the awfulness of love and violets
remorse despair while you
took a dull doll to pieces
and threw its head away
because of all you did
because of all I did not
you have to die
(Extract from Quilty’s death sentence, p. 298)
This is an essay I wrote on Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. It analyses chapter 35 - the death of Clare Quilty - in close detail, and talks about the "aesthetic morality" that Nabokov expounds therein.
Lolita’s narrative is framed within a court case. This is most apparent when Humbert opens his story with “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one …” (p. 9), and is reinforced by similar allusions throughout the novel. It could easily be assumed that this court case concerns the character of the title, Lolita herself, and this assumption indeed seems supported by the structure of the narrative, which focuses upon her, and attempts to justify Humbert’s rape of her. However, Humbert’s first description of himself is not as a paedophile, but as a murderer, “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” (p. 9). The Kubrick film version, additionally, for which Nabokov himself wrote the screenplay, closes with an epilogue that explicates that Humbert dies in prison awaiting trial for the murder of Clare Quilty. And yet, somehow, the reader comes away from the book feeling that the murder is the most moral act that Humbert in fact performs. This essay seeks to examine this tension within the book, through a close-reading of the murder scene.
There are many deaths in Lolita; Valeria, Annabel, Humbert’s mother, Charlotte Haze come to mind immediately. Their deaths are humorously absent from the text – Valeria’s expressed in a sentence (“A man from Pasadena told me one day that Mrs.Maximovitch née Zborovski had died in childbirth around 1945”), Annabel’s in a phrase (“… and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.”), the mother’s described in a mere two words (“picnic, lightning”). Even the crucial death of Charlotte Haze occurs outside of the narrator’s sight, and he spends a mere half-page describing the scene. But the death of Quilty is described in vivid detail; detail matched only in the early descriptions of rapturous moments with Lolita. Humbert the murderer therefore acts in the same mode as Humbert the lover – and as we shall see, it is his characterisation as a lover that justifies him to be the judge and executioner of Quilty the non-lover.
There are explicit similarities between Humbert and Quilty. On p. 293 Humbert even notes that Quilty’s purple bathrobe is much like the one he himself owns. Quilty shares Humbert’s sense of word-play, for instance, “Phil calls Philadelphia. Pat calls Patagonia” (p. 294), and “… as the Bard said, with that cold in his head, to borrow and to borrow and to borrow” (p. 300). He, too, spatters even prosaic English sentences with French, suggesting an education comparable to Humbert’s. In some ways, Quilty treats Humbert as a social equal, playing a game of niceties with him, as in “She met some remarkable people. Do you happen to know –” (p. 297) and “I said I had said I thought he had said he had never …”, parodying polite upper-class (for want of a better-defined term) social interactions. Quilty himself defines these similarities as, “We are men of the world, in everything – sex, free verse, marksmanship.” By “men of the world”, Quilty seems to imply that both characters believe that they are exempt, by a privilege of birth or intelligence, from the social rules that govern a society that they both seem to disdain.
However, undercutting their multiple similarities, there is a subtle awareness of class-consciousness that divides the men. Quilty, for instance, proclaims “You are either Australian, or a German refugee. Must you talk to me? This is a Gentile’s house, you know. Maybe you’d better run along” (p. 296). Humbert earlier debates with himself whether “master was still asleep in the master bedroom (p. 292).
The opening of the chapter reads like a bad horror story, littered with clichés:
A thunderstorm accompanied me most of the way back to Grimm Road … the birds screamed in the drenched and steaming trees. The elaborate and decrepit house … (p. 292)
Coupled with the general sense of unreality of the passage, and the fact that both characters are drunk (“I had overdone the alcoholic stimulation business,” p. 292), the scene is almost a burlesque. Such passages as
are numerous (many times, characters simply trip over things), and the high level of physical comedy in the scene operate in terms of a theatrical, rather than a literary, genre. Indeed, the chapter closes with the line “This … was the end of the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty”. There is a dialogue between theatrical and literary arts that runs throughout the novel, and Quilty, famed playwright, is obviously the ideal interlocutor for the literary purist Humbert. Humbert, on page 198 claims that he “detest[s] the theatre as being a primitive and putrid form”. Indeed, Humbert’s loss of Lolita begins when he loses her to the theatre, to Quilty’s play, in fact, which is the device he constructs to entrap her. It is of significance, therefore, that Humbert forces Quilty to read a poetic death sentence.
