humbert is drawing on a
nineteenth-century Romantic
tradition that still has a
certain power.
You can hear that incantatory
voice of Poe's speaker in the
poem making this doomed love
into something aesthetic,
but it's also a kind of
cliché.
If John Ray works with the
clichés of psychiatry and
of social work and,
in a way, of
politics--progressive
politics--"bring up a better
generation for the future"--
Humbert has truck with the
clichés of the literary.
So, his is a vocabulary of very
high-born clichés.
It's interesting.
When you read Speak,
Memory, Nabokov's
autobiography,
he talks about his own
experiments with this kind of
poetry when he was young and
especially when he was beginning
to fall in love with girls that
he would meet around St.
Petersburg.
He represents them as
overheated attempts at
literature, as dripping with a
kind of excess,
romantic excess,
as essentially unable to do
more than repeat a tradition.
What Humbert has found,
and I guess Nabokov has given
him, in the Poe,
is not only that kind of
overheated Romantic poetic
referent;
he's also chosen,
of course, someone who married
a very, very young bride.
So, Poe, I think at the age of
about twenty or twenty one,
married his fourteen-year-old
cousin.
So, for that reason Poe becomes
a kind of model,
and he's the model in both
ways: both as a pedophile and as
someone who imagined himself and
his young love fully clothed in
the language of romance.
So, it's a kind of fairy tale.
Now the fairy tale language
that is invoked here,
"the princedom by the sea,"
is brought back for us vividly
in the scene where Humbert first
sees Lolita.
This is on page 39.
So, he's walking through the
house.
The "Haze woman" is giving him
his tour of the house:
I was still walking
behind Mrs.
Haze through the dining room
when, beyond it,
there came a sudden burst of
greenery.
"The piazza," sang out my
leader, and then without the
least warning a blue sea wave
swelled under my heart,
and from a mat in a pool of sun
half naked, kneeling,
turning about on her knees,
there was my Riviera love
peering at me over dark
sunglasses.
It was the same child,
the same frail,
honey-hued shoulders,
the same silky,
supple bare back,
the same chestnut head of hair.
A polka-dotted black kerchief
tied around her chest hid from
my aging ape eyes but not from
the gaze of young memory the
juvenile breasts I had fondled
one immortal day and,
as if I were the fairy tale
nurse of some little princess
lost, kidnapped,
discovered in gypsy rags
through which her nakedness
smiled at the king and his
hounds,
I recognized the tiny,
dark-brown mole on her side.
With awe and delight,
the king crying for joy,
the trumpets blaring,
the nurse drunk,
I saw again her lovely in-drawn
abdomen where my southbound
mouth had briefly paused and
those puerile hips on which I
had kissed the crenulated
imprint left by the band of her
shorts that last mad,
immortal day behind the Roches
Rose.
The twenty-five years I have
lived since then tapered to a
palpitating point and
vanished.
This is a remarkable passage to
me.
He occupies in this passage
every subject position of the
fairy tale: the nurse,
the hounds and the king.
He's the nurse recognizing the
beloved child.
He's the king after her,
and the hounds really
after her.
At the same time,
I think we feel the freshness
of this prose,
and we feel the humor of it,
the self-parody.
So, even though he is counting
on us to be seduced by the
romantic language,
that incantatory trance of
Annabel Lee,
there is a certain way in
which it's refreshed for us,
like when he says,
"The twenty-five years I have
lived since then tapered to a
palpitating point and vanished."
That is not from the fairy tale.
That's his own voice.
One thing that Nabokov
does--and I think this is
related to the way words like
"throb" and the layers of
fiction and reality,
how these things permeate into
different texts and different
layers of the story--he always
mixes originality with
cliché.
He mixes the bad with the good.
He has a real disdain for the
black and the white,
that sense of simplicity.
And so, you're going to
find--even at moments where I
think we're meant to understand
Humbert's prose as overwrought,
that muscle-bound man that Amis
talks about--you're also going
to find in those passages,
while you're being just brought
to the sense of parody,
just to the edge of what you
can tolerate in that vein,
you're going to get a sharp
sentence;
you're going to get a sharp
piece of very original prose
style.
This is part of Nabokov's
talent, is to manipulate you.
This is another way of
manipulating you,
is to make you see the
cliché
and then to draw back from it
to something that surprises you.
So, this is part of the
strategy.
And then watch what happens to
the prose style and the
difference in tone:
I find it most difficult
to express with adequate force
that flash, that shiver,
that impact of passionate
recognition.
