Monday 6 July 2015

நகுலன், லா ச ரா, ஆ மாதவன் - Bogan Sankar , Boast of Quietness - Jorge Luis Borges, L O L I T A

 Bogan Sankar
16 mins ·
உருசுக் குட்டியின்
கூர் தீட்டிய முலைகளிடமிருந்து
விடைபெற்று
லா ச ரா
சாலைத் தெரு
ஆ மாதவனிடம் போனார்
அங்கிருந்து இருவரும்
நகுலனிடம் சென்றார்கள்
நகுலனும் அவர் நாயும்
ஒரே வீட்டில்
தனித்தனியாக இருந்தார்கள்
சுசீலா எங்கே இருக்கிறாள்
என்றதற்கு
''சுசீலாவும் செத்துக் கிடக்கிறாள்''என்றார் நகுலன்
ஜகன்மித்யை
என்று கசிந்தார் லா ச ரா
துரும்பைத் துரத்திப் போகும் துரும்பும்
என்றார் மாதவன்
நிணக் கச்சோடம்
நிணக் கச்சோடம் என்று தனக்குள் சொல்லிக் கொண்டார்.
நகுலனின் நாய்
அவர்களை முறைத்துக் கொண்டிருந்தது
''அவனுக்கு இறைச்சி நாள் இன்று ''
என்றார் நகுலன்
''நேரம் போகப் போக
நாம் எல்லாரும்
அவனுக்கு இறைச்சிப் பொதிகளாய் மாறிக் கொண்டிருக்கிறோம் ''
என்றார் எச்சரிக்கையாக,
லா ச ரா கால்களை
இழுத்துக் கொண்டார்
ஒருக்கால் ..ஒரு கால்
என்று எழுதிக் கொண்டது அவர் மனம்
பிஜாய்ஸ் குப்பியைத் திறந்ததும்
பட்டு உத்தரியம் தொங்க
அந்தரியம் இழுபட
கம்பனும்
ஈசுவர மூலியுடன்
மீசை தளரா பாரதியும் வந்து சேர்ந்துகொண்டார்கள்
உங்களில் யாரும் ராமச்சந்திரன் இல்லையே
என்ற கேள்விக்குப் பிறகு அவர்கள் சேர்த்துக் கொள்ளப்பட்டார்கள்
இரண்டாம் கோப்பைக்கு மேல்
தீமையின் மலர்களை மாதவன் நெகிழ்த்திக் கொண்டிருந்தபோது
ஜாய்சும் ஹென்றி ஜேம்சும் வில்லியம் பாக்னரும் வந்து சேர்ந்து கொண்டார்கள்
பின்னர் ஹோமரும் ஷேக்ஸ்பியரும் கூட
வில்லியம் கார்லோஸ் வில்லியம்சும் ப கமிங்க்சும் மூச்சிரைக்க வந்து சேர்ந்தபோது
இறந்துகிடக்கும் சுசிலாவை எந்தப்பக்கம் திறப்பது என்று நகுலன் தனது
பூனையிடம் விசாரித்துக் கொண்டிருந்தார்
சுசிலாக்கள் திறப்பற்றவர்கள் என்று லாசரா சொன்னார்
மார்புகளுக்கு நடுவில் கொத்தாய்ப் பிடித்துக் கொண்டு கிழித்துத்
திறப்பது சிறந்தது என்று பூனை சொன்னது
அதைக் கேட்டு நகுலனின் கண்களில் இருந்து நீர் சொட்டியது
மாதவன் பூனையின் நகங்களை விரித்துப் பார்த்து வியந்தார்
விஷயம் கேள்விப்பட்டு
நான் போய்ச சேர்ந்த போது
மது தீர்ந்து போயிருந்தது
அவர்கள் போயிருந்தார்கள்

Boast of Quietness ---- —Jorge Jorge Luis Borges f
rom MDM facebook
------------------------------------------
Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors. The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and my death, I observe the ambitious and would like to
understand them.
Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword,
the willow grove's visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude. They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to
arrive.
—Jorge Jorge Luis Borges


L O L I T A
a synopsis in quotationsQuotations are from Lolita and Lolita: A Screenplay in the Library of Americaedition of Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1955-1962, edited by Brian Boyd (1996).
[ Part 1 ]foreward
The author of Lolita, or the Confessions of a White Widowed Male died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952. Humbert Humbert, his bizarre cognomen, is his own invention and mask. Mrs. "Richard F. Schiller" died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952. I have no intention to glorify "H.H." He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author! — John Ray Jr., Ph.D.
[ prospect of my past ]
: 1 : Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Did she have a precursor? Yes she did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea.

 : 2 : I was born in 1910 in Paris. I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces. Mother died in a freak accident; my father owned the seaside Hotel Mirana and had various lady-friends, beautiful and kind beings who shed precious tears over my cheerful motherlessness.

