In this extract from II.20, Humbert Humbert’s « lurking eye, the ever alert periscope of [his] shameful vice (264) has reverted to another sort of gazing and description than in the first part of the book. The description of Lolita’s tennis game by Humbert becomes a eulogy for “aesthetic bliss” without regard for the “ethical impact” (5) of his confession: no feeling of guilt in this passage, no justification either (“Absolutely no harm done.” I.14), the nymphet’s innocence is enough, in his mind, to redeem him in the eyes of his jury (“Winged gentlemen!”). The scene takes place during the narrator and Lolita’s second road trip, simultaneously a running away from Beardsley and a means for Quilty to lure Dolores away from Humbert. This trip is charged with a sense of melancholy of their first journey through the U.S., and with the narrator’s longing for a nymphet always-already lost: it is as if Humbert reenacted the nymphet’s disappearance in order to sustain himself, making her, in turn, the absolute center around which his obsession revolves: “l’obsession littéraire fait fusionner en son esthétique paradoxale, vertige de l’anéantissement et stratégie de survie, preuve par l’absurde de l’évidement du sens ou affirmation obstinée de son impossible dissolution ». We will see how that tension between memory and desire translates for the narrator into a double vision of the nymphet, in turn sublimated, then eroticized. We will then see how that tension is resolved, at the same time fulfilling Humbert’s dream of immortalizing the nymphet, and burying her.
Humbert, a stranger to the principles of production and preservation, insulated from the society in which he lives, confines himself to consuming its products endlessly (the status of a newsreel changing when watched over and over, p.170) and endeavors to consummate the nymphet in the same way.
He relishes her artful technique precisely because it is devoid of consequence: “Her form was, indeed, an absolutely perfect imitation of absolutely top-notch tennis—without any utilitarian results.” (l.32-33). Similarly, we may question the role of Humbert’s description of the nymphet as tennis-player. Through his retelling, the game of tennis reaches an almost mythical dimension, the frequentative use of the modal will (26) shows clearly enough that Humbert sums up events he has watched unfolding time and time again, and tries to recapture the poetic dimension of his ecstasy (“almost painful convulsion” l.57-58 ; “teasing delirious feeling” l.10), rather than one single particular occurrence: Lolita’s grace nullifies the laws of gravity, the tennis ball is suspended, in time and in space, “in the zenith of the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of falling upon it […]” (53-54). But if Lolita, in this extract, has become a weaver (“weaving of those delicate spells” l.1-2; “vital web of balance” l.51), the reader knows that Humbert is the actual spider, a maimed (“like some paralytic” I.11) misshapen (“on soft distorted limbs” I.11) hairy (“huge hairy hand” I.13) species of arachnid, and Dolores Haze the nymph he has caught within his “sinuous trail of slime” (II.3).
In that respect, idealizing Lolita is but a strategy of concealment, a scene of purely visual pleasure in place of other scenes of pleasure, banned from sight by the narrator’s poetic efforts, never to be screened, but on “the projection room of [his] pain and despair.” (l.24-25)
Whereas everything tends to piece together the description of Lolita’s dancing with episodes of nymphet consummation (« leg-parted; languorous and jerky motions; her not quite nubile limbs had given me pleasure» l.5-8), Humbert is unable to prevent the fading away of desire: their intimacy is now reduced to their “dark life” (l.30). On the other hand, the sensual aura that emanated from Lolita has become a miraculous one: watching her play triggers in Humbert a « teasing delirious feeling of teetering on the very brink of unearthly order and splendor » (l.10-11). Mere pleasure (“nothing, absolutely nothing” l.8-9) is contrasted with a feeling that verges on the sacred and the divine, yet, ever since Georges Bataille, we know that “Plus grande est la beauté, plus profonde est la souillure » (L’Erotisme, p.161). The more Humbert translates Lolita into a poetic entity, the more his proximity taints her irretrievably: “mon grand péché radieux, had dwindled to its essence: sterile and selfish vice” (II.29).