In the course of the sun-shot
moment that my glance slithered
over the kneeling child,
her eyes blinking over those
stern, dark spectacles,
the little Herr Doktor who was
to cure me of all my aches,
while I passed by her in my
adult disguise,
a great, big,
handsome hunk of movieland
manhood,
the vacuum of my soul managed
to suck in every detail of her
bright beauty and these I
checked against the features of
my dead bride.
A little later of course she,
this nouvelle,
this Lolita,
my Lolita, was to eclipse
completely her prototype.
All I want to stress is that my
discovery of her was a fatal
consequence of that "princedom
by the sea" in my tortured
past.
And I think there's a reason
why there are quotations around
that princedom by the sea and
why it's Poe:
a fatal consequence--not just
of his early love for Annabel
Lee--but a consequence of the
poetry.
This is another kind of
defense: "the poetry made me do
it."
It's the romance that's being
offered in the poetry that lends
his life its course.
So, here the rationales for his
guilt, and our forgiveness of
it, begin to multiply.
Now, I want to draw back
from just being immersed in
those details of the text for a
minute to suggest to you that
this question of morality is
something that Nabokov
deliberately courts.
When Nabokov was an exile in
Europe, he spent a lot of time
composing chess problems.
These are setups of pieces on
the chess board that have
particular solutions.
And they're very complex,
and they have a kind of
aesthetic form to them.
And he would aim for certain
kinds of elegance in them.
He never wanted to have an
alternate solution.
He always wanted to have a
single kind of solution.
There are certain themes in
chess that refer to different
kinds of strategic movements
that he would bring out through
these little arrangements,
and he would spend inordinate
amounts of time organizing them.
Let me read to you how he
describes the action of setting
one of these things up:
It should be understood
that competition in chess
problems is not really between
white and black,
but between the composer and
the hypothetical solver.
Just as in a first-rate work of
fiction, the real clash is not
between the characters,
but between the author and the
world.
So that a great part of the
problem's value is due to the
number of tries,
delusive opening moves,
false scents,
specious lines of play,
astutely and lovingly prepared
to lead the would-be solver
astray.
But whatever I can say about
this matter of problem
composing, I do not seem to
convey sufficiently the ecstatic
core of the process and its
points of connection with
various other,
more overt and fruitful,
operations of the creative
mind: from the charting of
dangerous seas,
to the writing of one of those
incredible novels where the
author, in a fit of lucid
madness,
has set himself certain unique
rules that he observes,
certain nightmare obstacles
that he surmounts,
with the zest of a deity
building a live world from the
most unlikely ingredients--rocks
and carbon,
and blind throbbings.
Lolita is,
I think, for Nabokov,
a kind of chess problem.
The chess problem is:
how can Nabokov make us
identify with a pedophile?
How can he produce,
from these debased ingredients,
what Lionel Trilling called
it--and you have this blurb on
your back cover-- "the greatest
love story of our time"?
That's a question for you:
is it the greatest love story
of our time?
Was Lionel Trilling--a great
mid-century literary critic--was
he seduced by Humbert?
What would it mean to be the
greatest love story of our time?
But certainly Nabokov has in
mind the rhetoric of love
stories, the shape of love
stories,
and he's using those,
with all the skill he can
muster, to try to make us enter
in to the ecstasy that he
describes at the heart of this
kind of logical problem,
the setting up of this logical
problem.
So, in a way we are the solvers
of this problem for him;
we are the other half that
completes the aesthetic
experience;
we are there to participate in
it with him.
And, on the handout that I
have given you the world of
imagination and of the aesthetic
is very much on the surface of
this text.
And you can see it in lots of
ways, too, just in that little
bit of the first chapter that I
read to you, that sense of
fancy: "a fancy prose style."
So, you want to think of
"fancy" not just as a sort of
effeminate ornamentation,
but as that older-fashioned
sense of the word:
"the fancy," the imagination.
So, imagination is a privileged
realm for Nabokov,
and it is a realm that always
has about it that golden glow.
And as you read
Lolita, try to
notice how much light imagery
there is.
For Nabokov,
sunlight, goldenness--all those
midges, the golden midges,
the downy golden hair on
Lolita's limbs,
her tawny skin--all of that
goldenness is very much of a
piece with the world of
imagination.
So, it's as if imagination
makes everything glitter,
and its color is that of the
most aesthetic of metals,
of gold.
So, keep these things in mind
as you read, and in the next
couple of lectures you'll see
more of the development of
argument about the book,
but I hope this gets you
started.