 : 3 : In 1923, Annabel was a lovely child a few months my junior. We were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other. On the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire. Four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.

 : 4 : I am convinced that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel. The shock of Annabel's death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer. One night she managed to deceive the vicious vigilance of her family in a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves. My senses were suddenly filled to the brim; a sudden commotion in a nearby bush prevented them from overflowing. There came from the house her mother's voice, calling her with a rising frantic note. But that mimosa grove - the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since - until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.
[ tried hard to be good ]
: 5 : The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps. In my sanitary relations with women I was practical, ironical and brisk. Paid ladies sufficed me. I found a job teaching English. Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as 'nymphets.' Good looks are not any criterion; and vulgarity, or at least what a given community terms so, does not necessarily impair certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering insidious charm. I was consumed by a hell furnace of localized lust for every passing nymphet whom as a law-abiding poltroon I never dared approach. Humbert Humbert tried hard to be good. Really and truly, he did.

: 6 : I learned what they looked like, those lovely, maddening, thin-armed nymphets, when they grew up. Monique had a childish something mingling with the professionalfrétillement of her small, agile rump; she said she was eighteen but must have been one or two years younger. With her brown bobbed hair, luminous gray eyes and pale skin, she looked perfectly charming: a delinquent nymphet shining through the matter-of-fact young whore. I let myself go with her more completely than I had with any young lady before.

: 7 : Soon after, for my own safety, I decided to marry. My choice fell on the daughter of a Polish doctor: the good man happened to be treating me for spells of dizziness and tachycardia.

: 8 : What really attracted me to Valeria was the imitation she gave of a little girl. But reality soon asserted itself. Instead of a pale little gutter girl, Humbert Humbert had on his hands a large, puffy, short-legged, big-breasted and practically brainless baba. In 1939 mon oncle d'Amérique died bequeathing me an annual income of a few thousand dollars on condition that I came to live in the States. She said "There is another man in my life." Maximovich was a taxi driver, a stocky White Russian ex-colonel with a bushy moustache and a crew cut. Valeria - by now shedding torrents of tears tinged with the mess of her rainbow make-up - filled anyhow a trunk, and two suitcases, and a bursting carton with her things. Visions of putting on my mountain boots and taking a running kick at her rump were of course impossible to put into execution with the cursed colonel hovering around all the time. I sat with arms folded, one hip on the window sill, dying of hate and boredom.

: 9 : Divorce proceedings delayed my voyage, and after a winter of ennui and pneumonia in Portugal I at last reached the States. In New York I eagerly accepted the soft job fate offered me: it consisted mainly of thinking up and editing perfume ads. A dreadful breakdown sent me to a sanitorium for more than a year. I went back to my work - only to be hospitalized again. Robust outdoor life seemed to promise me some relief. I went on an expedition into arctic Canada. Soon after my return to civilization I had another bout with insanity (if to melancholia and a sense if insufferable oppression that cruel term must be applied). I owe my complete restoration to the discovery that there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists, cunningly leading them on, teasing them with fake 'primal scenes'; and never allowing them the slightest glimpse of one's real sexual predicament.
[ passionate recognition ]
: 10 : I cast around for some place in the New England countryside or sleepy small town where I could spend a studious summer. Mrs. Haze of 342 Lawn Street offered to accommodate me. We almost ran over a meddlesome dog as we swerved into Lawn Street. The Haze House, a white-frame horror, appeared, looking dingy and old, more gray than white. Presently, the lady herself - sandals, maroon slacks, yellow blouse, squarish face, in that order - came down the steps. "I see you are not favorably impressed," said the lady, as I pretended to deliberate over the absurdly, and ominously, low price that my wistful hostess was asking for board and bed. I was still walking behind Mrs. Haze through the dining room when, beyond it, there came a sudden burst of greenery - and then, without the least warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses. "That was my Lo," Haze said, "and these are my lilies." "Yes," I said, "they are beautiful, beautiful, beautiful."

 : 11 : May 30 is a fast day by Proclamation in New Hampshire. A few days before that I moved into the Haze house. The little diary I propose to reel off covers most of June. Thursday. Saw Dolores taking things off the clothesline in the apple-green light behind the house. Tuesday. I might say her hair is auburn, and her lips as red as licked candy, the lower one prettily plump. What is most singular is that she, this Lolita, my Lolita, has individualized the writer's ancient lust, so that above and over everything there is - Lolita. Thursday. Now, at twelve, she was a regular pest, said Haze. Sullen and evasive. Rude and defiant. Later, I heard a great banging of doors and other sounds coming from quaking caverns where the two rivals were having a ripping row. Friday. I was aware that mother Haze hated my darling for her being sweet on me. So I planned my lake day with a view to satisfying the mother.