The death of Quilty is a dialogue and action laden scene which reads more like a play than like a novel. Humbert’s authorial voice, which dominates the rest of the novel with its ironically mediated descriptions, gives way here to long passages of direct dialogue, a theatrical device. Quilty’s dying monologue in fact lasts a full uninterrupted page-and-a-half (pp. 299-300). The general mode of the chapter, in fact, is overwhelmingly theatrical or filmic – largely resembling an Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward play (the party characters, and the lack of emotional response that characterises that particular social group). The sense of bizarreness which Humbert describes is therefore the product of him finding himself in a world that conforms to different artistic conventions than his own literary one. Humbert’s sense of acting out a role written for him by someone else is interesting in light of the fact that Quilty’s is the only murder that Humbert successfully manages to perform in the novel, though he seriously considers performing others. It is in this scene, moreover, that Humbert finally emerges as a moral agent in the novel. It is therefore interesting that he is stripped of his artistic agency in the face of the theatrical form in the crucial scene.
The theatre/literature dialogue supports more crucial differences between the two men. Humbert’s descriptions of Pavor Manor are as distanced as his descriptions of the Haze home. The passage that reads
Quilty’s lifestyle is characterised by a grandiose, chaotic hedonism repulsive to Humbert. The opulence of the grand house (“a library full of flowers … a rather bare room with ample and deep mirrors and a polar bear skin … there were still other rooms”) is undercut by its unkemptness (Humbert notices “a number of used glasses growing out of the carpet”). Humbert’s aesthetics are curiously ascetic, he refers to “his usual meticulous way” even when cleaning his gun, and fastidiously washes his hands immediately after the murder. He obsessively describes Quilty in phrases of gross physicality: “fleshy”, “pudgy hands” and “hirsute chest”; he evens mentions a play he has written called Proud Flesh (p. 295). The extension of this is Quilty’s attitude to sex, which is obscene and fundamentally opposed to Humbert’s romanticism. Quilty offers Humbert “a rather exciting little freak, a young lady with three breasts” as “house pet”, as well as a photographic book of male genetalia, and the opportunity to enjoy both the daughters and granddaughters of “reliable and bribable” Mrs Vibrissa (p. 300) – he is attracted to deviance merely for its own sake, lacking a real standard of aesthetics to inform his sexual tastes. How different is this orgiastic sexual indulgence from Humbert’s rapture for the Nymphet, whose beauty is a product of its rarity, and its transience. By comparison, Quilty is an undiscerning consumer. This quality is the true distinction between Humbert and his Doppelganger, although it is expressed through a theatrical/literary distinction, and it is this quality that causes the reader to condone Humbert as the judge and executor of his foil.
The reason that the reader bestows his moral blessings upon Humbert, is because his aesthetic selectivity approximates something that has been represented to the modern world as “love”. The uniformity of the reader-response to Humbert in this regard is enormously indicative of the degree to which literature has formed our own moral consciousness. Trilling (1982) argues the eloquent point that Humbert, master of Romance languages and the poetic tradition, is a character that expresses the ideals of Romance stories, which exist in the modern world only in misrepresented forms that deal with sex rather than with unfulfilable, courtly love. It seems possible to argue, however, that Romance ideals pervade modern popular culture, even if in a compromised form (I am thinking here, of magazines like those Charlotte Haze devotes herself to, as just one example). We seem, as readers, to be predisposed to respond to the aesthetics of Romantic/romantic love, even if it overrides our normal moral sensibilities. Quilty’s crime, therefore, and the one that he ultimately dies for, is simply that he is worse than obscene, he is vulgar.
At last, we can make sense of the fact that was visited early in this essay: that the death scene is described in a vividness that equates with the vividness of the romantic descriptions of Lolita. Humbert is allowed to murder Quilty because it is the fulfilment of his role as lover. Shockingly, this implies that Quilty is demonised as a paedophile, while Humbert escapes this label, simply because Quilty’s art-form is not sufficiently seductive to convince the reader of its (political, class-conscious) moral paradigm.
