Oh, she had changed!

The passage I chose starts at the last paragraph on page 203 and continues onto 204—it occurs right after Humbert discovers Lolita skipped her lesson.

“So downstairs I went clearing my throat and holding my heart. Lo was now in the living room, in her favorite overstuffed chair. As she sprawled there, biting at a hangnail and mocking me with her heartless vaporous eyes, and all the time rocking a stool upon which she had placed the heel of an oustretched shoeless foot, I perceived all at once with a sickening qualm how much she had changed since I first met her two years ago. Or had this happened during those last two weeks? Tendresse? Surely that was an exploded myth. She sat right in the focus of my incandescent anger. The fog of all lust had been swept away leaving nothing but this dreadful lucidity. Oh, she had changed!”

Upon hearing the news of Lolita’s misbehavior, Humbert goes downstairs while “holding [his] heart.” The sentence by itself sounds like something a person who fears they’re about to get their heart broken would say. I suppose in a way, he is—anything bad linked to Lolita could ruin his perfect world of him and his nymphet. Though Humbert is a pedophile, the wording of this sentence that implies his heart is fragile and easily damaged, is something that causes the audience to empathize.

He then sees Lolita “sprawled there, biting at a hangnail…” The word “sprawled” is ugly, unladylike, and a very unattractive choice. He could have said “laid” or “sat” but he didn’t. Humbert proceeds to describe Lolita in the ugliest way—she had “heartless vaporous eyes” and “an outstretched shoeless foot.” It is hard to imagine a young girl with such menacing eyes, especially if she was just sitting there unaware of the trouble she was about to be in. It is clear Humbert wants us to see Lolita in this moment as a demonic being. He even describes her growing foot to be disdainful, as if growing up were the worst thing in the world. Though growth is a natural, healthy aspect of any person, to Humbert all it symbolizes is his nymphet slipping away from him. Lolita is supposed to be going through the most changes right now as a preteen, and yet Humbert acts as if he had been blinded and now just realized what horrific changes had occurred.
“I perceived all at once with a sickening qualm how much she had changed since I first met her two years ago.” Well….duh! She’s in her growing years, of course she changed! But this sentence has the effect of letting the reader see Lolita through Humbert’s twisted eyes. By growing/changing, she had lost the pure beauty she had as a child, and this is a very sad moment for Humbert. He is genuinely upset and confused in this passage, as if he hadn’t known Lolita would grow up.

The second to last sentence beginning with “The fog…” shows that Humbert, up until this moment, saw Lolita through his own version of rose-colored glasses. His lust for her shielded him from her changes, and in his eyes she had stayed his innocent nymphet, constant, for the past two years. In reality, growth doesn’t occur over night and Humbert must have noticed it. However, he was in control of their world so he could pretend that nothing was going to change. Now, he is realizing that Lolita is no longer under his control and he could be losing her. His loss of control and the pain of the prospect of losing her is too much for him to handle, so he acts as if she had changed and it was he who didn’t want her anymore, not the other way around. It is a defense mechanism, in order to save him the truth which he can’t handle.

Close Read

The passage I chose to close read is in fact all of chapter 21 in part 2, which starts on page 236 and ends on page 238. This passage stood out to me for a couple of reasons. First, it is a fantastic sample of Humbert's insane desire and jealousy. At the beginning of the passage he is frantically looking for Lolita, "crying...with...a wealth of anxiety, passion and pain". It turns out that Lolita has only walked outside before he was ready, but he is so afraid of losing possession of his girl that he can't stand not having her in sight even for a moment. When he sees her, he notices another man watching her. He describes the actions of Lolita and the man in gross detail, using harsh imagery such as "his hirsute thighs" and "his tight wet black bathing trunks bloated and bursting with vigor". Humbert finally realizes that Lolita is intentionally putting on a show for her voyeur, and he becomes madly jealous, describing Lolita as a "vile and beloved slut" and pointing out her "obscene young legs". The man eventually notices Humbert watching him, and so he feigns indifference and walks away from the scene. Lolita abruptly ends her charade, and Humbert is literally sickened by what he observed.