: 12 : For all the devil's inventiveness, the scheme remained daily the same. First he would tempt me - and then thwart me, leaving me with a dull pain in the very root of my being. The agent of these interruptions was usually the Haze woman (who was more afraid of Lo's deriving some pleasure from me than of my enjoying Lo).

 : 13 : She wore that day a pretty print dress, ample in the skirt, tight in the bodice, short-sleeved, pink, checkered with darker pink. She had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple. She snatched out of my abstract grip the magazine I had opened; I whisked it away. In a sham effort to retrieve it, she was all over me. Then, with perfect simplicity, the impudent child extended her legs across my lap. I managed to attune, by a series of stealthy movements, my masked lust to her guileless limbs. Keeping a maniac's inner eye on my distant golden goal, I cautiously increased the magic friction between the weight of two sunburnt legs, resting athwart my lap, and the hidden tumor of an unspeakable passion. We were fantastically and divinely alone; I watched her, rosy, gold-dusted, beyond the veil of my controlled delight, unaware of it, alien to it, and the sun was on her lips, and her lips were apparently still forming the words of the Carmen-barmen ditty that no longer reached my consciousness.

 : 14 : I felt proud of myself. I had stolen the honey of a spasm without impairing the morals of a minor. Absolutely no harm done. And nothing prevented me from repeating a performance that affected her as little as if she were a photographic image rippling upon a screen and I a humble hunchback abusing myself in the dark. And now see how I was repaid for my pains. For three weeks Lolita, Haze decided, would go to a summer camp. And stay there till school began. To explain my grim mood, I had to use the same toothache I had already simulated in the morning. "We have," said Haze, "an excellent dentist. Dr. Quilty. Uncle or cousin, I think, of the playwright. Let me contact Ivor Quilty tomorrow morning if it still hurts."
[ a landlady's order ]
: 15 : Haze, with a dreary laugh, said she had told Lo that her beloved Humbert thoroughly approved of the whole camp idea. And on Thursday quiet Mrs. Haze drove her to Camp Q. Under the poplars, the car was already athrob. Lolita looked up - and dashed back into the house. I heard my sweetheart running up the stairs. My heart expanded with such force that it almost blotted me out. And there she was in my arms, her innocent mouth melting under the ferocious pressure of dark male jaws, my palpitating darling! The next instant I heard her - alive, unraped - clatter downstairs.

 : 16 : Louise left an unstamped, curiously clean-looking letter in my shaking hand. This is a confession: I love you. I have loved you from the minute I saw you. So, will you please, at once, pack and leave. This is a landlady's order. You see, chéri, if you decided to stay, the fact of your remaining would only mean one thing: that you want me as much as I do you: as a lifelong mate. My first movement was one of repulsion and retreat. My second was like a friend's calm hand falling upon my shoulder and bidding me take my time. I got into Lo's bed and reread the letter.

 : 17 : Suddenly, gentlemen of the jury, I felt a Dostoevskian grin dawning like a distant and terrible sun. I imagined all the casual caresses her mother's husband would be able to lavish on his Lolita. So Humbert the Cubus schemed and dreamed - and the red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher. Before such an Amazing Offer, before such a vastness and variety of vistas, I was as helpless as Adam at the preview of early oriental history, miraged in his apple orchard.

: 18 : The wedding was a quiet affair. I simply can't tell you how gentle, how touching my poor wife was. Into the fifty days of our cohabitation Charlotte crammed the activities of as many years. She started to 'glorify the home.' She used up a tremendous amount of energy in washing window shades, waxing the slats of Venetian blinds, purchasing new shades and new blinds, returning them to the store, replacing them by others. The only couple with whom she had relations of real cordiality were the Farlows. John Farlow was a middle-aged, quiet, quietly athletic, quietly successful dealer in sporting goods. Jean, his youngish wife (and first cousin), was a long-limbed girl in harlequin glasses with two boxer dogs, two pointed breasts and a big red mouth.

