Dead Folks in Lolita

--The sentiment that "no ghosts walk" in the beginning of the book is meant to say that all characters who play a part in the story are no longer dwelling amongst the living in a visceral sense; though, this is not entirely true, as those characters are kept alive and technically amongst the living by their place in this story, which will likely be read by many to come.
--Humbert is dead when this story is being read. We know this because John Jay Jr. says in the foreword that "'Humbert Humbert,' [the author of Lolita], had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16th, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start" (3).
--Lolita herself is dead. John Jay Jr. also graces us with this information in the foreword, saying "Mrs. 'Richard F Schiller' died in childbed giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest" (5).
--Annabel, the initial object of Humbert's love, died four months after their attempt at consummation, of a disease called "typhus in Corfu" (13).
--Charlotte is dead. Though her death scene is described on page 98 ("...the top of her head a porridge of bone, brains, bronze hair and blood"), the first time that Humbert declares that she is dead is when he says to Lolita, "your mother is dead" (141).
--Valeria and Maximovich are dead. Valeria's death is confirmed when Humbert hears the news that "Mrs. Maximovich nee Zborovski had died in childbirth around 1945" (30). Maximovich himself has died, or so it seems, as result of "a year-long experiment...[that] dealt with human and racial reactions to a diet of bananas and dates in a constant position on all fours" (30).
--Quilty is killed in the last few pages of the book, when Humbert chases him upstairs in his house and shoots him several times. His death scene: "Quilty of all people had managed to crawl out onto the landing, and there we could see him, flapping and heaving, and then subsiding, forever this time, in a purple heap" (305).
--Humbert's mother is dead. "My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three" (10).
--Humbert's aunt Sybil is dead. "Aunt Sybil had punk-rimmed azure eyes and a waxen complexion. She said she knew she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, and did" (10).
--Finally, Charlotte's first husband is dead, of course. This is what leaves Charlotte vulnerable and prone to falling completely in love with weird old Humbert (other than his charming European habits and manners).

There are surely other characters who are dead. This could be a long project.

Humbert's Skewed Account: Episodes in Justification

The first most prominent instance of Humbert's cycle of justification comes in the dialogue between him and Lolita immediately after they leave the camp. Because this account of those crucial moments comes from Humbert, it is hard to interpret the words which Lolita speaks as wholly true. The things she says to Humbert do not exactly seem consistent in the voice of a thirteen year old girl--in one instance, she says "When did you fall for my mummy?"; in the next, she is telling Humbert she has been "revoltingly unfaithful to [him]...because [he's] stopped caring for [her]" (112). The language takes on a much more mature tone--there is something of Humbert's sophisticated sarcasm in the tone, which leads me to believe that Humbet has altered her dialogue to make Lo seem to be on a level plane with his intent psychological bent on their relationship. She even goes on to say that she "is sort of fond of [Humbert]" (115). This, of course, should make the reader a bit suspicious...

The play of dialogue to justify comes in again on 119, starting with another one of Humbert's (seemingly always out of place) speeches: "Look here, Lo. Let's settle this once for all. For all practical purposes I am your father. I have a feeling of great tenderness for you. In your mother's absence I am responsible for your welfare. We are not rich, and while we travel, we shall be obliged--we shall be thrown a good deal together. Two people sharing one room, inevitably enter into a kind--how shall I say--a kind--"; Lo cuts him off with "The word is incest," where as she walks giggling in and out of the hotel room closet.

There is a great deal that can be said about this passage--for one, again, Humbert intrudes his account of his narrative with a moralistic-sounding speech which he writes as spoken dialogue, rather than describing the situation at hand. Because he is the one writing the account, and the account's purpose is to sway a jury, we are to assume he is taking full liberty of writing out what he said with selective and often manipulative memory. Though this piece is fiction, we get a definite sense that Humbert is materizliaing a lot of the details of this story as he writes it in jail, perhaps not always as they actually occurred. Second, the justifications for their close-quartered room is obviously questionable--as an audience who knows Humbert's intentions, his justification of his and Lo's small room as a result of not being rich is very doubtful, but he says it anyway in an effort to construct another moralistic passage which may catch the inattentive observer offguard and perhaps sway their poor opinions of him. The third and final most prominent feature of this dialogue is the way Humbert writes Lo in--as an intrusive interrupter of his modest, fatherly speech. She cuts him off and he depicts her giggling, as if taunting him or purposely aggravating him. As Amy had pointed out in today's post, and what I think is very true, is the way Humbert begins to depict Lo as someone who is negatively affecting him--its a big part of his justification. This passage is a key shift in our perception of Lo, as per how Humbert illustrates her, and I think it is important to pay attention to how that shifts our sentiments about Humbert--how it may lend, even slightly, to the dissent of our opinions and an eventual justification of his actions.

