LITERATURE: Lolita – Layers of Narrative

Humbert has just met Lolita, and while we can tell that his plan was to seduce a young girl where he thought he’d be staying–all he knew was that she was twelve years old–the plans have changed due to a house fire, and instead he is led to the home of Mrs. Haze.  He is not happy with the accomodations, but his pulse quickens at the sight of Mrs. Haze’s daughter, the nubile Lolita.

I was still walking behind Mrs. Haze through the dining room when, beyond it, there came a sudden burst of greenery–"the piazza," sang out my leader, 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.  (p. 39)

Now I had seen the 1962 Stanley Kubrick (Clockwork Orange–also on my reading list) movie version of Lolita with James Mason and Sue Lyon when it first came out, but don’t remember it all that well.  In reading the original novel I see a more complex character in Humbert than mere pedophile.  This is not a man’s mid-life crisis; it is his strongest desire since he felt up his childhood love, Annabel.  In the above passage, he is comparing Lolita to Annabel, and the result is a total wave of passion.

What is the "blue sea-wave" that lifts his heart?  Blue has often been used to denote off-color or soft porn references.  While water should cleanse, I would think in this instance it does not but perhaps instead is a taking-over, as one would be helpless in an active sea. 

Why does Nabokov have Lolita kneeling?  It is possibly a subservient, sexual image that certainly would appeal to Humbert. 

We all have fantasies.  Humbert seems, however, to make his fantasies real, as well as his reality into fantasy.  Just as he boasts of his manliness, his good looks, his ease with women, and justifies his attraction to puerile feminity, he also claims shame at some points in the narrative.  There are two sides of Humbert and I tend to think that the dark glasses that Lolita is wearing are the border between the two.   An invitation–or what Humbert takes as such–by Lolita to pass through as she looks at him over the top of the rims.