Quilty’s insensitivity to the ideals of romantic love is not only expressed in the references to his sexual perversions, but also in his insensitivity to his own death. Explicitly Humbert must tell him,
because Quilty, right until the moment of his death, cannot seem to take the matter seriously. As Humbert begins to shoot him, Quilty reverts to a “phoney British accent … talking in a curiously detached and even amiable manner” (p. 302), and then climbs into bed and wraps himself in blankets as he is shot to death. The burlesque quality of this death conveys more than a theatrical mode, however. The comedy is not arbitrary, but rather reinforces the fact that Quilty is a “semi-animated, sub-human trickster” (p. 294); lacking a human soul (anima) and therefore the ability to love[2]. Quilty is unable to express an emotion as basic as horror; there is a gorgeous juxtaposition on page 294 where Humbert’s impassioned internal monologue (“To have him trapped, after those years of repentance and rage … oh, my darling, this was intolerable bliss!”) is set in the midst of Quilty’s most inane polite babble (“Somebody told me he had a brother with the same telephone company”).
Humbert’s fastidiousness and his abhorrence of flesh are not only aspects of his aesthetics, but are generally repulsions to the idea of death. By chapter 35, Humbert has learned that he can love even the overweight, pregnant, adult, hopelessly poor Dolly Schiller – and the overcoming of the intensity of his fear of transience is perhaps what allows him to finally empathise with Lolita, to call her “a little girl called Dolores Haze, Dolly Haze” and to finally take on the father role in protective action (“She was my child, Quilty” p. 295). In the face of this, Quilty is indeed impotent, sexually and morally, aesthetically and empathetically (“Sure, she may have made those calls, sure. Any place. Paradise, Wash., Hell Canyon. Who cares?”[3]) Humbert repeatedly calls him “feminine” to express his loss of sexual/romantic agency. Quilty’s impotence, really, is the loss of intensity of feeling.
The entrance of Quilty’s bizarre guests onto the scene (the “florid fellow”, the “faded blonde”, the “fat person” and the two girls on the davenport “so young, so lewd”, p. 303) demonstrates that Quilty’s disease (“Quilty was a very sick man” p. 302) extends to the entire social system that supported him, proclaimed him a genius and made him rich. Death means as little to these house guests as it did to Quilty himself – they are drunk and dulled. The “art” that they produce (it is implied that these are mainly pornographic films) is a perpetuation of their “florid”, “fat”, “faded” aesthetics – their art the source of social disease. Humbert is condoned to murder them, since he is the only character not tainted by their aesthetics; he is the only character, in the play, who is revolted by Quilty and his art-form the theatre.
The murder of Clare Quilty is more than the neat solution to make the narrative balance. By constructing Quilty as Humbert’s doppelganger, and by showing the fundamental ways in which they differ from each other, “Nabokov aims to give his narrator complete moral purgation” (Fowler, 1974). Humbert emerges from the murder with clean hands, literally and figuratively. In the concluding chapter, he goes on to state
The irony, of course, is that the law sees fit to punish Humbert for his murder, not for his rape, aiming its punitive powers at the wrong end of the lover-murderer spectrum. This ending should disquiet the reader, and force him to reconsider the depths of his own aesthetic prejudices that favour romantic love to the point where the murder of the non-romantic is entirely ethically justified. Humbert has developed in ethical sensibility over the course of the novel, making him realise (in the closing chapter) that Lolita’s absence from the group of laughing, innocent children that he watches playing is his real crime – but he ends the novel in even more of a socially rejected position than he was when he first desired Lolita. This is the curious puzzle that Nabokov invites us to resolve in our own prejudices.
References
Dupee, F. W. (1982). “F. W. Dupee in ‘Anchor Review’” in Page, N. (ed.) Nabokov: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, London: pp. 84-91.
Foweler, Douglas (1974). Reading Nabokov. Cornell University Press, London.
Frye, Northrop (1957). ”The Mythos of Summer: Romance”. In Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press: pp. 186-201.
Nabokov, Vladimir (1959). Lolita. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.