I also love this section for all of the clever uses of language Nabokov employs. He uses the same color description, Aztec Red, for Lolita's bathing suit as he uses for the car that has been following them along their journey. He also uses phrases that seem quite paradoxical, such as "beloved slut", "sacred disgust", and "masked by his own nakedness". Lastly, this chapter is full of still more examples of Nabokov using alliteration and rhyme. My favorites are "trim turfed terrace", "bathing briefs and bra", "black bathing trunks bloated and bursting with vigor where his great fat bullybag was pulled up and back like a padded shield over his reversed beasthood", "lechery of his look" and "gambol and glee". 

The Scepter of My Passion...hehe

Picking my excerpt was easy; this was one of the first passages that really blew me away:

“I have reserved for the conclusion of my "Annabel" phase the account of our unsuccessful first tryst. One night, she managed to deceive the vicious vigilance of her family. In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. Through the darkness and the tender trees we could see the arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive memory, appear to me now like playing cards--presumably because a bridge game was keeping the enemy busy. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.”

This section is chronologically odd. Why did Nabokov, or Humbert rather, conclude the “’Annabel’ phase” with their unsuccesfull attempt? Why not tell us about it before enlightening us about the sucesfull one? I think that the entire Annabel section is a microcosm of foreshadowing. If Nabokov had Humbert end on the (somewhat) happy note of his consummation with Annabel, the two stories wouldn’t be congruent. Nabokov wants us to know that his relationship with Lolita won’t end up any better than him and Annabel’s.
Let’s evaluate the language. Humbert has a fantastically unromantic way of describing the things he finds particularly romantic. You wouldn’t know it at the time, but going back and reading this passage again I notice that it’s very evocative of Humberts first sexual experience with Lolita. Humbert says that Annabel “trembled and twitched,” which aren’t exactly physical signs of pleasure. He goes on to discuss how she reacted to the “pain of love,” and how she would grab his hand between her legs in order to stop him, only to let him go again. Nabokov is brilliantly using Humbert to let the reader see, for the first time, what makes up a large part of his sexual appetite: masochism and power. Nabokov also leaves fairly subtle hints to suggest Humbert’s own egotism. He describes his effect on Annabel as that of “some mysterious potion,” and ends by giving her the gift of his….well…”scepter of passion” to hold. This passage is interesting in the context of the whole book because it’s one of the very few times that Nabokov actually describes anything sexual in detail. The only other comparable example is the passage that this excerpt evokes: Humbert’s first sexual encounter with Lo. I think it’s excerpts like these that make Lolita the “most convincing love story of our time,” because it’s realistic. Sure, it’s between 2 13 year olds, one of whom will grow up to be a pedophile, but the flight from the typical all-happy all the time model is refreshing. Nabokov illustrates that pain and pleasure are both intricate parts of love.

Poor Annabel

The passage I chose is near the beginning of the story, in the last paragraph of chapter three.

"That photograph was taken on the last day of our fatal summer and just a few minutes before we made our second and final attempt to thwart fate. Under the flimsiest of pretexts (this was our very last chance, and nothing really mattered) we escaped from the café to the beach, and found a desolate stretch of sand, and there, in the violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, had a brief session of avid caresses, with somebody's lost pair of sun-glasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu."

I thought this passage stood out when I was reading it for the first time. Especially the last sentence. To me it's very vivid and it has great imagery. In a "violet shadow" with "red rocks", and only some lost sunglasses looking on. It seems like the colors are the colors one would see looking through sunglasses. It makes it seem sort of surreal. The whole thing makes it seem so sad and beautiful; it's the lovers only chance to "thwart fate". And then the old men come out of the water completely ruining the mood. I loved the Hemingway allusion to the "old man of the sea" and the tacked on "and his brother". I could completely picture the scene and every detail of these two old men laughing and being crude, encouraging the young couple. I think I may have even laughed out loud when I first read this. But then all of a sudden, "four months later she died of typhus in Corfu", just like that. He just segues into this sad piece of information, with no fancy prose or anything. He just says it, and that's the end of the chapter. It's all a somewhat unexpected way to tell the readers of this tragedy, but in way it makes it seem more drastic. Humbert doesn't try to sugarcoat the news because it was such a terrible thing that happened to him, he really was affected by it, so much so that he couldn't even come up with the fancy prose to talk about it. That's how I took it at least. And I just love the way Nabokov can make you laugh with joy and then sit in stunned silence in only one sentence. He truly is genius.