: 19 : A few words more about Mrs. Humbert while the going is good (a bad accident is to happen quite soon). She showed a fierce insatiable curiosity for my past. I had to invent, or to pad atrociously, a long series of mistresses for Charlotte's morbid delectation. Oh, she simply hated her daughter! She had underlined the following epithets, ten out of forty, under 'Your Child's Personality': aggressive, boisterous, critical, distrustful, impatient, irritable, inquisitive, listless, negativistic (underlined twice) and obstinate. It was really maddening.
[ fat fate's formal handshake ]
: 20 : I am now obliged to describe in some tedious detail our last swim together at Hourglass Lake, one tropical Tuesday morning. Bland American Charlotte frightened me. I dared not do anything to spoil the image of me she had set up to adore. "Little Lo, I'm afraid, does not enter the picture at all, at all. She goes straight from camp to a good boarding school with strict discipline and some sound religious training." I took to the woods, for a spell of despair and desperate meditation. The natural solution was to destroy Mrs. Humbert. But how? Slowly we swam out into the shimmer of the lake. The setting was really perfect for a brisk bubbling murder. Those two tiny very busy figures on the opposite side were just ner enough to witness an accident and just far enough not to observe a crime. But what d'ye know, folks - I just could not make myself do it! And now comes the point of my perfect-crime parable. From the debouchement of the trail came a rustle, a footfall, and Jean Farlow marched down with her easel and things. Jean said she had been up there, in a place of green concealment, spying on nature (spies are generally shot), trying to finish a lakescape. "I almost put both of you into my lake," she said.

 : 21 :It occurred to me that I had a fine brain in beautiful working order and that I might as well use it. I resolved to press my advantage and spend a good deal of time, aloof and moody, working at my book - or at least pretending to work. So Charlotte sauntered in. She felt all was not well between us. Charlotte went up to a little table of imitation mahogany with a drawer where I kept my diary hidden. "Why is this thing locked up?" "Locked up love letters." Later I checked the hiding place of the key. Remarkable how difficult it is to conceal things - especially when one's wife keeps monkeying with the furniture.

: 22 : Next day, after lunch, I went to see 'our' doctor. Throughout most of July I had been experimenting with various sleeping powders, trying them out on Charlotte, a great taker of pills. He produced a vial of violet-blue capsules banded with dark purple at one end. I left in great spirits. Everything was somehow so right that day. So blue and green. Charlotte sat at the corner bureau writing a letter. Her face, disfigured by her emotion, was not a pretty sight. "You're a monster! You're a detestable, abominable, criminal fraud. If you come near, I'll scream out the window. Get back!" I went up to the ex-semi-studio, surveying from the threshold the raped little table with its open drawer. I calmly removed my diary from under her pillow into my pocket. I rearranged my respiration and went through the hallway to the kitchen. She could never resist Scotch. I placed the glasses on the sideboard near the telephone, which had started to ring. "There's this man saying you've been killed, Charlotte." But there was no Charlotte in the living room.

: 23 : A big black glossy Packard had climed Miss Opposite's sloping lawn at an angle from the sidewalk, where a tartan laprobe had dropped in a heap concealing the mangled remains of Charlotte Humbert who had been knocked down and dragged several feet by the Beale car as she was hurrying across the street to drop three letters in the mailbox. The widower, a man of exceptional self-control, neither wept nor raved. He was put to bed in Dolly's room by his two friends, gentle John and dewy-eyed Jean. The distraught father went on to say he would go and fetch his delicate daughter immediately after the funeral. And nothing might have happened, had not precise fate, that synchronizing phantom, mixed within its alembic the car and the dog and the sun and the shade and the wet and the weak and the strong and the stone. Fat fate's formal handshake brought me out of my torpor; and I wept.
[ the Enchanted Hunters ]
: 24 : For unknown adventures I was leaving the livid house where I had rented a room only ten weeks before. I do not know if in these tragic notes 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. Jean Farlow, who was thirty-one and absolutely neurotic, had also apparently developed a strong liking for me. Tears in her bright blue eyes, she attempted, unsuccessfully, to glue herself to my lips. Dust was running and writhing over the exact slab of stone where Carlotte, when they lifted the laprobe for me, had been revealed, curled up, her eyes intact, their black lashes still wet, matted, like yours, Lolita.

: 25 : Instead of basking in the beams of smiling Chance, I was obsessed by all sorts of purely ethical doubts and fears. My scheme was a marvel of primitive art: I would whizz over to Camp Q, tell Lolita her mother was about to undergo a major operation, and then keep moving with my sleepy nymphet from inn to inn while her mother got better and better and finally died. I devoted the whole afternoon to buying beautiful things for Lo. I recalled the hotel or inn with the seductive name of The Enchanted Hunters which Charlotte had happened to mention. I decided to send a wire ordering a room with twin beds for the next night. What a comic, clumsy, wavering Prince Charming I was!

 : 26 :This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. That must have been around August 15, 1947. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita.

