Vladimir Nabokov's Style

Hello again bloggers!

A great deal has happened in Lolita since I last chatted with you. I’ll try to summarize it as briefly as possible:

Since we left Humbert Humbert in his new marriage to Charlotte Haze, Humbert continued to devise a plan to maintain a romantic relationship with Lolita when she returned from summer camp. Although the thought and opportunity to murder Mrs. Haze crossed Humbert’s path, he ultimately could not find the will to go through with it.

Ironically, during Humbert’s fantasies of her death, Mrs. Haze grew increasingly fond of Humbert. Her fondness, however, ceased upon the fateful morning that she discovered the love letters and diary entries Humbert had written about Lolita and locked away in his desk. In a delusional state of rage and disgust, Mrs. Haze rushed across the street to mail a letter to her daughter where a car killed her upon impact. While the event was initially shocking to Humbert, it was not long before the elation over his new possession of Lolita as her sole guardian settled in. Humbert spent the next week arranging for the safe realization of his fantasy.

At the end of the week, Humbert picked Lolita up from camp early claiming that Mrs. Haze had been hospitalized for experiencing abdominal pain. Lolita had no reason to question his story and faithfully followed Humbert to the hotel where they had their first sexual encounter. From that encounter, Humbert learned that Lolita was not in fact a virgin and did not entirely live up to the ideal he had developed of her.

For the next few months, Humbert and Lolita road tripped across the U.S., and Humbert began to distaste Lolita’s childish materialism and indifference to natural beauty. His obsession, however, did not diminish, and he terrorized Lolita into believing that she has no other choice than to stay silent in Humbert’s custody.

(Still from the 1962 film adaptation)

Now that you’re up to date on the plot, let’s get to the subject of today’s blog post: Vladimir Nabokov's writing style. In my opinion, the style of Lolita is characterized by two main elements, its figurative language and its point of view.

Figurative language is a major characteristic of the novel’s style because of the lyrical nature of Nabokov’s writing. Nearly every chapter in the novel contains imagery and figurative language of some sort. The following is a typical passage from the novel: “And then, in the velvet of a summer night, my brooding over the philter I had with me! Oh miserly Hamburg! Was he not a very Enchanted Hunter as he deliberated with himself over his boxful of magic ammunition?...Much too precious was each tiny plum, each microscopic planetarium with its live stardust. Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical” (page 109). In this passage, Humbert uses the terms “philter,” “magical ammunition,” “tiny plum,” and “microscopic planetarium” all to refer to the maximum strength sleeping pills that the doctor had prescribed to him for his feigned insomnia. (I should clarify that when Humbert later attempted to use the pills, he discovered that they were not actually strong barbiturates.) Without ever stating the words “sleep” or “pill” Humbert conveys through this passage that he worships the pills for providing him with the chance to covertly rape Lolita.

There are many other messages and events in the novel that are conveyed without being directly stated, especially those of a sexual nature. On page 135, Humbert implies that he has had sex with Lolita in two separate ways. The first is through a description of the way he would paint the beauty he associates with Lolita: “There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child.” The second is through the suggestion of their meal the next morning, a breakfast of “mealy bananas and bruised peaches.” Through suggestions like these, the reader must constantly infer Humbert’s actions.

Point of view is equally as influential in the story as its figurative language. For the most part, Humbert tells his story in the first person point of view because the entire novel is his confession to an unspecified crime. Due to the nature of a confession, readers must be aware that the narrator, Humbert, is biased toward himself and is constantly trying to convince his audience, “the jury,” of the morality of his actions. In that respect, Humbert’s writing is persuasive. As great persuasive writing often does, Humbert includes countless literary appeals to logos and pathos throughout his confession.

One example of Humbert’s utilization of appeals to logos are the allusions he makes in the quote, “Oh Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe’s, and Bea Dante’s” (page 107). The first allusion is to Edgar Allen Poe and his wife Virginia Eliza Poe, first cousins who were publicly married when Edgar was 27 and Virginia was 13. This allusion is made more than once throughout the novel. The second allusion is to Dante Alighieri and a woman named Beatrice who he claims to have fallen in love with when she was eight years old. Both of these allusions serve as an attempt by Humbert to normalize his relationship with Lolita and to prove that his infatuation with a minor is not unusual.

Another example of Humbert using an appeal to logos to normalize his relationship is when he cites several periods throughout history when similar relationships had been socially acceptable. He states, “we are not surrounded in our enlightened era by little slave flowers that can be casually plucked between business and bath as they used to be in the days of the Romans; and we do not, as dignified Orientals did in still more luxurious times, use tiny entertainers fore and aft between the mutton and the rose sherbet” (page 124).

Appeals to pathos can be found just as frequently in Humbert’s narration. On page 129 for example, Humbert begs readers to attempt to see his gentleness in the quote, “Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let’s even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling. For instance, I had no place to rest my head, and a fit of heartburn was added to my discomfort.” This quote is describing the position he freezes in just before he attempts to rape Lolita in her sleep but realizes that the sleeping pills he tried to drug her with had not worked. By asking readers to see “the doe” in him, he tries to paint himself as a gentle, compassionate individual for choosing not to go through with his plan while there was a chance of her realizing what was happening to her. The quote is one of Humbert’s many attempts to get his audience to view him as a caring individual so they may feel sympathetic toward his situation.

Another significant aspect of point of view in Lolita is the fact that Humbert selects certain elements of his story to tell in the third person. There are various reasons why Humbert switches to the third person in his narration, and they are always intentional. One reason Humbert chooses to describe events in the third person is that he would prefer not to disclose his thoughts. An example of that reasoning can be found in the quote immediately following the description of Mrs. Haze’s death; “the widower,” (Humbert) “a man of exceptional self-control, neither wept nor raved. He staggered a bit, that he did, but he opened his mouth only to impart such information or issue such directions as were strictly necessary in connection with the identification, examination and disposal of a dead woman, the top of her head a porridge of bone, brains, bronze hair and blood” (page 98). In this instance, it would work against Humbert to describe to the jury the absence of negative emotions he should have felt toward his wife’s death or the excitement that he likely felt in its place.

Another reason Humbert occasionally shifts into third person narration is explained in the quote, “I have sufficiently stressed the peculiar ‘sending’ effect that the writer’s good looks - pseudo-Celtic, attractively simian, boyishly manly - had on women of every age and environment. Of course, such announcements made in the first person may sound ridiculous. But every once in a while, I have to remind the reader of my appearance much as a professional novelist, who has given a character of his some mannerism or a dog, has to go on producing that dog or that mannerism every time the character crops up in the course of the book” (page 104). In short, he shifts to the third person in order to emphasize physical characteristics of himself that would not come across through first person narration.

A final reason that Humbert shifts into third person narration is to distance his present self from the actions he performed in the past. The quote, “‘We might [go see that movie],’ chanted Humbert - knowing perfectly well, the sly tumescent devil, that by nine, when his show began, she would be dead in his arms” (page 116) is a perfect example of that effect. In this quote, Humbert refers to himself in the third person because he is ashamed or would like to appear ashamed of his plan to drug and rape Lolita at the time of the movie she had requested to see.

To summarize, Vladimir Nabokov’s style is certainly an impressive one consisting of figurative language, an extremely complex point of view, allusions, and appeals to logos and pathos. I’d love to hear anyone else’s thoughts on my analysis!