• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 539 0

of his first intercourse with Lolita. This description is introduced by Humbert's claim that he is "not concerned with so-called 'sex' at all," but is inspired instead by a "greater endeavor": to "fix once and for all the perilous magic of nymphets" (134). What follows, however—and belies this claim of higher purpose—is a series of fragmented images highlighting Humbert's sexual "desire . . . and pleasure" as well as his "selfish violence and Dolores's pain."18 Attempting to convey what transpired between him and Lolita through an impressionistic mural that he (ever a creative soul) might have painted, Humbert conjures up a "catalogue of fragments"19 that includes, among other images, "a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child" (135). As Phelan argues,

through the very act of telling his story, the effort of perceiving and misperceiving himself and Dolores, [Humbert] is changing his relation to the story as well as to himself, to Dolores, and to his audience. . . . [During] the first intercourse, he has seen her wincing, stinging, and smarting, and

11: Nabokov's Lolita

during his two years with her, he has seen the kind of suffering that led to her sobs in the night, but during those years, he refused to let those sights affect his behavior. . . . The first time Humbert gives the account of the intercourse, he succeeds in keeping his eyes averted from Dolores's pain [hence his claim that he was not concerned about 'so-called sex']. But [as the images that follow suggest] the act of telling leads him to begin to face much of what he had previously turned away from. The more he allows himself to see, the less he can pursue his exoneration, and so the motive for his telling shifts.20

It shifts to Humbert's increasing willingness to condemn rather than exonerate himself. In contrast to the self-exonerating Humbert—the one who has forced us to see his version of events as coming from other sources throughout the novel—the self-condemning Humbert is a reliable narrator. And it is by following his text—by uncovering, that is, the parts of Lolita that can be traced to this Humbert—that we are able to reconstruct the true story of the relationship between the man and the girl.

Of course, this "present-tense" Humbert, who begins to face Lolita's suffering and thus may regain (at least some of) his readers' trust, does not totally break with the "past-tense" Humbert, who had refused to register those sufferings. Humbert still regularly "reverts to the kind of rationalization that [he] has engaged in before"21 to justify his abuse of Lolita. One important effect of such parallel narratives is, as Phelan observes, to make Humbert the narrator (i.e., "present-tense" Humbert) more sympathetic than Humbert the character (i.e., "past-tense" Humbert):

Nabokov uses this present-tense story and the technique of dual focalization to add a significant layer to the whole narrative: the ethical struggle of Humbert the narrator. The struggle, at the most general level, is about whether he will continue to justify and exonerate himself or shift to admitting his guilt and accepting his punishment. . . . [And this struggle] becomes a significant part of our interest, even as it becomes increasingly painful to see what he sees about his past behavior.22

Phelan believes that "the story of Humbert's gradual move toward greater clear-sightedness is a move toward greater reliability along the axis of evaluation" and that by "the end of the narrative he has stopped trying to hoodwink both himself and his audience and has instead confessed to his crimes against Dolores and condemned himself for them."23 If we indeed allow ourselves (for not all readers do) to trust the "presently

tense" Humbert, we can go back and reread the story looking for the early and not-so-obvious traces of that slowly and painfully emerging reliable narrator. It is then that we realize that the two different appeals to our source-tracking adaptations often do their insidious work