(although I cite page numbers from the 1982 Penguin Edition)
Nabokov, Vladimir (1973). Strong Opinions. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.
Trilling, Lionel (1982). “Lionel Trilling in ‘Encounter’” in Page, N. (ed.) Nabokov: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, London: pp. 92-102.
[1] Nabokov’s own eloquent phrase is “I loathe such things as jazz, the white-hosed moron torturing a black bull, rayed with red, abstractist bric-a-brac, primitivist folk masks, progressive schools, music in supermarkets, swimming pools, brutes, bores, class-conscious philistines, Freud, Marx, fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks” (Nabokov, 1973).
[2] I do not mean this to be as sentimental as it sounds – I am referring to the motifs of the Romance mode itself, where ethical and generative/sexual abilities are interlinked (Frye, 1957). Humbert even alludes to the generative concept of Romance in his poem (pp. 298-299), mentioning “a marriage in a mountain state/aye a litter of Lolitas …”
[3] Quilty’s wordplay equates to that Lolita may have been in Paradise, Hell or Purgatory, it is all one to him. Note that this technique of expressing emotion through place names is one used commonly by Humbert throughout the novel, for instance the chapter in fact opens with the phrase “I left insomnia lodge next morning around eight”.
remorse despair while you
took a dull doll to pieces
and threw its head away
because of all you did
because of all I did not
you have to die
(Extract from Quilty’s death sentence, p. 298)
This is an essay I wrote on Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. It analyses chapter 35 - the death of Clare Quilty - in close detail, and talks about the "aesthetic morality" that Nabokov expounds therein.
Lolita’s narrative is framed within a court case. This is most apparent when Humbert opens his story with “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one …” (p. 9), and is reinforced by similar allusions throughout the novel. It could easily be assumed that this court case concerns the character of the title, Lolita herself, and this assumption indeed seems supported by the structure of the narrative, which focuses upon her, and attempts to justify Humbert’s rape of her. However, Humbert’s first description of himself is not as a paedophile, but as a murderer, “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” (p. 9). The Kubrick film version, additionally, for which Nabokov himself wrote the screenplay, closes with an epilogue that explicates that Humbert dies in prison awaiting trial for the murder of Clare Quilty. And yet, somehow, the reader comes away from the book feeling that the murder is the most moral act that Humbert in fact performs. This essay seeks to examine this tension within the book, through a close-reading of the murder scene.
There are many deaths in Lolita; Valeria, Annabel, Humbert’s mother, Charlotte Haze come to mind immediately. Their deaths are humorously absent from the text – Valeria’s expressed in a sentence (“A man from Pasadena told me one day that Mrs.Maximovitch née Zborovski had died in childbirth around 1945”), Annabel’s in a phrase (“… and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.”), the mother’s described in a mere two words (“picnic, lightning”). Even the crucial death of Charlotte Haze occurs outside of the narrator’s sight, and he spends a mere half-page describing the scene. But the death of Quilty is described in vivid detail; detail matched only in the early descriptions of rapturous moments with Lolita. Humbert the murderer therefore acts in the same mode as Humbert the lover – and as we shall see, it is his characterisation as a lover that justifies him to be the judge and executioner of Quilty the non-lover.
There are explicit similarities between Humbert and Quilty. On p. 293 Humbert even notes that Quilty’s purple bathrobe is much like the one he himself owns. Quilty shares Humbert’s sense of word-play, for instance, “Phil calls Philadelphia. Pat calls Patagonia” (p. 294), and “… as the Bard said, with that cold in his head, to borrow and to borrow and to borrow” (p. 300). He, too, spatters even prosaic English sentences with French, suggesting an education comparable to Humbert’s. In some ways, Quilty treats Humbert as a social equal, playing a game of niceties with him, as in “She met some remarkable people. Do you happen to know –” (p. 297) and “I said I had said I thought he had said he had never …”, parodying polite upper-class (for want of a better-defined term) social interactions. Quilty himself defines these similarities as, “We are men of the world, in everything – sex, free verse, marksmanship.” By “men of the world”, Quilty seems to imply that both characters believe that they are exempt, by a privilege of birth or intelligence, from the social rules that govern a society that they both seem to disdain.
