The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [242]
Lolita: The infantile anima
Humbert Humbert (with double echoes of `humbug') is another version of the divided hero, split between the outwardly respectable persona of the scholarly academic and the hidden fantasy self driven by his erotic, daydreaming obsession with pre-pubescent little girls. Lolita is one of the most celebrated instances in literature of the `infantile anima, an underdeveloped or in some way inadequate `other half' whose presence always shows that the hero is not fully a man and has an unresolved tie to the Mother.
Sure enough, no sooner has Humbert set eyes on Lolita, the supreme goal of all his dark daydreams, than two things follow. Firstly, in pursuit of his obsession, he marries her mother, who turns out to be the Dark Mother, an empty, silly, suffocating woman who, thanks to Humbert's callousness, is quickly and violently got out of the way. He has only married her as a front to his real goal; and, secondly, now that the way is clear, we see that Lolita herself is not an innocent young girl but a raging Temptress. Like all characters driven by an obsession, Humbert is fundamentally weak. All dark characters in stories are defined by some sort of obsession. This always shows that the hero is not fully a man, in control of himself, that some component of his personality, ego-centred but driven by an autonomous will of his own, is leading him by the nose, ruling his life. Equally, however often it is gratified, no obsession can ever reach a satisfactory resolution, because it is at odds with the framework of reality and the Self. Humbert's obsession with Lolita cannot possibly come to a lasting resolution. He cannot marry her because she is under-age and his stepdaughter; and even if she did one day come of age, she would have lost her charms for him.
We thus see how the treacherous, bewitching, egotistical little Lolita represents in the most frustrating possible way all the possible aspects of the dark feminine. She is simultaneously:
(a) the `infantile anima';
(b) the Temptress;
(c) in the background she is related to the Dark Mother;
(d) she is even that very rare figure in stories, the Dark Child, a child who promises not the hope of new life but only the frustration and denial of the forces of life.
As Humbert's obsession grows, so, heightening his frustration in a vicious spiral, does Lolita begin to slip away from him. She thus becomes in addition:
(e) the `elusive anima'.
Finally the only other figure of importance in the story begins to come mysteriously into view, Quilty, the Dark Rival, in the grip of exactly the same obsession as Humbert himself. The shadowy, menacing Quilty is a projection of Humbert's own fantasy self. And when, eventually driven mad by jealous loathing, Humbert tracks down and kills his Rival in a long drawn out frenzy of cold violence, he is in effect killing himself. He is arrested and shortly afterwards dies in prison of a heart attack.
In these four stories we have seen the range of goals the weak, tragic hero is after in his state of fantasy:
(1) for Macbeth and Faustus the emphasis is on their desire for power over others: the dark inversion of the masculine urge to sovereignty;
(2) for Humbert, as it later becomes for Faustus, it is on the urge