Casey 1

Matthew Casey

Dr. Geoffrey Sadock

Literature 204-001H

20 December 2014

The Binary Nature of Parody in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

In Lolita, parody not only eclipses the novel’s romantic

theme, it aids in distinguishing Nabokov from his own creation.

While various critics and scholars alike tend to conflate Lolita’s

narrator, Humbert Humbert, with Nabokov himself, enough clues

exist throughout the narrative to help distance the creator

(Nabokov) from his creation (Humbert Humbert). As Alfred Appel

states in his publication Lolita: The Springboard of Parody, “In

parodying the reader’s complete, self-indulgent identification

with a character, which in its mindlessness limits self-

conscious, Nabokov is able to create the detachment necessary for

a multi-platform, spatial view of his novels.” (Appel 215). By

imbuing Humbert with both charm and depravity, Nabokov exploits

the reader’s latent need to empathize with the novel’s

protagonist. Moreover, by allowing Humbert to use love as a mode

Casey 2

of apologia, Nabokov effectively parodies the romantic genre.

Ultimately, however, parody in Lolita works in opposition on a

binary plane- with Humbert’s authorial voice attempting to

exculpate himself through its use, and Nabokov, whose existing

consciousness transcends Humbert’s narrative, using parody to

show Humbert’s confinement within a “…prison of mirrors” (Appel

217) to which only Nabokov himself holds the key.

Before embodying Humbert Humbert, Nabokov pens the foreword

from the perspective of Dr. John Ray Jr., a Freudian academic who

has received the manuscript of Humbert’s

Casey 3

”confession” from his cousin and Humbert’s lawyer, Clarence

Choate Clark, Esq. In his pontifical analysis of Humbert’s

memoir, John Ray asserts that the narrative will lead “…

unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis” (Nabokov

4), and that Lolita will eventually become “…a classic in

psychiatric circles” (Nabokov 6). While a case may be made for

the latter, Nabokov refutes the former in his afterword, On A Book

Entitled “Lolita” by asserting that the novel “…has no moral in tow”

(Nabokov 315). Indeed, after perusing the novel, readers find

many of John Ray’s assertions are not only incorrect, but comical

in their presumptions. Examples range from the claim that if

Humbert “…went to a competent psychopathologist, there would have

been no disaster” (Nabokov 5) to the notion that scenes in Lolita

“…warn us of dangerous trends” (Nabokov 5). As John Lennard

claims in his analysis of the novel, “…Nowhere in Lolita does

parody fall thicker than in John Ray Jr.’s foreword” (Lennard

89). Ultimately, Nabokov’s burlesque of Freudian ideas, although

resonant throughout the entire novel, is chiefly apparent during

the course of John Ray’s writing.

Casey 4

Echoes of Freudian parody are seen throughout Humbert

Humbert’s tryst with his first love, the pseudonymous Annabel

Leigh. Knowing that psychoanalysis is predicated on the belief

that sexual problems arising in adulthood are rooted in childhood

trauma, Humbert exploits this idea in order to rationalize his

pedophiliac urges. Before consummating their mutual passion,

Humbert and Annabel are interrupted by Annabel’s parents. Shortly

thereafter, Annabel dies of Typhus. Therefore, in accordance with

repetition compulsion (a psychoanalytic term coined by Freud),

Humbert’s pedophilia can be explained as his constant need to

reincarnate his lost childhood love. Although Humbert may or may

not have purposefully infused this idea into his defense, it is

nonetheless clear that Nabokov is mocking Freudian assumptions,

which may validate Humbert’s sentiments.

After emigrating to the United States, Humbert’s job

prospects are jeopardized following the conflagration of the

McCoo household. However, a friend of the McCoo’s, Charlotte

Haze, offers to accommodate Humbert. Arriving at 342 Lawn Street

(a symbolic number that reverberates throughout the narrative),

Humbert derides the inside of the Haze residence by noting the

Casey 5

kitsch adorning the front hall, including “…a white-eyed wooden

thingamabob of commercial Mexican origin, and that banal darling

of the arty middle class, Van Gogh’s Arlesienne” (Nabokov 38).

Humbert also takes care in describing Charlotte’s immediate

features with acridity, “…she had a shiny forehead, plucked

eyebrows and quite simple but not unattractive features that

might be described as a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich”

(Nabokov 39). Scathing descriptions such as these continue

throughout Humbert’s narrative, all of which aim to portray

Charlotte as a vulgarian, whose constant attempts at urbanity

only further Humbert’s mockery of her. While Humbert lounges in a

lawn chair, Lolita sneaks behind Humbert and playfully cups her

hands over his eyes, whereupon,

…Mrs. Haze strolled up and said

indulgently ‘Just slap her if she

interferes with your scholarly

meditations. How I love this garden [no

exclamation mark in her tone]. Isn’t it

divine in the sun [no question mark

either].’ And with a sigh of feigned

Casey 6

content, the obnoxious lady sank down on

the grass and looked

up at the sky as she leaned back on her

splayed out hands…

By humorously portraying Charlotte not only as uncouth, but

hostile towards her own daughter, Humbert effectively dehumanizes

Charlotte and wins the reader's empathy- to such an extent that

readers are almost relieved following her death (despite knowing

that Humbert is now free to satisfy his pedophiliac urges towards

Lolita). However, Nabokov hides certain clues in Humbert's

caricature of Charlotte, which in turn help expose Humbert's

solipsistic mindset.