: 27 : I reached my destination around half past two; parked my car in a pine grove where green-shirted, redheaded impish Charlie Holmes stood throwing horseshoes in sullen solitude. She was thinner and taller, and for a second it seemed to me her face was less pretty than the mental imprint I had cherished for more than a month. In the hot car she settled down beside me, slapped a prompt fly on her lovely knee. "Well, you haven't kissed me yet, have you?" Hardly had the car come to a standstill than Lolita positively flowed into my arms. We drove through weakly lighted streets in search of The Enchanted Hunters. "Wow! Looks swank," remarked my vulgar darling. In the slow clear hand of crime I wrote: Dr. Edgar H. Humbert and daughter. It was then that I sprang my surprise gifts. Then she crept into my waiting arms, radiant, relaxed, caressing me with her tender, mysterious, impure, indifferent, twilight eyes - for all the world, like the cheapest of cheap cuties. I produced a small vial containing Papa's Purple Pills. I had hoped the drug would work fast. It certainly did. She sat down on the edge of the bed, swaying a little, speaking in dove-dull, long-drawn tones. "Oh, I've been such a disgusting girl," she went on, shaking her hair, removing with slow fingers a velvet hair ribbon. "Lemme tell you -" "Tomorrow, Lo. Go to bed, go to bed." I pocketed the key and went downstairs.

: 28 : I was still firmly resolved to pursue my policy of sparing her purity by operating only in the stealth of night, only upon a completely anesthetized little nude. I should have understood that Lolita had alreadyproved to be something quite different from innocent Annabel, and that the nymphean evil breathing through every pore of the fey child that I had prepared for my secret delectation, would make the secrecy impossible, and the delectation lethal. I wandered through the various public rooms, glory below, gloom above: for the look of lust is always gloomy. In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood. All I would do - all I would dare to do - would amount to such a trifle ... Suddenly I was aware that in the darkness next to me there was somebody sitting in a chair on the pillared porch. "Where the devil did you get her?" "My daughter." "You lie - she's not." At least half an hour had elapsed. One could still - but the key was already in the lock, and then I was in the room.
[ such a disgusting girl ]
: 29 : I seemed to have shed my clothes and slipped into pajamas when Lolita turned her head and stared at me through striped shadows and thickly calling me 'Barbara.' As I learned later from a helpful pharmaceutist, the purple pill was too mild a sedative to affect for any length of time a wary, albeit weary, nymphet. 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. She was again fast asleep, my nymphet, but still I did not dare to launch upon my enchanted voyage. She freed herself from the shadow of my embrace with the neutral plaintive murmur of a child demanding its natural rest. Mists of tenderness enfolded mountains of longing. By six she was wide awake, and by six fifteen we were technically lovers. I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me. I gently caressed her hair, and we gently kissed. All at once, with a burst of rough glee (the sign of the nymphet!), she put her mouth to my ear and whispered. I answered I did not know what game she and Charlie had played. "Okay," said Lolita, "here is where we start." She was not quite prepared for certain discrepancies between a kid's life and mine. Pride alone prevented her from giving up; for, in my strange predicament, I feigned supreme stupidity and had her have her way. But really these are irrelevant matters; I am not concerned with so-called 'sex' at all. Anybody can imagine those elements of animality. A greater endeaver lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets.

: 30 : I have to tread carefully. I have to speak in a whisper. It would never do, would it, to have you fellows fall in love with my Lolita! Had I been a painter, had the management of The Enchanted Hunters commissioned me to redecorate their dining room with murals of my own making, this is what I might have thought up: There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. 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.

: 31 : I have but followed nature. I am nature's faithful hound. Why then this horror that I cannot shake off? Did I deprive her of her flower? Sensitive gentlewomen of the jury, I was not even her first lover.

: 32 : Through July, every morning Barbara and Lo would be helped to carry the canoe to Onyx or Eryx by Charlie Holmes, the camp mistress' son, aged thirteen; and at one point, among the luxuriant undergrowth, Lo would be left as sentinel while Barbara and the boy copulated behind a bush. At first, Lo had refused to 'try what it was like,' but curiosity and cameraderie prevailed, and soon she and Barbara were doing it by turns with the silent, coarse and surly but indefatigable Charlie. I had Lo go to the bathroom and take a much-needed soap shower. When she was ready at last, I gave her a lovely new purse of simulated calf and told her to buy herself a magazine in the lobby. A fellow my age in tweeds was staring at my Lolita over his dead cigar and stale newspaper. Still reading, she was driven to a so-called coffee shop a few blocks south. I was unbathed, unshaven, and had had no bowel movement. My nerves were a-jangle. More and more uncomfortable did Humbert feel. It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed. "You chump," she said, sweetly smiling at me. "You revolting creature. I was a daisy-fresh girl, and look what you've done to me. I ought to call the police and tell them you raped me. Oh, you dirty, dirty old man." An ominous hysterical note rang through her silly words. "Look," she said in that neutral voice that hurt me so, "give me some dimes and nickels. I want to call mother in that hospital." "You can't call that number." "Why can't I call my mother if I want to?" "Because," I answered, "your mother is dead."