However, undercutting their multiple similarities, there is a subtle awareness of class-consciousness that divides the men. Quilty, for instance, proclaims “You are either Australian, or a German refugee. Must you talk to me? This is a Gentile’s house, you know. Maybe you’d better run along” (p. 296). Humbert earlier debates with himself whether “master was still asleep in the master bedroom (p. 292).
The opening of the chapter reads like a bad horror story, littered with clichés:
A thunderstorm accompanied me most of the way back to Grimm Road … the birds screamed in the drenched and steaming trees. The elaborate and decrepit house … (p. 292)
Coupled with the general sense of unreality of the passage, and the fact that both characters are drunk (“I had overdone the alcoholic stimulation business,” p. 292), the scene is almost a burlesque. Such passages as
I see myself following him through the hall, with a kind of double, triple, kangaroo jump, remaining quite straight on straight legs while bouncing up twice in his wake, and then bouncing between him and the front door in a ballet-like stiff bounce … (p. 301)
are numerous (many times, characters simply trip over things), and the high level of physical comedy in the scene operate in terms of a theatrical, rather than a literary, genre. Indeed, the chapter closes with the line “This … was the end of the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty”. There is a dialogue between theatrical and literary arts that runs throughout the novel, and Quilty, famed playwright, is obviously the ideal interlocutor for the literary purist Humbert. Humbert, on page 198 claims that he “detest[s] the theatre as being a primitive and putrid form”. Indeed, Humbert’s loss of Lolita begins when he loses her to the theatre, to Quilty’s play, in fact, which is the device he constructs to entrap her. It is of significance, therefore, that Humbert forces Quilty to read a poetic death sentence.
The death of Quilty is a dialogue and action laden scene which reads more like a play than like a novel. Humbert’s authorial voice, which dominates the rest of the novel with its ironically mediated descriptions, gives way here to long passages of direct dialogue, a theatrical device. Quilty’s dying monologue in fact lasts a full uninterrupted page-and-a-half (pp. 299-300). The general mode of the chapter, in fact, is overwhelmingly theatrical or filmic – largely resembling an Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward play (the party characters, and the lack of emotional response that characterises that particular social group). The sense of bizarreness which Humbert describes is therefore the product of him finding himself in a world that conforms to different artistic conventions than his own literary one. Humbert’s sense of acting out a role written for him by someone else is interesting in light of the fact that Quilty’s is the only murder that Humbert successfully manages to perform in the novel, though he seriously considers performing others. It is in this scene, moreover, that Humbert finally emerges as a moral agent in the novel. It is therefore interesting that he is stripped of his artistic agency in the face of the theatrical form in the crucial scene.
The theatre/literature dialogue supports more crucial differences between the two men. Humbert’s descriptions of Pavor Manor are as distanced as his descriptions of the Haze home. The passage that reads
There were still other rooms. A happy thought struck me. If and when master returned from his constitutional in the woods, or emerged from some secret lair, it might be wise for an unsteady gunman with a long job before him to prevent his playmate from locking himself up in a room … The house, being an old one, had more planned privacy than have modern glamour-boxes, where the bathroom, the only lock-able locus, has to be used for the furtive needs of planned parenthood.(p. 293)shows this distance from both the middle class and the American aristocracy in conjunction. Such socially particular phrases as “constitutional in the woods” and “furtive needs of planned parenthood” demonstrate Humbert’s familiarity, and exclusion, from both. The loaded word “furtive” expresses his disdain for the middle class, but his descriptions of Quilty as “fleshy” and “pudgy” demonstrate that Humbert is equally repulsed by Quilty. Dupee (1982) suggests that the confrontation between the two characters is allegorical of the differences between European (restrained, well-bred) and American (opulent, infantile) aristocracy. However, keeping in mind the fact that Nabokov loathes obvious allegory, polemics and Marxist class-consciousness[1] (Nabokov, 1973), we cannot interpret these distinctions as mere class dialectics in themselves. The issue, rather, is one of aesthetics.