Creating Comfort: Humbert's Anxious Search for Justification

As the joyriding continues, Humbert still constantly creates situations in his mind which justify his keeping Lolita captive. One passage which particularly stuck out to me is the long-winded explanation Humbert gives to Lolita about their relationship. Though the sole purpose of this speech, in Humbert's conscious mind, is to "terror[ize] Lo" into not forming any opinion of her own, it becomes so extensive that one is left to question whether Humbert is not also going on this tangent to instill confidence in himself. He goes on and on about how he "want[s] to protect [Lo]...from all the horrors that happen to little girls in coal sheds and alley ways"; how he, as both sexual partner and father, wants to keep Lolita from the horrors of the outside (and in H.H.'s mind, presumably, "vulgar") world. This is obviously delusion--if Humbert thinks he is really protecting Lolita from anything except for forces which may empower and sway her from his grasp, he is most certainly spraying this nonsense for himself more than for Lo. He wants to be confident that he really is, in no way, in the wrong. On the following page (150), Humbert goes on to state "I am not a criminal sexual psychopath taking indecent liberties with a child." Has Dolores ever stopped and accused him of being a "sexual psychopath?" Maybe so, but her voice concerning for that subject is, for the most part, left completely out of the text, and so this statement rings more as self-confidence inducing blather. H.H. keeps with this lengthy monologue, stopping for more unnecessary statements--"I am your daddum, Lo"--along the way, though he will soon start citing justification from a book about the behavior of "normal girls," whom he assures Lolita that she is one of. Humbert reads to Lo from the book: "Among Sicilians sexual relations between a father and his daughter are accepted as a matter of course, and the girl who participates in such relationship is not looked upon with disapproval by the society of which she is part," following this with "I'm a great admirer of Sicilians" (150). Since when has Humbert mentioned Sicilians as a source of inspiration? Of admiration? Of anything? He absorbs facts from books, out of his own anxiety, and perceives them to ring true because they provide some logical justification to his actions. The close reader can see, then, that Humbert is not telling Lolita all of this to instill any confidence in the situation in her--it is  more or less for himself. Why else would he "advise" a thirteen year old not "to consider [her]self [his] cross-country slave," or declare conclusively (but not concluding his speech) "I am your father, and I am speaking English, and I love you?" These declarative occurrences appear so often in H.H.'s effort to "terrorize" Lo that it seems, in reality, he is trying to calm his anxieties with self-justification.

I think I may follow Humbert's patterns of justification to the book's conclusion, eventually developing my observations into a more precise essay topic.

H.H. in Ramsdale

Humbert Humbert's reasons for staying in a sleepy New England town, as he says in the text revolve around a slowing of pace--"I cast around for some place in the New England countryside or sleepy small town (elms, white church) where I could spend a studious summer subsisting on a compact boxful of notes I had accumulated and bathing in some nearby lake" (35). This makes some sense, as he thinks the outdoors "promise [him] some reflief"--he goes on an expedition with a doctor-friend before checking out of the sanatorium and finding his way to Ramsdale, and a "sleepy New England town" promises some sort of outdoors-y attraction and activities (33). However, as soon as he learns there is a twelve year old girl who resides at the McCoo's, the family he is to stay with, his mind largely fleets from thoughts of rural relaxation and is set on secretly "fondling her in Humbertish" (35).
So though Humbert's primary reason of picking a sleepy rural place to reside is his sudden desire to return to his studious ways, Nabokov's may be a bit different. I think there is some relation to this choosing of the setting to the sorts of people who will reside there--"middle class [Americans] in the '50s," as you say, Robin. Sleepy New England is precisely the place to find single mothers with wild-child daughters; a place where many women are, as Humbert describes, "those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or a bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality"--the northeast in the 1950's was surely a hot-bed for convention. Nabokov chose Ramsdale as the setting because small towns are so set on their own history and convention--placing a man like Humbert in the middle of small town American tradition may not seem like deep enough of a rift at first, but his arrogance and cynicism are something that directly conflict with the warmth the idea "American tradition" presents. The story's place in Ramsdale is also important because it is a place where a pedophile can lay low--a place where, as long H.H. keeps up appearances, there will be a miniscule amount of suspicion.

