novel I’d whip off! From real life. Imagine this kind of thing: an old dog—but still in his prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness—gets to know a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl—you know what I mean—when nothing is formed yet, but already she has a way of walking that drives you out of your mind—a slip of a girl, very fair, pale, with blue under the eyes—and of course she doesn’t even look at the old goat. What to do? Well, not long thinking, he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down the three of them. Here you can go on indefinitely—the temptation, the eternal torment, the itch, the mad hopes. And the upshot—a miscalculation. Time flies, he gets older, she blossoms out—and not a sausage. Just walks by and scorches you with a look of contempt. Eh? D’you feel here a kind of Dostoevskian tragedy? That story, you see, happened to a great friend of mine, once upon a time in fairyland when old King Cole was a merry old soul.
The language of Lolita is as amazing in its way as the language of Ulysses or A Clockwork Orange. Nabokov has the same lexicographical itch as Joyce or Burgess, but because he learned Russian and English almost simultaneously in his privileged childhood, he likes to play the two languages off against each other. Like so many of the most original modern novelists, he started literary life as a poet. The poet, W. H. Auden says, has first to woo not his own muse but Dame Philology. Vladimir Nabokov wooed that mistress for years before surrendering to Lolita. The novel teems with loving lexicography, crystalline coinages, lavish listmaking—all the unmistakable symptoms of rapture of the word.
“Nymphet” was a Nabokovian coinage for this novel, as were the more obscure items “libidream,” “pederosis,” “nymphage,” and “puppy-bodies.” As with Ulysses, not a page fails to amaze; not a page fails to reward the most diligent rereading. (French critics pointed out that Ronsard had used the word “nymphette” to mean little nymph—a fact Nabokov knew—but he created an English term, which has stuck because we have no substitute to describe that feral girl-woman who drives the middle-age man mad.)
Lolita is a novel about obsession. It has this in common with Death in Venice, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Shakespeare’s sonnets, and even Portnoy’s Complaint. Impossible obsession fuels literature. Many writers are obsessed with obsession.
The subject was hardly a new one for Nabokov—though the form the obsession takes is new in this novel: nymphage. Luzhin in The Defense is obsessed with chess; Sebastian Knight in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight with literary immortality; Kinbote in Pale Fire with regaining his Zemblan kingdom; Herman in Despair with killing his double, Fyodor in The Gift with transcending time through literary creation. (One could continue the list through all Nabokov’s novels.)
In Speak, Memory, Nabokov’s autobiography, he terms himself a “chronophobiac” (another delicious invention), and to a great extent Lolita is a book about chronophobia every bit as much as Shakespeare’s sonnets are.
Humbert Humbert is in love with something that by definition cannot last. That prepubescent state he calls nymphage lasts from nine to thirteen, a fleeting four years, often less. The honey-hued shoulders, the budbreasts, the brownish fragrance of the bobby-soxed nymphet, are all destined to be abolished by the advent of womanhood—which Humbert despises every bit as much as he worships nymphage. Humbert’s dilemma puts the dilemma of all obsessional lovers in relief. He loves what he can never possess. Time rips it away from him even as he dreams of possessing it. No Elizabethan poet writing sonnets about gathering rosebuds while ye may could convey this better than Nabokov does with his nymphet.
So the villain here is time. And the dilemma is the dilemma of the human being who foresees his own death. It is
The language of Lolita is as amazing in its way as the language of Ulysses or A Clockwork Orange. Nabokov has the same lexicographical itch as Joyce or Burgess, but because he learned Russian and English almost simultaneously in his privileged childhood, he likes to play the two languages off against each other. Like so many of the most original modern novelists, he started literary life as a poet. The poet, W. H. Auden says, has first to woo not his own muse but Dame Philology. Vladimir Nabokov wooed that mistress for years before surrendering to Lolita. The novel teems with loving lexicography, crystalline coinages, lavish listmaking—all the unmistakable symptoms of rapture of the word.
“Nymphet” was a Nabokovian coinage for this novel, as were the more obscure items “libidream,” “pederosis,” “nymphage,” and “puppy-bodies.” As with Ulysses, not a page fails to amaze; not a page fails to reward the most diligent rereading. (French critics pointed out that Ronsard had used the word “nymphette” to mean little nymph—a fact Nabokov knew—but he created an English term, which has stuck because we have no substitute to describe that feral girl-woman who drives the middle-age man mad.)
Lolita is a novel about obsession. It has this in common with Death in Venice, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Shakespeare’s sonnets, and even Portnoy’s Complaint. Impossible obsession fuels literature. Many writers are obsessed with obsession.
The subject was hardly a new one for Nabokov—though the form the obsession takes is new in this novel: nymphage. Luzhin in The Defense is obsessed with chess; Sebastian Knight in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight with literary immortality; Kinbote in Pale Fire with regaining his Zemblan kingdom; Herman in Despair with killing his double, Fyodor in The Gift with transcending time through literary creation. (One could continue the list through all Nabokov’s novels.)
In Speak, Memory, Nabokov’s autobiography, he terms himself a “chronophobiac” (another delicious invention), and to a great extent Lolita is a book about chronophobia every bit as much as Shakespeare’s sonnets are.
Humbert Humbert is in love with something that by definition cannot last. That prepubescent state he calls nymphage lasts from nine to thirteen, a fleeting four years, often less. The honey-hued shoulders, the budbreasts, the brownish fragrance of the bobby-soxed nymphet, are all destined to be abolished by the advent of womanhood—which Humbert despises every bit as much as he worships nymphage. Humbert’s dilemma puts the dilemma of all obsessional lovers in relief. He loves what he can never possess. Time rips it away from him even as he dreams of possessing it. No Elizabethan poet writing sonnets about gathering rosebuds while ye may could convey this better than Nabokov does with his nymphet.
So the villain here is time. And the dilemma is the dilemma of the human being who foresees his own death. It is
Similar Books