Quilty’s lifestyle is characterised by a grandiose, chaotic hedonism repulsive to Humbert. The opulence of the grand house (“a library full of flowers … a rather bare room with ample and deep mirrors and a polar bear skin … there were still other rooms”) is undercut by its unkemptness (Humbert notices “a number of used glasses growing out of the carpet”). Humbert’s aesthetics are curiously ascetic, he refers to “his usual meticulous way” even when cleaning his gun, and fastidiously washes his hands immediately after the murder. He obsessively describes Quilty in phrases of gross physicality: “fleshy”, “pudgy hands” and “hirsute chest”; he evens mentions a play he has written called Proud Flesh (p. 295). The extension of this is Quilty’s attitude to sex, which is obscene and fundamentally opposed to Humbert’s romanticism. Quilty offers Humbert “a rather exciting little freak, a young lady with three breasts” as “house pet”, as well as a photographic book of male genetalia, and the opportunity to enjoy both the daughters and granddaughters of “reliable and bribable” Mrs Vibrissa (p. 300) – he is attracted to deviance merely for its own sake, lacking a real standard of aesthetics to inform his sexual tastes. How different is this orgiastic sexual indulgence from Humbert’s rapture for the Nymphet, whose beauty is a product of its rarity, and its transience. By comparison, Quilty is an undiscerning consumer. This quality is the true distinction between Humbert and his Doppelganger, although it is expressed through a theatrical/literary distinction, and it is this quality that causes the reader to condone Humbert as the judge and executor of his foil.
The reason that the reader bestows his moral blessings upon Humbert, is because his aesthetic selectivity approximates something that has been represented to the modern world as “love”. The uniformity of the reader-response to Humbert in this regard is enormously indicative of the degree to which literature has formed our own moral consciousness. Trilling (1982) argues the eloquent point that Humbert, master of Romance languages and the poetic tradition, is a character that expresses the ideals of Romance stories, which exist in the modern world only in misrepresented forms that deal with sex rather than with unfulfilable, courtly love. It seems possible to argue, however, that Romance ideals pervade modern popular culture, even if in a compromised form (I am thinking here, of magazines like those Charlotte Haze devotes herself to, as just one example). We seem, as readers, to be predisposed to respond to the aesthetics of Romantic/romantic love, even if it overrides our normal moral sensibilities. Quilty’s crime, therefore, and the one that he ultimately dies for, is simply that he is worse than obscene, he is vulgar.
At last, we can make sense of the fact that was visited early in this essay: that the death scene is described in a vividness that equates with the vividness of the romantic descriptions of Lolita. Humbert is allowed to murder Quilty because it is the fulfilment of his role as lover. Shockingly, this implies that Quilty is demonised as a paedophile, while Humbert escapes this label, simply because Quilty’s art-form is not sufficiently seductive to convince the reader of its (political, class-conscious) moral paradigm.
Quilty’s insensitivity to the ideals of romantic love is not only expressed in the references to his sexual perversions, but also in his insensitivity to his own death. Explicitly Humbert must tell him,
Quilty … I want you to concentrate. You are going to die in a moment. The hereafter for all we know may be an eternal state of excruciating insanity. You smoked your last cigarette yesterday. Concentrate. Try to understand what is happening to you. (p. 296)
because Quilty, right until the moment of his death, cannot seem to take the matter seriously. As Humbert begins to shoot him, Quilty reverts to a “phoney British accent … talking in a curiously detached and even amiable manner” (p. 302), and then climbs into bed and wraps himself in blankets as he is shot to death. The burlesque quality of this death conveys more than a theatrical mode, however. The comedy is not arbitrary, but rather reinforces the fact that Quilty is a “semi-animated, sub-human trickster” (p. 294); lacking a human soul (anima) and therefore the ability to love[2]. Quilty is unable to express an emotion as basic as horror; there is a gorgeous juxtaposition on page 294 where Humbert’s impassioned internal monologue (“To have him trapped, after those years of repentance and rage … oh, my darling, this was intolerable bliss!”) is set in the midst of Quilty’s most inane polite babble (“Somebody told me he had a brother with the same telephone company”).