 : 33 :In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four books of comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary napkins, sunglasses, some more garments. At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely no where else to go.
So ends Part 1 of Lolita. To read Nabokov's version of On the Road, and find out about Humbert as housewife, the mysterious Aztec Red convertible, Lolita's betrayal, pregnant Mrs. Dolly Schiller, and the final confrontation at Pavor Manor — buy the book!
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© 1999 Bruce MacEvoy
L O L I T A
a synopsis in quotationsQuotations are from Lolita and Lolita: A Screenplay in the Library of America edition of Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1955-1962, edited by Brian Boyd (1996).

E X C E R P T S
two passages from the novel

Quotations are from Lolita in the Library of America edition of Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1955-1962, edited by Brian Boyd (1996).

[ Annabel by the sea ]
The narrator, Humbert Humbert, opens his story by exploring his first love, Annabel, as the seed of his sexual desire for young girls. This is the most erotic passage in the book; and his drowsy nighttime lover subtly prefigures his later idea to ravish a drugged Lolita as she sleeps.
I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity? When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel. ...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.I recall the scent of some kind of toilet powder - I believe she stole it from her mother's Spanish maid - a sweetish, lowly, musky perfume. It mingled with her own biscuity odor, and my senses were suddenly filled to the brim; a sudden commotion in a nearby bush prevented them from overflowing - and as we drew away from each other, and with aching veins attended to what was probably a prowling cat, there came from the house her mother's voice calling her, with a rising frantic note - and Dr. Cooper ponderously limped out into the garden. But that mimosa grove the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since - until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.
[ the final insight ]
In the novel's last pages, as the police are carrying him into captivity, Humbert recalls the frantic days after Lolita had finally left him. Sick with grief on a mountain road, he finally accepts partial awareness of the damage that his passion has inflicted on a little girl.
One day, soon after her disappearance, an attack of abominable nausea forced me to pull up on the ghost of an old mountain road that now accompanied, now traversed a brand new highway, with its population of asters bathing in the detached warmth of a pale-blue afternoon in late summer. After coughing myself inside out I rested a while on a boulder and then thinking the sweet air might do me good, walked a little way toward a low stone parapet on the precipice side of the highway. Small grasshoppers spurted out of the withered roadside weeds. A very light cloud was opening its arms and moving toward a slightly more substantial one belonging to another, more sluggish, heavenlogged system. As I approached the friendly abyss, I grew aware of a melodious unity of sounds rising like vapor from a small mining town that lay at my feet, in a fold of the valley. One could make out the geometry of the streets between blocks of red and gray roofs, and green puffs of trees, and a serpentine stream, and the rich, ore-like glitter of the city dump, and beyond the town, roads crisscrossing the crazy quilt of dark and pale fields, and behind it all, great timbered mountains. But even brighter than those quietly rejoicing colors - for there are colors and shades that seem to enjoy themselves in good company - both brighter and dreamier to the ear than they were to the eye, was that vapory vibration of accumulated sounds that never ceased for a moment, as it rose to the lip of granite where I stood wiping my foul mouth. And soon I realized that all these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but these came from the streets of the transparent town, with the women at home and the men away. Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic - one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.
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L O L I T A
a n   a p p r e c i a t i o n
Quotations are from Lolita and Lolita: A Screenplay in the Library of America edition of Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1955-1962 , edited by Brian Boyd (1996).
[ the morality thing ]
Lolita starts with the premise that because we are human, we have desires. Then adds that because we our human, our desires cannot be acted on impulsively; our desires have moral consequences.Morality means others judge our needs, impose through opinion and law the oppressive duty to live as they think we should. But some of our desires are too strong for these weak restraints. They lead us to the wrong choices, even to habitual deception. If discovered we suffer shame, scorn or prosecution.
We stumble and fail in the tangle of what we want and what others think is right. Despite our suffering we never really pierce the mystery of ourselves and why our most basic desires collide with a world of right and wrong.
For all its sadness, Lolita portrays how miserably funny this is. We can salvage dignity through our capacity to laugh at our own torment and our capacity to pity and care for others.
Humbert Humbert, pervert murderer, has lusted and seduced in ways our society utterly rejects. As a child molester writing the summary of his life, he cannot laugh at himself, and he cannot pity others. He can ape, and clown, spin excuses and dramatic confessions, exult with triumph or rage with frustration. But he cannot pity his victim enough to spare her the torment of his desires.It is for the reader to laugh and to pity him.
 [  ]
