Lolita, for me, was clearly split into its two parts,
with the first part being completely focused on Humbert’s lust for girls
(mostly Lolita, but also covering his first love and, later, his observations
of other children), and the second part being more outwardly focused, on
landscapes and Lolita’s other friend and admirers.
I finished the first half of the book for the previous
class, and at the time I was pretty excited about it. It was very uncomfortable
to read, but it was also exciting to watch as the narrator slowly moved in on
Lolita. He wrote on and on about how beautiful she was, and would get aroused
over the tiniest things. His extremely poetic writing even made me fall in love
with Lolita, for a moment here and there, until I caught myself. He constantly
drops in lengthy descriptions; “there my beauty lay down on her stomach,
showing me, showing the thousand eyes wide open in my eyed blood, her slightly
raised shoulder blades, and the bloom along the incurvation of her spine, and
the swellings of her tense narrow nates clothed in black” and it’s not until I
get to “and the seaside of her schoolgirl thighs” that I remember this should
me making me feel uncomfortable. These little events and observations escalate,
as do the narrator’s fantasies and plans about Lolita, until the book reaches a
dramatic climax when he finally makes love to her.
After that, though, I feel like the tone of the novel
completely changes. Although Humbert still drops in notes on how beautiful “his
Lolita” is, the frenetic and borderline-orgasmic quality of his observations
seems lost. I feel like it wasn’t until this point that I started to understand
Lolita’s personality, as that barrier created by Humbert’s obsessive lust for
her was lessened and I could see her more clearly. At this point, actually, this loving poetry that he used to
reserve for Lolita is now directed towards the landscapes they pass through on
their road trips around the country. He goes on and on about this travels: “heart
and sky- piercing snow-veined gray colossi of stone, relentless peaks appearing
from nowhere at a turn of the highway; timbered enormities, with a system of
neatly overlapping dark firs, interrupted in places by pale puffs of aspen;
pink and lilac formations”.
I chose to focus on these two quotes (really, these two
types of quotes), because they not only present themes for the book and
characterize Humbert, but also they make up a big percentage of the actual
text. A huge amount of the book was spent with the narrator lapsing into long,
rambling (but very pleasant to read and almost musical) discussions of Lolita
or landscape, and these passages were probably what made the book so enjoyable. Listening to the book being read, it really sounded musical at times. In another style of writing, this book
would probably have been too uncomfortable or weird, but written as it was it
really pulled me in and kept me reading (listening) for the entire story.
