Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [19]
I want to emphasize once more that we were not Lolita, the Ayatollah was not Humbert and this republic was not what Humbert called his princedom by the sea. Lolita was not a critique of the Islamic Republic, but it went against the grain of all totalitarian perspectives.
Let us go to the part when Humbert arrives at Lolita’s summer camp to pick her up after her mother’s death, of which she knows nothing. This scene is the prelude to two years of captivity, during which the unwitting Lolita drifts from one motel to another with her guardian-lover:
“Let me retain for a moment that scene in all its trivial and fateful detail: hag Holmes writing out a receipt, scratching her head, pulling a drawer out of her desk, pouring change into my impatient palm, then neatly spreading a banknote over it with a bright ‘. . . and five!’; photographs of girl-children; some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall (’nature study’); the framed diploma of the camp’s dietitian; my trembling hands; a card produced by efficient Holmes with a report of Dolly Haze’s behavior for July (’fair to good; keen on swimming and boating’); a sound of trees and birds, and my pounding heart . . . I was standing with my back to the open door, and then I felt the blood rush to my head as I heard her respiration and voice behind me.”
Although this is not one of the more spectacular scenes in Lolita, it demonstrates Nabokov’s skill, and I believe it is at the heart of the novel. Nabokov called himself a painterly writer, and this scene gives a good indication of what he meant. The description is pregnant with the tension between what has gone on before (Charlotte’s discovery of Humbert’s treachery and their confrontation, leading to Charlotte’s fatal accident) and the knowledge of more terrible things to come. Through the juxtaposition of insignificant objects (a framed diploma, photographs of girl-children), ordinary transactions (“fair to good; keen on swimming and boating”) with personal feeling and emotions (“my impatient palm,” “my trembling hands,” “my pounding heart”), Nabokov foreshadows Humbert’s terrible deeds and Lolita’s orphaned future.
Ordinary objects in this seemingly descriptive scene are destabilized by emotions, revealing Humbert’s guilty secret. From now on, Humbert’s shiver and tremble will color every nuance of his narrative, imposing emotion onto landscape, time and incident, however seemingly marginal or insignificant. Did you, like my girls, feel that the evil implied in Humbert’s actions and emotions is all the more terrifying because he parades as a normal husband, normal stepfather, normal human being?
Then there is the butterfly—or is it a moth? Humbert’s inability to differentiate between the two, his indifference, implies a moral carelessness in other matters. This blind indifference echoes his callous attitude towards Charlotte’s dead son and Lolita’s nightly sobs. Those who tell us Lolita is a little vixen who deserved what she got should remember her nightly sobs in the arms of her rapist and jailer, because you see, as Humbert reminds us with a mixture of relish and pathos, “she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”
This came to mind when we were discussing in our class Humbert’s confiscation of Lolita’s life. The first thing that struck us in reading Lolita—in fact it was on the very first page—was how Lolita was given to us as Humbert’s creature. We only see her in passing glimpses. “What I had madly possessed,” he informs us, “was not she, but my own creation, another fanciful Lolita—perhaps, more real than Lolita . . . having no will, no consciousness—indeed no real life of her own.” Humbert pins Lolita by first naming her, a name that becomes the echo of his desires. There, on the very first page, he adumbrates her various names, names for different occasions, Lo, Lola and in his arms always Lolita. We are also informed of