Oh Humbert.

The passage I picked to close read is on page 130, which takes place in the hotel, the night before Humbert consummates his love.

"And less than six inches from me and my burning life, was nebulous Lolita! After a long stirless vigil, my tentacles moved toward her again, and this time the creak of the mattress did not wake her. I managed to bring my ravenous bulk so close to her that I felt the aura of her bare shoulder like a warm breath upon my cheek. And then, she sat up, gasped, muttered with insane rapidity something about boats, tugged at the sheets and lapsed back into her rich, dark, young unconsciousness. As she tosses, within that abundant flow of sleep, recently auburn, at present lunar, her arm struck me across the face. For a second I held her. She freed herself from the shadow of my embrace- doing this not consciously, not violently, not with any personal distaste, but with the neutral plaintive murmur of a child demanding its natural rest. And again the situation remained the same: Lolita with her curved spine to Humbert, Humbert resting his head on his hand and burning with desire and dyspepsia."

In this passage, Humbert plays with words, by using them in peculiar ways. He calls Lolita nebulous with means hazy and faint, which seems like an odd adjective to describe the little girl he is lusting after. He says "the aura of her bare shoulder like a warm breath " and she was "recently auburn, at present lunar," and the reader can picture Lolita just glowing and producing warmth, like some kind of goddess. He uses a lot of words and phrases that inform the reader that Humbert is very clear that he is a monster. He says his "tentacles" moved toward her, his body is a "ravenous bulk" meaning his is so hungry with desire, his body not just a big chunk of flesh. In this passage Humbert sees Lolita as a goddess and himself as a monster, which we do see referenced many times throughout the story. There are also rich phrases like "insane rapidity" and "neutral plaintive" which enrich the passage by going a step beyond descriptive.

Hilarious

I'm with Kevin, the passage I chose is full of word-play and subtle irony, so I just had to grab it first. 

It begins on pg 197 paragraph 3 and ends on paragraph 5 of the same page. After babbling on about "The Duke's Manor" and never coming to any real point,  Pratt addresses Lolita's use of crude language, but only after she deemed Humbert's verbal ejaculation of "Sex play" as civilized terminology. (p196, p6). She then proceeds to make herself look like more of a fool when she tells Humbert, who has a firmer grasp on the English language than most native speakers: "I am always fascinated, by the admirable way foreigners---or at least  naturalized Americans--Use our rich language." (p197, p 1) She then proceeds to use the language in a flighty, disjointed way by providing, again, completely irrelevant information. 

The most ironic, and funny bit when describing Lolita's transgression Pratt informs Humbert in an almost soothing tone "It is rather a jolt when Dolly, who looks like a little lady, uses words which you as a foreigner probably simply do not know or do not understand...Dolly has written a most obscene four letter word which our Dr. Cutler tells me is low Mexican for urinal with her lipstick on some health pamphlets which Mrs. Redcock..."and she goes on with more irrelevant information. 

Nabokov continually plays with language throughout this novel, but is never more insulting than in this passage. He pokes fun at pretension and ignorance while injecting some of his own ahem..crude little tidbits. Nabokov's nimble wordplay is a pleasure and a pain. At times he seems to look down on the reader for lacking his agility, but he seems to allow more in the event  of honest confession of intellectual defeat and not "faking it".  The most contempt he has is empty, idle words. Every word in this passage was carefully selected to poke fun, to draw the perfect conclusion. It's tight. 

(naughty)

          One of my favorite passages in Lolita was luckily also one of the stylistically richest, so I’m jumping on it before someone else steals it away. I chose a rather early passage: part two, chapter two, p. 155 “We inspected…” to pg. 158 “…personal belongings.” Humbert manages to sum up the duo’s first helter skelter trip across America in just two paragraphs, which are filled to the brim with his characteristic wordplay. 

“…on her brown shoulder, a raised purple-pink swelling (the work of some gnat) which I eased of its beautiful transparent poison between my long thumbnails and then sucked till I was gorged on her spicy blood.” 