Humbert’s fastidiousness and his abhorrence of flesh are not only aspects of his aesthetics, but are generally repulsions to the idea of death. By chapter 35, Humbert has learned that he can love even the overweight, pregnant, adult, hopelessly poor Dolly Schiller – and the overcoming of the intensity of his fear of transience is perhaps what allows him to finally empathise with Lolita, to call her “a little girl called Dolores Haze, Dolly Haze” and to finally take on the father role in protective action (“She was my child, Quilty” p. 295). In the face of this, Quilty is indeed impotent, sexually and morally, aesthetically and empathetically (“Sure, she may have made those calls, sure. Any place. Paradise, Wash., Hell Canyon. Who cares?”[3]) Humbert repeatedly calls him “feminine” to express his loss of sexual/romantic agency. Quilty’s impotence, really, is the loss of intensity of feeling.
The entrance of Quilty’s bizarre guests onto the scene (the “florid fellow”, the “faded blonde”, the “fat person” and the two girls on the davenport “so young, so lewd”, p. 303) demonstrates that Quilty’s disease (“Quilty was a very sick man” p. 302) extends to the entire social system that supported him, proclaimed him a genius and made him rich. Death means as little to these house guests as it did to Quilty himself – they are drunk and dulled. The “art” that they produce (it is implied that these are mainly pornographic films) is a perpetuation of their “florid”, “fat”, “faded” aesthetics – their art the source of social disease. Humbert is condoned to murder them, since he is the only character not tainted by their aesthetics; he is the only character, in the play, who is revolted by Quilty and his art-form the theatre.
The murder of Clare Quilty is more than the neat solution to make the narrative balance. By constructing Quilty as Humbert’s doppelganger, and by showing the fundamental ways in which they differ from each other, “Nabokov aims to give his narrator complete moral purgation” (Fowler, 1974). Humbert emerges from the murder with clean hands, literally and figuratively. In the concluding chapter, he goes on to state
had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least 35 years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges … 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 … and this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. (p. 305)
The irony, of course, is that the law sees fit to punish Humbert for his murder, not for his rape, aiming its punitive powers at the wrong end of the lover-murderer spectrum. This ending should disquiet the reader, and force him to reconsider the depths of his own aesthetic prejudices that favour romantic love to the point where the murder of the non-romantic is entirely ethically justified. Humbert has developed in ethical sensibility over the course of the novel, making him realise (in the closing chapter) that Lolita’s absence from the group of laughing, innocent children that he watches playing is his real crime – but he ends the novel in even more of a socially rejected position than he was when he first desired Lolita. This is the curious puzzle that Nabokov invites us to resolve in our own prejudices.
References
Dupee, F. W. (1982). “F. W. Dupee in ‘Anchor Review’” in Page, N. (ed.) Nabokov: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, London: pp. 84-91.
Foweler, Douglas (1974). Reading Nabokov. Cornell University Press, London.
Frye, Northrop (1957). ”The Mythos of Summer: Romance”. In Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press: pp. 186-201.
Nabokov, Vladimir (1959). Lolita. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.
(although I cite page numbers from the 1982 Penguin Edition)
Nabokov, Vladimir (1973). Strong Opinions. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.
Trilling, Lionel (1982). “Lionel Trilling in ‘Encounter’” in Page, N. (ed.) Nabokov: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, London: pp. 92-102.
[1] Nabokov’s own eloquent phrase is “I loathe such things as jazz, the white-hosed moron torturing a black bull, rayed with red, abstractist bric-a-brac, primitivist folk masks, progressive schools, music in supermarkets, swimming pools, brutes, bores, class-conscious philistines, Freud, Marx, fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks” (Nabokov, 1973).
[2] I do not mean this to be as sentimental as it sounds – I am referring to the motifs of the Romance mode itself, where ethical and generative/sexual abilities are interlinked (Frye, 1957). Humbert even alludes to the generative concept of Romance in his poem (pp. 298-299), mentioning “a marriage in a mountain state/aye a litter of Lolitas …”
[3] Quilty’s wordplay equates to that Lolita may have been in Paradise, Hell or Purgatory, it is all one to him. Note that this technique of expressing emotion through place names is one used commonly by Humbert throughout the novel, for instance the chapter in fact opens with the phrase “I left insomnia lodge next morning around eight”.