H.H. plays the role of millenial pop-star Shaggy: "It Wasn't Me"

Humbert is a character who will inevitably try to justify his attraction to Dolores. Though at the basest level it is against the law, but it is also a "sickness" which the public will ostracize any active participant of. Humbert is in (or would be in, if he had not died in jail) a position which requires him to make some kind of social appeal to the jury as to not be proven guilty. His explanations require logic, whimsy, and other traits which will trigger human empathy in those looking on. His attempts at triggering such empathy are various.
For one, he attempts to produce an empathy in the jury through sad recollection, in the passage on page 15, reminiscing on the "flurry of pale repetitive scraps" that was his youth. He tells the tale of his indirection as a student as if it is a tragedy worthy of public mourning--that, though his studies "were meticulous and intense," he was eventually plagued by "a peculiar exhaustion"; one which hindered him in some sort from pursuing his education to the fullest extent. Of course, in the bigger picture of human life, it may not come as a surprise that a young adult pursuing a college degree found themselves questioning their interests and motives, but Humbert talks of this time in such a way that the audience is made to think it is a great misfortune and he is at some kind of disadvantage because of it.
H.H. also attempts to create logic by explaining the rules of his attraction in a step-by-step fashion. The passage listed from pages 17-18 is a prime example of this: Humbert explains that "there must be a gap of several years, never less than ten ... generally thirty or forty, and as many as ninety in a few known cases, between maiden and man to enable the latter to come under a nymphet's spell." Of course, this is ridiculous--that there is a certain age boundary which the offender in a pedophilic relationship must adhere to in order for that relationship to be considered a nymphetic seduction; of course, it is just made up in Humbert's head to justify his actions to himself and to those looking on, but H.H. explains his attraction in such a precise and finite way--explaining more deeply that "it is...a certain distance that the inner eye thrills to surmount, and a certain contrast that the mind perceives" that triggers an attraction to a "nymphet"--that the reader, the jury, and the general bystander is likely to say "Well, maybe there is a science to his 'sickness.'"
One last passage that I found in which Humbert tries to justify his actions occurs when he meets Mr. McCoo on page 36 and learns that his house has burnt down:

"No, since the only reason for my coming had vanished, the aforesaid arrangement seemed preposterous...I was angry, disappointed and bored, but being a polite European, could not refuse to be sent off to Lawn Street in that funeral car, feeling that otherwise McCoo would devise an even more elaborate means of getting rid of me... I tipped the chauffer and hoped he would immediately drive away so that I might double back unnoticed to my hotel and bag; but the man merely crossed to the other side of the street where an old lady was calling to him from her porch. What could I do?"

Here, Humbert tries to appeal to the audience in a way which might not be expected: that he was stuck in a trap of unfortunate coincidence, a situation in which his manners conflicted with his real feeling and motives, forcing him to accept the offer of staying with the Hazes rather than going on his own way. One might be pretty suspicious that Humbert still had in mind that figure of an adolescent whom he wished to "fondle in Humbertish" (35) when he decided to stick around and see what happened, but he explains the situation in a way which justifies his actions to himself and his audience as an inescapable case of coincidence, which would eventually lead to his fatal attraction to Dolores.

Close Reading: Humbert's Flawed Sex

"Later, in his delightful debonair manner, my father gave me all the information he thought I needed about sex; this was just before sending me, in the autumn of 1923, to a lycèe in Lyon (where we were to spend three winters); but alas, in the summer of that year, he was touring Italy with Mme de R. and her daughter, and I had nobody to complain to, nobody to consult." [Lolita (online text pg. 5), Vladimir Nabokov]

