. Spinning .

A quickie–

We find that indeed, Lolita has been deflowered prior to Humbert’s groping, and she in fact is the one who, after a painfully frustrating night for Humbert, seduces him.

But onto hypertextual:  This novel with its high-falutin’ words and in particular, it’s multitude of French phrases and words interspersed with Humbert’s narrative, would be an ideal candidate for hyperlinks that give meaning or translation.  I’ve given up on dictionary digging for the English translations entirely–although I must say that in looking up phrases it has to a minute degree allowed me to recognize some words as they later show up in the text.

Closing the novel to open the dictionary–or to go online for the French language–is distracting.  Making notes and checking a list of words at a time is not as effective to the reading comprehension.  Footnotes, I would think, would be useful but how not to insult the reader on the English definitions?

With Nabokov’s love of language, it is often easy to guess at the meaning by its relevance to the sentence.  But here we are truly using the reader’s experience and intuition to progress the story. 

So then, what is the answer to the reading?

This book is not comfortable reading and I’m trying to decide whether it’s the topic or if it’s the skill with which it involves the reader into this topic.

The idea of a forty-plus year-old man lusting after a twelve year-old does not as deeply disturb me for its own sake for several reasons.  First, as yet there is no action in the desire.  That I must take into consideration that the bias is a cultural taboo, and one that has changed through the centuries.  Physiologically, most young girls are able to bear children with the beginning of the menses, normally around age eleven.  Where environment and conditions warranted, girls were married at age twelve and that was acceptable.  Also, we must remember, that it was often to very much older men–seldom if ever to a boy their own age.  Even in modern day America there are girls of eleven and twelve who willingly engage in sexual activity.

Sex itself is an enigma in that it is both described as wrong and right depending only upon conditions that according to some standards need exist to sway its meaning one way or the other.

But Nabokov’s Humbert is deeply disturbing for other reasons.  Primarily, because he is the first person narrator of his story, and his attitude is more upsetting then his desires themselves.  His plan is to drug both Lolita and her mother (before this poor woman is unfortunately killed in a car accident) to make them not only compliant, but rather oblivious to his physical satisfying of his needs and wants.  And, he speaks not of penetration but more of fondling, and in some way that’s yuckier because it’s more weird somehow.

Another thing that disturbs me quite a bit is Humbert’s seemingly overblown obsession with Lolita.  It reminds me of Sarrasine’s torturous passion for La Zambinella, as well as many other doomed heroes and heroines of early Romantic literature.  It revulses the reader who sees it as pathetic and weak.  Nabokov’s use of language is brilliant, and his technique of weaving in colors of humor and pathos and adventure in such a planning of pacing make it good reading, but the relationship between Humbert and the reader is almost too intimately fastened.  Perhaps that is where the level of comfort feels rubbed raw.

Strange thoughts tonight about reading the enduring novels, the best loved, the most progressive, the products of writers who excelled in language use and the audacity to write an oft-told tale in a new way to find a path that curdles through the reader’s mind to leave new understandings.  And to read them back to back, to take from one to give to another; each then being changed.

Nabokov makes us uncomfortable with Humbert Humbert, yet we must read on.  Kittenish Lolita hasn’t developed yet–as a woman or as a character and maybe we look to Humbert to bring her out.  But what are we thinking?  Can we be cheering him on?  What evil within us rallies behind him? 

Does man learn and change, or do we adjust as a society, so that there is no place to reach that hasn’t always been there.  Just a different path.  And if nothing truly changes, if perfection for mankind is not a reality and never will be, why would there be a heaven to which a soul would strive?  Perhaps there is nothing.  It just happens over and over again to different people.  The history of mankind may be the longest running play on the stage of earth with the dramatic touches of different directors, new actors.

I am asking questions of myself, of Nabokov, and even more so lately, of whoever or whatever it is we call God.

Since I haven’t quite had the head to put into Barthes’ S/Z, I only have scanned the codes he outlines but in reading Nabokov’s Lolita, I’m wondering if these little things I’m picking out are part of the readerly theory.

I was already lying upon my cold bed both hands pressing to my face Lolita’s fragrant ghost when I heard my indefatigable landlady creeping stealthily up to my door to whisper through it–(…)

Has she already been initiated by mother nature to the Mystery of the Menarche?  (…) "Mr. Uterus (I quote from a girls’ magazine) starts to build a thick soft wall on the chance that a possible baby may have to be bedded down there."  The tiny madman in his padded cell. (p. 47)

I see either a fantasy figure of the baby, or Humbert in the prison of his room while "life" lies outside of it, in Lolita.

This one’s a bit too obvious, from a dream of Humbert’s:

Sometimes I attempt to kill in my dreams.  But do you know what happens?  For instance I hold a gun.  For instance I aim at a bland, quietly interested enemy.  Oh, I press the trigger all right, but one bullet after another feebly drops on the floor from the sheepish muzzle.  (p. 47)

This is a bit more questionable:

Lo came in and after pottering around, became interested in the nightmare curlicues I had penned on a sheet of paper.  Oh no:  they were not the outcome of a bellelettrist’s inspired pause between two paragraphs; they were the hideous hieroglyphics (which she could not decipher) of my fatal lust.  (p. 48)

Humbert keeps a diary of his days with Lolita and of his desire for her.  His use of "hieroglyphics" may go beyond the physical cramped writing he uses, perhaps hinting of ancient secrets and likening that to his own.

Her adorable profile, parted lips, arm hair were some three inches from my bared eyetooth and I felt the heat of her limbs through her rough tomboy clothes. (p. 48)

"Bared eyetooth" indicates the hunger of a predatory animal.  There could be little mistaking this reference.

And how does Nabokov’s prose manipulate the reader?  There is a romance to the language, it is certainly not crude and yet the subject most certainly is.  Would we be more offended if the descriptions included more vulgar terms–we’re certainly used to them, although America of 1955 was not.  Does the language hide the vulgarity, the devil–which Humbert, in the use of "nymphet" alludes to as those certain young girls that have this power over him–being cloaked in the innocent "rough tomboy clothes" of his prey?