A&H.Bouazza, write
about HH's “Lolita was safely solipsized,” considering that this
"neologism implies that outside of Humbert’s will Lolita has no consciousness of
her own... [she was his] 'own creation, another , fanciful
Lolita – perhaps more real than Lolita'. Philosophically speaking,
this is the exact opposite of solipsism!" The " 'epiphany' above the small
mining town" may be disregarded, "because Brian Boyd has already shown how
deceptive it is." In
conclusion: "The question that preoccupied Nabokov remains: crime and art.
Humbert is a pedophile and a murderer, but is he also an artist? We encounter
the same theme in Despair and Laughter in the Dark. Is mastery of the word also
the word’s mercy?"
JM: In "Lolita,"
Humbert's feels that his mind has been split in two because,
although "taboos strangulated" him, there were those
psychoanalysts who "wooed me with pseudoliberations of
pseudolibidoes. The fact that to me the only object of amorous tremor were
sisters of Annabel's, her handmaids and girl-pages, appeared to me at times as a
forerunner of insanity." However,
inspite of a sort of post-modernist dismissal of an "arc of the
character," there is no denying that HH's words sound true when he recognizes
that, if it cannot be proven 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."
HH's flash of sanity doesn't last
long, since Nabokov is far too sane to stake his beliefs in this kind
of "arc," or in his mastery of the word, outside the realm of his
articulate art ( ie, he was not a solipsist and he is the
artist).*
...........................................................................
* Ian McEwan's "Atonement" has the
narrator, Briony, express the most undivided and extreme form of "artistic
solipsism," that surprises the reader with a double turn of authorial
intervention...