Since the novel Lolita's main character is a child molester, and since the story is set up as an account of the narrator used in court, the tendency to psychoanalyze Humbert Humbert is not one that comes as surprise. By close reading his accounts, the reader may grasp at the reasons why Humbert is seduced so by the appearance and unconscious actions of adolescent females.
It should be known that Humbert can account for his father having "numerous" relationships with other women who were not or did not act as a mother figure to him, but simultaneously ogled over him as a young boy. He also describes his father as charming in various instances. The use of "debonair" in the first sentence of this section, then, is a use that Humbert (and certainly Nabokov) knows is quite excessive. This suggests that Humbert sees nothing but charm in his father, and, knowing that his only attention from women was that of the "cutesy" variety, suggests further that the only charm he really knows how to have is that which grants him cutesy attention--the kind which young girls give.
His father "gave [Humbert] all the information he thought [Humbert] needed about sex," and Humbert's immediate memory after this is his father sending him away. There is a clear spirit of isolation in Humbert's remembrance of this time--though his father may have given him "all he needed to know about sex," Humbert's memory suggests he did not give Humbert the proper support concerning sexuality an adolescent should have when transitioning into young adulthood. This does not suggest anything directly reflecting his attraction to young girls, but it is clear Humbert's psyche may have suffered because of his father's absence.
The final sentence (or half of the prior sentence) solidifies this observation further--Humbert was alone that summer, presumably a young boy with little to do, with newly learned feelings about sex. With "nobody to complain to, nobody to consult," Humbert was alone with his feelings which, at this point, probably began to twist and malign into a flawed idea of interrelations between genders. Surely these traits can be connected to his eventual strange fondness of the youth of preteens.

Lolita: Opening Sentiments

John Jay Jr. is the cousin of Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., who happens to be Humbert Humbert’s lawyer in the trial for his sex crimes. Clark chooses Jay to edit “Lolita” because Jay has some familiarity with writing about “morbid states and perversions”—in the context of the book, “Lolita” is the memoir of H.H. concerning his life immediately prior to, during, and after the course of his criminal actions.

            The foreword frames Lolita, the novel, as reality—by setting it up as a postscript to a man’s life, a man who has endured punishment for his vile actions, the reader is jabbed with some expectation of empathy before they hear what Humbert himself has to say of these matters. The continual framing of the story from different angles: as a cautionary tale of currently developing fissures in civilized society; as a great opportunity for case study and psychoanalysis—these angles of viewing Humbert’s criminality made me find myself taking a more sterile approach, looking not for striking emotional moments, but combing over the text more scientifically, appreciating facts of Humbert’s situation and their justifications in his mind. The foreword is a brace for what is to come, but it is also an attempt at socially contextualizing the book to make it seem less about the obscene and more about what the obscene can teach civilized society.

            As far as the balance of banality and originality goes, I did find that the text so far did not strike me as completely Nabokovian—aside from the up-front cynical sarcasm of our main character’s narration, the intricate language is not quite as intricate; there is not anything noticeably puzzle-like about the text, yet. It seems Nabokov, though certainly his own writer to an extent, is pulling from other texts of the time—the set-up of the foreword and the first chapter, for instance, (for some strange reason) reminds me of the beginning of The Immoralist by Andre Gide. Though I did not read past the first ten pages of that book (it isn’t very good), the tone of Lolita’s opening has a definite similarity in its direct address to the reader, a precautionary segment before the text itself, not completely similar but resembling in some sort the opening justifications of Edgar Allen Poe’s stories. The first chapter itself pulls from Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” going as far as to pull near-complete lines from the poem: “In a princedom by the sea” in the first chapter copies “In a kingdom by the sea” from “Annabel Lee.” The themes of the works are similar, too: love, madness, perversion. It is clear that Nabokov took these similarities with utmost purpose to frame the beginning of his novel.

            Either Nabokov wants to make parody of Freud’s psychoanalytic approaches, or he is consciously borrowing from but not wanting to be associated with the strict constraints of psychological thought. While one may not put it past Nabokov to make parody of well-known and somewhat respected social figures, it seems to me that he does find some treasure to be wrought for literature in psychoanalysis but wishes to discern himself on a higher level in his interviews by denying association and even slandering the work of Freud and the like. The precursors of The Enchanter and Lolita are, in many senses, pulling from figures ( I am thinking of Camus and Freud, specifically) that Nabokov has openly denied of seeing any intellectual prowess in. Since he has observed them closely enough to shit-talk them relentlessly, it is nearly certain that he is borrowing from their theories consciously, and it is hard to think of this borrowing as parody, as it contextualizes entire stories which have worked in Nabokov’s favor. Perhaps he is using the psychological approach as a means of making his stories relevant in circles that appreciate Freud and Camus.

            Like the use of psychoanalytic approaches, I believe that Nabokov is exploiting the exploitative and its appeal to the masses in order to characterize his main characters as troubled, sleazy, corrupted—in Lolita, especially, the foreword’s frame of justification followed by the vulgar perversions of Humbert’s account—his speaking of these matters matter-of-factly—creates a conflict in the reader as to whether or not they should feel empathy for him. It keeps the average reader interested and reading.