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Lolita 95
wed together for the rest of their lives. Most importantly, of course,
Humbert is a pedophile, and Nabokov is most certainly not.
A careful reading of Lolita demonstrates the underlying ethical
soundness of the work and its author. The novel moves increasingly
away from the narrator’s pathetic efforts at moral justification, and
attentive readers, even if inexperienced, come to realize that Nabokov
and Humbert are totally different entities. Anyone who reads Lolita
attentively from cover to cover is going to realize that the author does
not agree with, or even much like, his main character. In his preface
to the English translation of another novel, Despair, Nabokov speaks
of “the rhetorical venom I injected into the narrator’s tone” in Lolita,
and unambiguously describes Humbert as a “neurotic scoundrel”
(“Foreword” 9).
Well, then, if Lolita isn’t a dirty book, and Nabokov is not a
sex maniac, is Humbert Humbert a pervert? This is another valuable
question. It invites us to consider Shakespeare’s words in A
Midsummer-Night’s Dream: “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are
of imagination all compact” (5.1.7–8). Questions about Humbert’s
morality are considerably less naïve than those about Nabokov’s, and
do not admit glib answers. Humbert certainly claims he is a poet and
a lover. Sometimes he also seems to see himself as a madman. In the
remark cited earlier, Humbert compares “sex offenders” to “poets.”
How can that be? This question takes us to the heart of Lolita, and to
much of Nabokov’s work.
Throughout most of this novel, Humbert Humbert does not so
much love, nor lust after Dolores Haze: his passion is for his idea of
this girl. He certainly seeks to possess her physically, but the “her” here
is not so much the actually flesh and blood kid as the fantasy of childhood
sexuality that he has grafted unto her. It is not that Humbert
finds his lover; it is that he creates her.
This is actually clear to Humbert himself. Soon after moving into
the home of Charlotte and Dolores, Humbert has a one-sided sexual
encounter with his Lolita. This occurs when, in a rather grotesque
parody of fatherly affection, she is sitting in his lap and he is singing
to her, both are fully clothed, and he manages to achieve a sexual
climax without her knowing it. At this point, he declares, tellingly,
“Lolita had been safely solipsized.” “Solipsism” is the philosophy that
only the self can be known, only the self is real. Humbert only truly
possesses Dolores when he makes of her a figment of his own fevered