If Lolita’s tennis game too can be read as the reverse of Humbert and Lolita’s “connection,” (“duties” l.3, also reminiscent of “morning duty” II.2), then there is indeed eroticization of her body. From l.16 to l.23, she is described in a syncopated way, thin layers of clothing overlapping with intervals of “apricot” body parts (“c’est l’intermittence […] qui est érotique”) and for the narrator, clothes virtually amount to nothing: “the […] psychologically very friable […] material divide” (59). Yet, by drawing this portrait of Lolita in tennis outfit, Humbert is also making an inventory of sorts, not unlike the long consumerist enumeration of II.2: « Le blason = le catalogue […] inventaire du corps aimé comme accumulation de biens possédés ». It starts with her shorts, and ends with the price of her racket, incongruously minimizing the importance of her body: underneath the description lies the image, in negative, of the disarticulated mannequins of II.19 (“when clothed it had represented, and would represent when clothed again, a girlchild of Lolita’s size”).
Accordingly, H.H. is no Pygmalion. He admits he has failed to teach her anything (“the court instead of reflecting the harmonies latent in her was utterly jumbled by the clumsiness and lassitude of the resentful child I mistaught.” II.20). If, by contrast with former memories of Lolita on the tennis court (“simulacrum of a serve into the net […] brandished her racket in despair […] kept the exact score of their ineptitudes.”II.3) this particular one is chosen by Humbert, it is because he is fascinated by it, at the same time, excluded from it: the “art of make-believe” (l.32) and her “performance” (l.2), have all been taught to Lolita by Clare Quilty, whose name surfaces, compressed into the noun “clarity” (l.34). On a textual level, “golden whip” (l.60) and “racket guts” (l.45) also point at Quilty’s omnipresence: if Humbert has failed to immortalize the nymphet, (“I could have filmed her!” l.23), “Golden Guts,” is the name of a movie, adapted from a play by Quilty, in which Lolita was to have a part in a tennis match scene (p.276).
Humbert has tirelessly conveyed his obsession with capturing the essence of nymphets, in a sense, to make substantial desire coincide with timeless memory: « to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets. » (I.29) It is not so much, at first sight, a matter of plot progression, as of letting the nymphet’s body manifest itself in literary form. It is, in fact, as if the body of the nymphet had become the incarnation of such epiphanies, when everything seems to fall into place, “with everything right” (16).
Both time and space seem to materialize through the medium of Lolita’s body: “unearthly order / white-lined time”: Lolita outlined in white becomes associated with the white-lined geometry of the tennis court, her rhythm or pace with a music (movie?) score (“a bar or two…” l.26; “pure ringing sound”), by association, with the outcome of the game: “always rather vague about the score” (l.29). Humbert’s photographic memory superimposes the fourteen year old tennis player (“her advanced age”) with her ghost (“I would have her now with me, before my eyes” l.23-24), with Annabel’s ghost : “Idiot, triple idiot!”
Memory, like the fantasized movie reel, unwinds indefinitely, does not wear away, and despite the narrator’s efforts to instill life within the narrative, it is, ultimately, a matter of embalming Dolores (“No hereafter…”).
At this stage of the book, Humbert’s fascination only underlines his complete unawareness of Lolita’s intention to escape. The narrator’s incursions into the narrative already seem to resonate from beyond the grave (“this tombal jail”), along with Lolita’s sobs “every night, every night” and the marks of authorial intervention into the text disturbingly coincide with the narrator’s own obsession. Humbert seems to be feeding on the nymphet like Nabokov, butterfly-like, in a strangely humanized vision of inspiration (“I traveled down your secret stem, And reached the root, and fed upon it” “On translating Eugene Onegin”, Poems and Problems, 175).
1 Marc Amfreville et Claire Fabre (sous la dir. de), Les formes de l’obsession dans la littérature anglaise et américaine, vol.2,Paris : Michel Houdiard, 2007, p.10.
2 Le Plaisir du texte, p.17
3 Le Discours amoureux, Seuil, 2007, p.514.
4 « vertige du Temps écrasé » (La Chambre claire, p.151)
5 “I would drill Lo, and try to relive the days when […] I fed ball after ball to gay, innocent, elegant Annabel (gleam of bracelet, pleated white skirt, black velvet hair band).” (II.3) Lolita toujours revêtue, pour lui, du voile mortuaire de la nymphette originelle.