Morality is something that the reader brings to the book because the book does not offer a moral point of view: it is written by a criminal.Humbert writes Lolita in a prison cell as evidence in his defense. He is on trial for the murder of Clare Quilty, famous dramatist. Humbert occasionally addresses the reader as "ladies and gentlemen of the jury" or some mordant equivalent, and this reminds us of the basic situation.
But his confession very quickly reveals a completely different and unexpected crime: that for many years he had manipulated and sexually abused a young girl, Dolores Haze, whom he calls "Lolita" with a lascivious tripping of the tongue. He says he murdered Clare Quilty in retribution for seducing his child lover away from him. As he finishes the manuscript, he decides to withhold it until both he and Lolita are dead, claiming to know that he may be convicted by this lack of evidence. But he dies of heart failure (one does not speak in Lolita of a broken heart) before the trial begins.
Now, Humbert sometimes refers to himself as a beast, he sometimes expresses sadness or humiliation at his own acts, he sometimes scorns his own stupidity, and he seems unflinchingly honest as he confesses his seductions, lies, schemes, plots and act of murder. But he doesn't much talk about the murder. He is consumed by his sexual attraction Lolita. Even more: he speaks of her as the great love of his life and the burning meaning of his whole existence. We do not judge a murder, but a love story.
So we are invited to read a document revealing the guilt of a sex pervert, offered as evidence to excuse a murderer, in a trial that will never happen because everyone — Humbert, Quilty, and even Lolita — is dead.
The reader's curiosity is invited in by the officious comments of John Ray Jr., Ph.D., editor of the manuscript, who helpfully suggests that "in this poignant study there lurks a general lesson." This seems to give the reader both a moral and esthetic justification for perusing the pervert's text. But it also certifies that it is "us" who look at him.
By mooting the murder trial through the death of the accused, Nabokov gives the reader complete moral freedom. Our judgment is a personal reaction, not a social duty. But what really is our judgment? Is it that Humbert is immoral? Humbert agrees. Is it that Humbert is degenerate, disgusting? He agrees. That he must renounce his passion for Lolita? Here he is silent. He asks Lolita to forgive him for loving her. But he cannot give up his longing for her.Lolita tests our moral sense through a pariah. Humbert is a man who cannot relinquish his desires in order to join our moral world. Yet those desires seem fit to earn him our harshest condemnation.
  [  ]
Ironically, we can judge Humbert only if we believe what he tells us is true. But the truth of his testimony is hard to establish.There seems good reason to reject his testimony out of hand. He is awaiting trial — why shouldn't he lie? He describes in detail his ability to deceive others and disguise his crimes. He knows the jurors can convict him, why shouldn't he play on their pity? He brags about his ability to manipulate the feelings of his former physicians, psychiatrists, wives.
Humbert's seduction expands. Not only does he by his own admission seduce various women and young girls (using these admissions to comment on his physical attractiveness), he is perhaps trying to seduce us as well — to credulity, to compassion, to consent to the longing that consumes him.
He pits his words against the reader's conscience. And what amazing, powerful, hypnotizing words they are. The detail and precision of his descriptions challenge our skepticism through the intense reality they invoke. The humor and irony and horror and misery of the novel erode our detachment until we feel an empathy for Humbert's suffering.
He wants to turn the empathy in this single direction: that we let him have his longing, his love. And in a sense, this means letting him have Lolita.
But false notes crop up in the many justifications that Humbert scatters throughout his seductive story. Among them, his claim that Lolita was instigator of their overt sexual relations ("it was she who seduced me"), that anyway Lolita had already been seduced by a playmate ("I was not even her first lover"); that besides Humbert intended many precautions to preserve her innocence (soporifics, fondling without intercourse); that many cultures accept love between adults and children; that nymphets are not really children but demonic spirits, as any knowing observer will tell you; and Humbert did "try hard to be good. Really and truly he did..."
But is there really any merit to these claims? Of course not. Sexual intercourse with preadolescent girls is a perversion. A flirtatious child should be admonished, not fondled. Sex between a child and her playmate doesn't excuse sex between the child and her parent. What other cultures accept has little relevance to what our morality requires. The idea that children might be demonic is no pretext to exploit them. "Trying hard to be good" must include cooperating honestly with one's therapists and wife; and so on. We can add that lying and deceiving others are wrong; and murder for revenge is wrong.
In our culture, in this time, you either understand these things or you don't. Humbert's excuses show that he doesn't understand them. The reader does. Nabokov even has wooden Dr. Ray shuffle out to make the moral matters perfectly clear.So his justifications seem flimsy enough to be insincere. "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style," he comments. But if he only wants to seduce us, why would he point out to us the style he is using to do it?
  [  ]
The new possibility is that there is another victim in Humbert's seductive story: himself. This spins things in a new direction, from whether Humbert wants us to believe him, to whether he believes himself.The roots of this theme appear in the first pages of his story, where Humbert loves and then loses to typhus his lovely twelve year old Annabel Leigh by the sea. Humbert claims that this experience scarred him and that the scar shaped his destiny. With an astounding consistency, he traces how all his acts, all his thoughts, flow as consequences of that wound and his struggle against its pain.