After reading Charlotte's love letter and subsequently

mocking her melodramatic posturing and self-pitying martyrdom,

Humbert includes a short aside which most readers tend to

overlook, "I have left out a lyrical passage which I more or less

skipped at the time, concerning Lolita's brother who died at two

when she was four, and how I would have liked him" (Nabokov 70).

Humbert mentions Lolita's brother again only while discussing

Charlotte's coarse, bourgeois mannerisms, "In one of her

Casey 7

tasteless reveries, she predicted that the dead infant’s soul

would return to earth in the form of the child she would bear in

her present wedlock" (Nabokov 82). The fact that Lolita had a

brother, while trivial to Humbert, is crucial towards viewing

Charlotte outside of Humbert's subjective lenses. It shows how

Charlotte is not necessarily a cruel, self-serving philistine

( as Humbert would have readers believe), but rather a caring

mother grieving her son's death. Hidden within the parameters of

Humbert's comedy routine, this clue contradicts Humbert's overall

portrayal of Charlotte's persona.

In his afterword On A Book Entitled “Lolita,” Nabokov mentions

"...The subliminal coordinates by which the book is plotted,”

which he deems the "...nerves of the novel" (Nabokov 318).

Additionally, in the same paragraph, Nabokov comments how a

mundane scene in which Humbert gets a haircut costed him "...a

month of work" (Nabokov 318). During his journey with Lolita

across the United States, Humbert and Lolita stop in a small town

named Kasbeam. While Lolita remained at their lodgings, Humbert

stops at the local barber shop for a haircut. He comments that

the haircut overall was "very mediocre" (Nabokov 215), and that

Casey 8

during the haircut, the barber, "babbled of a baseball-playing

son of his, and, at every explodent, spat into my neck, and every

now and then wiped his glasses on my sheet-wrap, or interrupted

his tremulous scissor work to produce faded newspaper clippings"

(Nabokov 215). Focusing solely on his own exasperation with the

barber’s confab, Humbert realizes only after the barber points to

a photograph hanging on an easel, "...that the mustached young

ball player had been dead for the last thirty years" (Nabokov

215). Both this section in the novel, as well as the section

regarding Charlotte's son, epitomize Humbert's monstrous

incuriosity. Renowned philosopher and Yale professor Richard

Rorty also links together these two separate moments of

obliviousness and the importance of their connection in his

publication Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, in which he concludes “…

it is left to the reader to make this connection…this and the

further fact that Humbert does not make the connection himself,

is exactly the sort of thing Nabokov expects his ideal reader to

notice” (Rorty 168). Humbert’s inattentiveness to anything

unrelated to his own obsession remains perhaps one of the

greatest crimes in the novel, almost as irredeemable as Humbert's

Casey 9

other offenses. More often than not, this indifference surfaces

during the course of Humbert’s vaudeville.

During his tenure at Beardsley College, Humbert is called to

Beardsley Prep (the conglomerate all-girls school) regarding

Lolita’s misbehavior. When given a report by Beardsley

headmaster, Ms. Pratt, on Lolita’s unruliness, Humbert cannot

help but mock her preoccupation with Freudian notions, “ ‘She is

still shutting,’ said Ms. Pratt, showing with her liver-spotted

hands, ‘between the anal and genital zones of development’ ”

(Nabokov 196). Moreover, Pratt claims that Lolita is “…obsessed

by sexual thoughts for which she finds no outlet” (Nabokov 198),

a laughable presumption given how both readers and Humbert know

the exact opposite is the case. However, while Pratt’s mindless

psychobabble is thoroughly illustrated by Humbert, little care is

taken towards the underlying symptoms which Pratt attempts to

delineate, “…both teachers and schoolmates find Dolly

antagonistic, dissatisfied, cagey…” (Nabokov 198). Overall, such

indifference corresponds to an enduring pattern reverberating

throughout Humbert’s narrative- his inability to see outside the

scope of his own mindset. Instead of realizing Pratt is (in

Casey 10

actuality) offering him a survey of the emotional damage he has

wrought, Humbert cannot help but sneer at its messenger. Again,

within Humbert’s use of parody as a means of self-vindication,

Nabokov hides this clue with full expectation that “good” readers

will discern such information for themselves.

Besides parodying the romantic and confessional genres,

Nabokov constructs a false doppelgänger through Humbert’s rival,

Clare Quilty. While Humbert uses the doppelgänger as a means of

exorcising his own guilt, Nabokov subtly blurs the distinctions

Humbert makes between himself and Quilty, thus assailing and

parodying the traditional dichotomy formed by the doppelgänger as

a literary device. As Priscilla Meyer of Wesleyan College

asserts, “Humbert, the literary scholar and artist, is

sophisticated enough to understand the implications of the genre

for himself: the original of a set of doubles, called the “host,”

shares at some level the despised qualities of his double” (Meyer

4).

