Lolita, Part One – a jumble!

Out of all the things we’ve read thus far, I think Lolita has been the best at illustrating Foucault’s ideas surrounding the discourse of sexuality. I imagine The History of Sexuality would have been much easier for me to understand at the time of reading if, every few paragraphs, there had been an excerpt from Nabakov’s novel exemplifying each concept and string of thoughts regarding them: confession, denial, perversion, secrecy, expression, medicalization, childhood sexuality, and more. Within ten pages of reading I had underlined more than a handful of lines that seemed ideal for this task in particular. What struck me most, however, throughout my reading of the first half of Lolita was the depth and complexity of Humbert Humbert’s character in contrast to the simplistic descriptions of the novel I’ve encountered since I began reading at a young age.

It became immediately apparent that Lolita is much more than a novel about a man who’s a pedophile, period. The many, many layers to Humbert’s actions and psyche are revealed slowly, in anecdotes or use of language or asides to the reader. So much so, in fact, that by the time the reader reaches the end of Part One and has finished reading about Humbert and Lolita’s first sexual encounters, their reaction is more involved than “Ew, what a freak,” or something basic and typical. For me, my understanding had grown over the pages and I somehow visualized in my mind Humbert’s character having aspects of it pulled from the worlds of school, of books, of experience, of fantasy, of childhood, of absurdity, and maybe a little insanity. All of his actions seem influenced by all previous experiences in his life, in a peculiar way that I’m not sure I’m describing very well…

Anyway, in relation to Foucault, I would say that one of my favorite paragraphs from Lolita is on page II, when Humbert describes “the only definite sexual events” that he can remember – the first being “a solemn, decorous and purely theoretical talk about pubertal surprises” and “some interesting reactions on the part of my organism to certain photographs…in Pinchon’s sumptuous La Beaute Humaine…” To me, it becomes increasingly important in the novel to remember these two things and the way they affected Humbert’s life onwards: the ways in which Humbert first experienced or interpreted his sexuality as well as the fact that he never had a complete, satisfactory occasion of sex with Annabel. After all, Humbert does say that “twenty-four years later, [he] broke her spell by incarnating her in another.” (15)

I would be interested to see how much more fantastical the novel becomes over Part Two…in Part One, Humbert often acknowledges that the Lolita he loves currently will not be the same Lolita forever, but one must wonder if the other girls that Humbert sees and identifies as nymphets actually are, or if he’s projecting onto them characteristics and identities that they do not have. Whether or not Humbert is a reliable narrator of his own tale stops me frequently from empathizing too strongly when he tangled layers of his reasoning and thoughts makes his actions excusable.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011 at 12:04 pm and is filed under Savannah. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.