Of Pickaninnies and Nymphets: Race in Lolita - Project MUSE

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6 Nabokov Studiesredoubling his efforts to enjoy the categorizing power of the WASPishethnic elite typified by the Hazes, the Farlows, and the management of TheEnchanted Hunters? If so, it would certainly go a long way in explaining whyhe postures as a supercilious master to the black bellhop’s Uncle Tom, anaffect that would seem fitting indeed to those tourists who might toss theirpennies to pickaninnies. That Humbert has positioned himself as discriminatorrather than discriminatee is evident as Uncle Tom is reduced to asynecdochic wanting black hand: “I was tempted to place a five-dollar bill inthat sepia palm, but thought the largesse might be misconstrued, so I placeda quarter” (119). Humbert’s swelling near-beneficence is predicated uponthe bellhop’s only being Uncle Tom, an imagined type that allows him tosavor the powerful position of seeing Uncle Tom’s “sepia palm” with avision as backward-looking and sepia-washed as the guidebook’s version ofNew Orleans.The “Uncle Tom” label given to the “hunchbacked and hoary Negro”is a significant descriptive detail because it draws the reader’s attentionback to that oft-quoted moment when “Lolita had been safely solipsized”(60). This pronouncement comes after Humbert has ejaculated in hispajama bottoms after (unknowing?) Dolores fidgets in his lap. The selfcongratulatorystance is among the novel’s most disturbingly self-deluded:“The child knew nothing. I had done nothing to her. And nothing preventedme from repeating a performance that affected her as little as if she were aphotographic image rippling upon a screen and I a humble hunchbackabusing myself in the dark” (62). Aside from being one of the many examplesof Humbert’s desire to enjoy Lolita as a purely aesthetic object, this passageassociates Humbert Humbert the “humble hunchback” with the “hunchbackedand hoary” Uncle Tom—the point seems to be that for all Humbert’sbigoted posturing, Nabokov wants to cast his narrator’s crimes in terms ofthe racist superiority that produces aesthetic categories such as “Uncle Tom.”The specific image of Humbert the humble hunchback “abusing himselfin the dark” is key to understanding Lolita’s racial politics, for the veil ofdarkness Humbert’s solipsism brings down on the world is tinged with racialawareness.The notion of a Lolita projected visually onto a movie screen reminds oneof the pickaninnies and Uncle Tom, which are categories reinforced as muchby popular films as they are by guidebooks. Thus when Humbert indulges inhis lyrical descriptions of the strange and seductive minutiae of postwarAmerica, he turns to film cliché to help him articulate. In the South heencounters: “Ante-bellum homes with iron-trellis balconies and hand-workedstairs, the kind down which movie ladies with sun-kissed shoulders run in
Race in Lolita 7rich Technicolor, holding up the fronts of their flounced skirts with bothlittle hands in that special way, and the devoted Negress shaking her head onthe upper landing” (156). Technicolor in real-life American films and inHumbert’s imagined reel of Lolita insists on distinctions between blacknessand whiteness that will grow murkier as Humbert desperately tries tostrengthen his mastery over Dolores. 12 The presence of the maternal, “devotedNegress” is yet another example of worn stock characters Humbert so keenlyidentifies in the kitschy culture Dolores adores—types the novel suggests aremore than a little complicit in perpetuating dangerous aesthetic types. 13To understand why Humbert’s engagement with American racism is sooften a visual one, let us recall that John Farlow’s remark about Leslie—lastname Tomson, not incidentally—occurs in the context of Jean’s being anamateur member of the “old school of painting” (82). After Humbert hasraped Dolores for the first time, painting is again an occasion for him to museabout his vision of the world:Had I been a painter, had the management of The Enchanted Hunterslost its mind one summer day and commissioned me to redecorate theirdining room with murals of my own making, this is what I might havethought up, let me list some fragments: […] There would have been asultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his moldingcaress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx.There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow thattravel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have been allkinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group, Canoeing,Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would havebeen poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fireopal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab ofcolor, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child. (134–35)It is hardly surprising that Humbert’s aesthetic should reflect his totalitarianview of Lolita; when something like Charlotte’s “arty middle class” decor isreplaced by something like Humbert’s ideal world, a tormented master must12. Humbert’s other discussions of film have been much remarked on; seeLolita 170–71 for his dismissal of “musicals, underworlders, westerners”(170). Jon Thompson discusses passages such as this in the context of anargument about Lolita’s relationship to European travel writing (156).13. Lolita’s third hunchback makes an appearance at the Wace post office,where Humbert runs into a “hunchback sweeping the floor” (223). Early onHumbert refers to himself as “round-backed Herr Humbert coming with hisCentral-European trunks” (56).
Page 1 and 2: Nabokov Studies 9 (2005)STEVEN BELL
Page 3 and 4: Race in Lolita 3“Miss Opposite”
Page 5: Race in Lolita 5Although this encou
Page 9 and 10: Race in Lolita 9gliding through sum
Page 11 and 12: Race in Lolita 11world-view stainin
Page 13 and 14: Race in Lolita 13declares “She ha
Page 15 and 16: Race in Lolita 15even a world as ae
Page 17: Race in Lolita 17Phelan, James. Liv

Of Pickaninnies and Nymphets: Race in Lolita - Project MUSE

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