This line was funny, but also rather disturbing. Humbert is troubled by the imperfection the gnat has left on Lolita, and attempts to correct it, but he only unthinkingly mimics the gnat, gorging himself on her blood. While this produces situational irony, it also leaves us with a strange image – it suggests that like the gnat, Humbert is just a parasite feeding off Lolita’s life force. It also suggests that, as is the case here, every time Humbert tries to fix a problem he sees in Lolita’s life, he only blindly repeats the damage that was done before. In this way, his repetition of the gnat’s parasitic feeding is akin to his repetition of Charlie’s defloration of Lolita; in both cases he sees himself as a different, positive force in her life, when he is really only echoing the damage on a larger scale.
             Multiple times in the passage, Humbert shows his possessiveness of Lolita, emphasizing any interaction with other men, such as the way he notes her palms sweating in the presence of the “repulsively handsome White Russian”, the boy who ogles her, and even the “bronzed owner of an expensive car” that she dares to squint at instead of showing interest in the postcard of his father’s hotel. This illustrates the obsession, insecurity, and paranoia that characterize Humbert’s relationship with Lolita, and foreshadows its unavoidable failure. Humbert recognizes and admits that he is imprisoning Lolita, playing on words as he recalls tourist attraction entry fees: “…children under 12 free, Lo a young captive.”
              There are a variety of distinctly American things that both amuse and bemuse Humbert: Bourbon Street “(what fun)”, “Indian ceremonial dances, strictly commercial.”, “…a church built in the shape of a wine barrel”, “ART: American Refrigerator Transit Company”. These not so subtle jabs at American culture are part of a recurring motif in the novel, the conflict of Humbert’s old-world European sensibilities with commercialized American society. Although Humbert is critical of the material society, he is also obsessed with Lolita, who is ultimately a product of that society, in fact, he earlier refers to her as the person “to whom which ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer”. He struggles to reconcile his conflicting thoughts on American society as the novel continues, and this struggle makes for some very interesting social commentary, especially considering that Nabokov was also an immigrant.

“Somber Yellowstone Park and its colored hot springs, baby geysers, rainbows of bubbling mud – symbols of my passion.” 

            This imagery really shows Humbert’s recognition of the foulness of his deeds, but also his attempts to justify them. Like the bubbling mud, his abuse of Lolita is the foulest and dirtiest of deeds, but the juxtaposition of this image of seething filth against ‘rainbows’ is similar to the logic he uses to justify his actions. Although he knows raping Lolita is wrong, he feels that his passion for her is so strong and beautiful that in a way, it transforms the normally filthy action into something beautiful.
            The structure of this passage is very interesting as well. Humbert ranges from short, fragmented sentences “Distant mountains. Near mountains.” or “Fish Hatcheries. Cliff Dwellings.” to long lists spanning multiple topics (see the fourteen line sentence that concludes the paragraph ending on p. 156), and everything in between. He uses parenthetical comments liberally, and often utilizes on repetition and hyperbole to emphasize the repetitive nature of the trip (“Hundreds of scenic drives, thousands of bear creeks” “Our twentieth Hell’s Canyon.” “Always the same three old men…”). These paragraphs straddle the line between stream of consciousness and a traveler’s scribbled notes, and give this passage a much different feel from the rest of the novel. The more fragmented, eclectic structure is purposeful, it highlights the nature of Humbert’s journey and his mental state during this time, showing the unreflective, impulsive way he leads Lolita across the US, focusing on minute details and day to day tourist distractions instead of facing the looming problems the pair must soon face.

Other things I observed but couldn’t attach significance to (but I’d like to hear yours):

§  “(by now we are in Poplar Cove N.C., reached by what my kind, tolerant, usually so restrained tour book angrily calls ‘a very narrow road, poorly maintained,’ to which, though no Kilmerite, I subscribe).” – Personification plus Allusion to Joyce Kilmer, the author of the poem “Trees” (“I think that I shall never see/a poem lovely as a tree”) that the town’s memorial is dedicated to. For the record, I dislike that poem too.

§  “…interrupted in places by pale puffs of aspen; pink and lilac formations, Pharaonic, phallic, ‘too prehistoric for words’…” – Alliteration of P, pharaonic (meaning of a Pharaoh) falls in nicely with “heavy Egyptian limbs” later in the sentence, and "mummy of a child" on the next page, but I'm not sure what Egypt has to do with anything.

On a related note, check this out: http://www.d-e-zimmer.de/LolitaUSA/Trip1.htm