But is this remarkable clarity insight, or fiction? To that objection, Humbert offers as it were a torture test of his sincerity. Whatever a man believes will relieve his unbearable pain becomes through that pain a pure conviction. If Humbert's excuses were only directed at us they would be worthless, mere pandering to our sentimentality. But if they were the excuses and rationalizations Humbert rehearsed to himself, as attempts to cure his pain, they would be truthful. The irony of this argument is that the crazier his reasoning sounds, the more desperate would be the torment that formed it.
This torture test is the implicit reason why Humbert goes into such detail about the events or crimes in his life (the almost-drowning of Charlotte Haze, for example) that we would never know about otherwise. He is painting the full depths of his suffering. In the context of that suffering, he can introduce his illogical justifications without appearing to insult our intelligence.
Finally there is Humbert's obvious vanity, which emerges in his shallow demonstrations of intellectual superiority, his tailored clothing, the icy rage at his suspected rivals for Lolita's affections, his delight in manipulating other people, and his arty language. We might think that Humbert is writing at such length because it gratifies his vanity. But his writing only shows us that he has ruined his life for the embraces of an indifferent little brat.
When he describes his past, we see that the lies to others and the lies to himself get mixed up — for example, in his futilely optimistic marriage to Valeria, or his refusal to see Lolita's unfaithfulness. So the crux of the reader's problem is that we do not know when Humbert is lying and when he is telling us the truth.
This is the dark fascination of the book. Humbert feels pain, and so do we. Humbert didn't consciously choose his nature, and neither did we. Humbert wrestles with his pain, again just like us. As he struggles, he devises justifications for the things that bring him relief, just as we often do. Some of these justifications shield him from the judgment of others, and some shield him from his own despair and self loathing. Seen in this way, Humbert is no different from us.
But for this one detail: Humbert cannot escape his longing, no matter how much pain it causes him. His longing is not mere torment, but the very core of his existence. Without his longing his life would have no meaning. And without it, alone in jail, he dies.All that is not along the lines suggested by Dr. Ray's excuses, but it is also a more complicated moral predicament than the sturdy psychologist seems capable of offering ... pervert there, "us" normal folks here.
  [  ]
Some critics have followed helpful Dr. Ray's esthetic appreciations and characterized the novel in purely artistic terms, as the allegory (the "tendresse") of old-world Nabokov's romance with the feisty youthful American language. This is a weirdly tepid explanation for a terribly sad and disturbing book.If we want to search for a single thematic image — in itself not a very clever goal — then a good place to look is Speak, Memory(1951), the autobiography that occupied Nabokov for three years before work on Lolita began. And when we read the autobiography for hints of the fiction, we discover an episode that suggests Humbert's passion for nymphets took its moral reality from Nabokov's passion for ... butterflies.
Judge for yourself:
Few things indeed have I known in the way of emotion or appetite, ambition or achievement, that could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration. From the very first it had a great many intertwinkling facets. One of them was the acute desire to be alone, since any companion, no matter how quiet, intefered with the concentrated enjoyment of my mania. Its gratification admitted of no compromise or exception. Already when I was ten, tutors and governesses knew that the morning was mine and cautiously kept away.In this connection, I remember the visit of a schoolmate, a boy of whom I was very fond and with whom I had excellent fun. He arrived one summer night — in 1913, I think — from a town some twenty-five miles away. His father had recently perished in an accident, the family was ruined and the stout-hearted lad, not being able to afford the price of a railway ticket, had bicycled all those miles to spend a few days with me.On the morning following his arrival, I did everything I could to get out of the house for my morning hike without his knowing where I had gone. Breakfastless, with hysterical haste, I gathered my net, pill boxes, killing jar, and escaped through the window. Once in the forest, I was safe; but still I walked on, my calves quaking, my eyes full of scalding tears, the whole of me twitching with shame and self-disgust, as I visualized my poor friend, with his long pale face and black tie, moping in the hot garden — patting the panting dogs for want of something better to do, and trying hard to justify my absence to himself.
The scene is powerful in its moral clarity. How selfish did Nabokov have to be to sneak away from a bikesore, impoverished, lonely and grieving friend to stalk and capture a few insects? Clearly, selfish enough to sink beneath his own moral limits — not just to a pang of guilt but to burning tears of humiliation. Yet he followed his desire.In Lolita Nabokov wrote concretely about the struggle of our desires against our better selves, and the corroding effects of that struggle on our sense of reality and truth, and the inextricable pain that our deepest loves create for us. There is no allegory. Nabokov created a pervert, but invested him with a moral selfishness that Nabokov recognized in himself.
The difference between Nabokov the child slighting a friend, and Humbert the adult abusing a child is, of course, the difference between reality and art. Where readers of this book share the predicament of Nabokov and Humbert is that we can be miserable about the moral consequences of our desires — but we follow them anyway, because without them, life would have no meaning.

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