Barrie Karp's question at the end of
his message was: "What are the best and most convincing writings on how
Lolita is about love of America?" The more challenging issue, though,
is directed towards learning about Lolita's subjectivity, its invention -
a process that should be rather dissimilar from the development of
love of our country...
M.Roth wrote: Humbert "can
only 'enjoy in peace' his vicious circle of paradise if the real little girl he
is do desperately mistreating does not too violently interpose herself--and so
he decides to 'firmly ignore' her in favor of the 'phantasm' first formed on
this fateful Sunday [the davenport scene]" ( 72-73). I do not think it is
possible to know or to guess who the actual (fictional) Dolores Haze might be,
though we know that she is not the girl Humbert gives himself and, by extension,
us.
Jansy: While I'd been searching through
"Lolita" to find HH's reference about immortality ( I knew it
came in the last paragraph but...why not collect other informations on the way?)
I selected a bunch of quotations. I think they might be handy to us now,
but since I was not intent on using them here I don't know if I set them
down in the correct page sequence, nor from
where exactly they were extracted. The selection is not
exhaustive!
1. Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play
with!
2. I find it most difficult to express with adequate
force that flash, that shiver, that impact of passionate recognition. In the
course of the sun-shot moment that my glance slithered over the kneeling child
(...) while I passed by her in my adult disguise (...), the vacuum of my soul
managed to suck in every detail of her bright beauty, and these I checked
against the features of my dead bride. A little later, of course, she, this
nouvelle, this Lolita, my Lolita, was to eclipse completely her prototype. All I
want to stress is that my discovery of her was a fatal consequence of that
"princedom by the sea" in my tortured past. Everything between the two events
was but a series of gropings and blunders, and false rudiments of joy.
Everything they shared made one of them.
3. oh, that I were a lady
writer who could have her pose naked in a naked light! But instead I am lanky,
big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert(...) And neither is she the fragile
child of a feminine novel. What drives me insane is the twofold nature of this
nymphet of every nymphet, perhaps; this mixture in my Lolita of tender dreamy
childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity, stemming from the snub-nosed
cuteness of ads and magazine pictures, from the blurry pinkness of adolescent
maidservants in the Old Country (smelling of crushed daisies and sweat); and
from very young harlots disguised as children in provincial brothels; and then
again, all this gets mixed up with the exquisite stainless tenderness seeping
through the musk and the mud, through the dirt and the death, oh God, oh God.
And what is most singular is that she, this Lolita, my Lolita, has
individualized the writer's ancient lust, so that above and over everything
there is Lolita.
4. Or is it because I can imagine so well the rest of
the colorful classroom around my dolorous and hazy darling: Grace and her ripe
pimples; Ginny and her lagging leg ... And there she is there, lost in the
middle, gnawing a pencil, detested by teachers, all the boys' eyes on her hair
and neck, my Lolita.
As greater authors than I have put it: "Let readers
imagine" etc. On second thought, I may as well give those imaginations a kick in
the pants. I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she
would not be forever Lolita. She would be thirteen on January 1. In two years or
so she would cease being a nymphet and would turn into a "young girl," and then,
into a "college girl" that horror of horrors. The word "forever" referred only
to my own passion, to the eternal Lolita as reflected in my blood. The Lolita
whose iliac crests had not yet flared, the Lolita that today I could touch and
smell and hear and see, the Lolita of the strident voice and rich brown hair
of the bangs and the swirls and the sides and the curls at the back, and the
sticky hot neck, and the vulgar vocabulary "revolting," "super," "luscious,"
"goon," "drip" that Lolita, my Lolita, poor Catullus would lose forever. So
how could I afford not to see her for two months of summer insomnias? Two whole
months out of the two years of her remaining nymphage! Should I disguise myself
as a somber old-fashioned girl, gawky Mlle Humbert, and put up my tent on the
outskirts of Camp Q, in the hope that its russet nymphets would clamor: "Let us
adopt that deep-voiced D.P.," and drag the said, shyly smiling Berthe au Grand
Pied to their rustic hearth. Berthe will sleep with Dolores Haze!
5.It
would never do, would it, to have you fellows fall madly in love with my Lolita!
had I been a painter, had the management of The Enchanted Hunters lost its mind
one summer day and commissioned me to redecorate their dining room with murals
of my own making, this is what I might have thought up, let me list some
fragments:
There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in
flame-flower. There would have been nature studies a tiger pursuing a bird of
paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There
would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were,
by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of
onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel
up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have been all kinds of camp
activities on the part of the intermediate group, Canoeing, Coranting, Combing
Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban
Sunday. There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed
pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smearing pink, a sigh, a
wincing child.
6. Somewhere beyond Bill's shack ... there she was
with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and her
goose-flesh white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits, there she
was (my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at seventeen, with that baby, dreaming already
in her of becoming a big shot and retiring around 2020 A.D. and I looked and
looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more
than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else.
She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had
rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet
ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook,
and one last cricket in the crisp weeds... but thank God it was not that echo
alone that I worshipped. What I used to pamper among the tangled vines of my
heart, mon grand pκchι radieux, had dwindled to its essence: sterile and selfish
vice, all that I canceled and cursed. You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear
the court, but until I am gagged and half-throttled, I will shout my poor truth.
I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and
polluted, and big with another's child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed,
still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine... No matter, even if
those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack,
and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn even then I
would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the
mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita.
"Lolita," I said, "this
may be neither here nor there but I have to say it. Life is very short. From
here to that old car you know so well thee is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five
paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now.
Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after."
7. A couple of years before, under the guidance of
an intelligent French-speaking confessor, to whom, in a moment of metaphysical
curiosity, I had turned over a Protestant's drab atheism for an old-fashioned
popish cure, I had hoped to deduce from my sense of sin the existence of a
Supreme Being. On those frosty mornings in rime-laced Quebec, the good priest
worked on me with the finest tenderness and understanding. I am infinitely
obliged to him and the great Institution he represented. Alas, I was unable to
transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find,
whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my
Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to
me to me as I am now, today, with my heart and by beard, and my putrefaction
that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American
girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac,
unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing
for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of
articulate art. To quote an old poet:The moral sense in mortals is the duty/We
have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.
8. I have still other
smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain.
Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I
was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost
to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and
seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to
die than hear Milton Pinski, some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my
Lolita remarked:
"You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are
completely on your own"; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and
down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite
possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichιs, there was in her a garden and a
twilight, and a palace gate dim and adorable regions which happened to be
lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable
convulsions; for I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of
total evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss
something she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real healthy
sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, purified, analyzed, deified
Harold Haze, might have discussed an abstract idea, a painting, stippled
Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of genuine kind. Good
will! She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas
I, using for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that
set my own last teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such outbursts of
rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my poor, bruised
child.
I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was
despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t'aimais, je
t'aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know
it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller..
9. ...
neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book.... Be true to your Dick.
Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will
love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will
always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like
black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do
not pity C.Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to
exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the
minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of
durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only
immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.