While Quilty’s identity remains hidden until Lolita’s

conclusion (which, in turn, parodies the detective novel),

Humbert nevertheless takes care in describing to readers mutual

Casey 11

qualities he and Quilty possess. After Quilty and Lolita escape

from the hospital where she was staying (which, unbeknownst to

Humbert, happens to occur on Independence Day), Humbert attempts

to track down Quilty in order to gain Lolita back. Over the

course of several years, Humbert traverses across the United

States behind their trail, finding literary allusions and

anagrammatic clues hidden within hotel registries where Quilty

and Lolita have stayed. From these highbrow clues left by Quilty,

Humbert concludes that “…he was well-read. He knew French. He was

versed in logodaedaly and logomancy” (Nabokov 251-252). Humbert,

knowing that he himself possesses these characteristics (along

with pedophiliac inclinations), ascribes them to Quilty in order

to reinforce the doppelgänger as a literary technique.

Although Humbert aims to portray Quilty as his evil double,

Nabokov parodies any attempt by Humbert to separate himself from

his darker side. This is evidenced during the ensuing struggle

between Humbert and Quilty, “I felt suffocated as he rolled over

me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him.

We rolled over us” (Nabokov 299). Obfuscating these pronouns,

while perhaps unintentional on Humbert's part, demonstrates the

Casey 12

author's consciousness existing outside the overall narrative,

parodying Humbert's use of the doppelgänger. The irony lies in

the fact that Humbert's constant need to distance himself from

the hedonistic, nefarious Quilty throughout the course of his

narrative becomes undone by his own muddling.

Apart from Humbert’s own self-indictment, Quilty also makes

note of Humbert’s wrongdoings when confronted with several

accusations of kidnapping Lolita and robbing Humbert of his

supposed redemption, “I saved her from a beastly pervert…/I am

not responsible for the rape of others. Absurd!” (Nabokov 300).

Additionally, while attempting to dissuade Humbert from killing

him, Quilty mentions how Humbert was, “…not an ideal stepfather,

and I did not force your little protege to join me. It was she

who made me remove her to a happier home” (Nabokov 303).

Considering how Humbert illustrates Lolita’s escape as a

kidnapping and Quilty as an unconscionable pervert, Quilty’s

refutations not only counteract Humbert’s textual authority, but

deconstructs Humbert’s doppelgänger narrative in whole.

Contrary to popular consensus following Lolita’s release, its

standing as a crown jewel of Western literature is not predicated

Casey 13

on its romantic theme, nor on its salaciousness. As Nabokov

himself points out in his afterword On A Book Entitled “Lolita,” “The

initial shiver of inspiration” (Nabokov 313) behind his

composition of Lolita began after reading a newspaper story

regarding “…an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months

of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever

charcoaled by an animal: the bars of its own cage” (Nabokov 313).

Although (on a superficial level) readers tend to associate

Humbert’s incarceration while composing Lolita with this analogy,

more astute readers will observe farther-reaching implications

resulting from this comparison. Not only is Humbert trapped

within his immediate confines (while retrospectively penning his

narrative), he is trapped within “…a solipsistic prison of

mirrors where he cannot distinguish the glass from himself”

(Appel 219). As this paper has demonstrated, nowhere are the bars

to this “prison” more apparent than during the course of the

novel’s parody. Looking past Humbert the vaudevillian, readers

can finally see Nabokov, Lolita’s

true author, behind the curtain, winking.

Casey 14

Works Cited

Appel, Alfred. Lolita: The Springboard of Parody. 2nd ed. Vol. 8. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin, 1967. Print.

Bloom, Harold. Lolita. New York: Chelsea House, 1993. Print.

Boyd, Brian. Stalking Nabokov: Selected Essays. New York: Columbia UP, 2011. Print.

Frosch, Thomas R. Parody and Authenticity in Lolita. (New York: Chelsea House Publishers), 1987. Print.

Lennard, John. Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita. Penrith, CA: Humanities E-, LLP, 2011. Print.

Meyer, Priscilla, Lolita and the Genre of the Literary Double: Does Quilty Exist? (2009). Division III Faculty Publications. Paper 305.

Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita, ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. (New York: Vintage) 1991. Print

Nabokov, Vladimir, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt,Brace Jovanovich), 1980. Print.

Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Print.

Tamir-Ghez, Nomi, Rhetorical Manipulation in Lolita. The Structural Analysis ofNarrative Texts, ed. Andrej Kodjak and Krystyna Pomorska (Colombus, OH:

Casey 15

Slavica), 1980. Print.

Tucker, William S. (2013) A Multifarious Approach to Understanding Rhetorical Fragmentation in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”. The Oswald Review: AnInternational Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English: Vol. 15: Iss. 1, Article 6. Print.