Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [67]
More attempts to "outsource" his flattering representation of himself take place during Humbert's last encounter with Lolita, when summoned by her unexpected letter he comes to visit her in "Coalmont," where she lives with her husband, "Dick Schiller." As Humbert sits on the divan in the Schillers' squalid parlor, we get a glimpse of him, presumably through Lolita's eyes:
She considered me as if grasping all at once the incredible—and somehow tedious, confusing and unnecessary—fact that the distant, elegant, slender, forty-year old valetudinarian in velvet coat sitting beside her had known and adored every pore and follicle of her pubescent body. (272)
Note the rhetorical sleight-of-hand promulgated by this passage. Both the reader and Lolita are ostensibly asked to grasp the "incredible . . . fact" that Humbert once knew and adored every pore of Lolita's body. While we obligingly consider this fact, weighing it this way and that, Humbert manages to slide by us as the casual given that Lolita perceives Humbert as "the distant [and] slender . . . valetudinarian." Now, this is indeed the image of himself that Humbert wants to cultivate on the last pages of his narrative: his purported elegance and slenderness would soon provide the most use
11: Nabokov's Lolita
ful contrast to the swinish appearance of Quilty whom Humbert murders. Similarly, the intimation of Humbert's failing health could garner extra sympathy for the murderer. However, when we look at this scene closely, there is no evidence at all that Lolita indeed sees Humbert as distant, slender, and ailing. Given, however, that our attention is distracted (for, remember, we are still busy "grasping" the incredible fact, etc.), we hardly pause to realize that we are presented with yet another fake source of our sympathetic image of Humbert.
Immediately after, Humbert brings up the same image again—now using as its source the mind of Lolita's husband and that of his friend, Bill, who enter the parlor and thus have to be introduced to Lolita's "dad": "The men looked at her fragile, frileux, diminutive, old-world, youngish but sickly, father in velvet coat and beige vest, maybe a viscount" (273). The representation of Humbert as a refined, vaguely aristocratic valetudinarian acquires more and more validity as it is presented to us as originating in three different minds (Lolita's, Dick's, and Bill's) almost simultaneously.
The novel closes with the protagonist feeling that his "slippery self [is] eluding [him], gliding into deeper and darker waters than [he cares] to probe" (309). Still, he is trying desperately to extort the last appealing image of that elusive self from the minds of his readers. Wishing to "make [Lolita] live in the minds of later generations," and thus "thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art," Humbert quietly upstages his "immortal love" in those notyet-born minds with his assertion that "this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita" (309). In other words, when future readers remember Humbert, they will not think of sexual enslavement, emotional abuse, rape, and murder; instead they will think of angels and of sonnets, and of the miraculous endurance of love and art. And the strangest thing about this last manipulative sentiment of Humbert's is that he is right—at least in so far as Lolita is considered to be "the only convincing love story of our century." (I am quoting