''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

-
114
-
by Lolita's reports of the various "diversions" (135)
practised by her friends in the summer camp. Lolita
herself is no exception, and the moment at which
Humbert discovers this is one of the most grotesque
in the whole book.
At some stage, on his signing out of the sanatorium
in which he has so successfully fooled the doctors,
"precise fate, that synchronizing phantom" (102), deliberately
seems to take over and arrange things for
Humbert. Instead-of allowing him to take rooms in the
McCoo household as he had planned, it starts a fire
in this very house so that he has to change his plans.
It spares him the disappointment of the little McCoo
girl whom he had imagined as a lovely nymphet and
whom "I would coach in French and fondle in Humbertish"
(37). It deposits him instead in the very garden
where, "in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning
about on her knees" (40), he finds Lolita.
Nor does fate stop halfway but works on his behalf
again somewhat later. From the moment he moves into
the Haze household, there begins for him a time of
such intense frustration and agony that he begins to
fear another breakdown, for Lolita, so near and an
"intolerable temptation" (48), is of course unattainable.
Checked in his desires by her mother's presence
and, 'he protests, his own consideration for the child's
chastity and moral (56,62), he has to content himself
with a few blissful moments when Lolita "co-operatively"
allows him to kiss "her fluttering eyelid"
(44-45), to hold and stroke and squeeze her hand (51),