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Nabokov has written that the inspiration for “Lolita” was a story of an ape who, when taught to draw, produced a picture of the bars of his cage.
-- Thomas R. Frosch, “Parody and Authenticity in Lolita”
A poignant proposition, that. Mr. Frosch takes it that it illustrates for Nabokov the problem of the literary artist who seeks to break free of parody and imitation, desiring to be original and free, wanting to say something new, or at least to say it in a captivatingly new way. I do not doubt that this may be one level of meaning, but Nabokov was genius enough to play the multiple-level game.
The more obvious meaning has to do with the way Humbert Humbert feels constrained by the conventions of civilization. His one honest passion in life is his sexual affection for preteen girls, and wouldn’t you know it, this very thing is verboten, both legally and culturally, that is, it is not only criminal but it is a case of moral leprosy, the lowest form of scum. Hence, he must exercise a good deal of self-repression. If he cannot impose an imaginary set of bars on his passion, then society will gladly put him behind some real bars, as happens by the end of our novel.
And it’s not like Humbert did not try to repress himself, doing a pretty good job of it through his adult life, at the personal cost of finding himself in and out of mental sanatoria for nervous breakdowns. Ah, but then came Lolita, standing four ten in one sock, and he had to try to make his dreams come true. He broke down his psychological bars in a mad bid for paradise, hoping that he would be able to avoid finding himself behind real bars.
Personally, I see a more general case. Humbert and his pedophilia is an extreme case. Oh, I almost hate to borrow from Freud, since Nabokov and Humbert so disdain Freudian analytics, but maybe this anti-mirroring is appropriate. The argument is that human nature and higher civilization are necessarily at odds. Our civilized ideals are much too refined for our primate spirits, so that we have to repress our wilder desires, putting our inner ape behind psychological bars, or else risk being a fugitive from society, a wild animal that must be put in the zoo in a real cage. It would seem that if we want civilization, we must suffer our discontents.
At the risk of going beyond Freud, I suppose that human nature wins out over civilization in the long run. As a society advances, it gives rise to a super ruling-class, and one of the privileges of being in this exalted social class is that the risk disappears of being locked away in prisons, and without this constraint, these privileged people no longer see a need to impose psychological bars on their desires. The inner-ape is let free, and they can just take all the wealth and sex they want, while the common people are helpless to do anything about it. Our leaders run mad. And so even great empires decline and fall.
-- Thomas R. Frosch, “Parody and Authenticity in Lolita”
A poignant proposition, that. Mr. Frosch takes it that it illustrates for Nabokov the problem of the literary artist who seeks to break free of parody and imitation, desiring to be original and free, wanting to say something new, or at least to say it in a captivatingly new way. I do not doubt that this may be one level of meaning, but Nabokov was genius enough to play the multiple-level game.
The more obvious meaning has to do with the way Humbert Humbert feels constrained by the conventions of civilization. His one honest passion in life is his sexual affection for preteen girls, and wouldn’t you know it, this very thing is verboten, both legally and culturally, that is, it is not only criminal but it is a case of moral leprosy, the lowest form of scum. Hence, he must exercise a good deal of self-repression. If he cannot impose an imaginary set of bars on his passion, then society will gladly put him behind some real bars, as happens by the end of our novel.
And it’s not like Humbert did not try to repress himself, doing a pretty good job of it through his adult life, at the personal cost of finding himself in and out of mental sanatoria for nervous breakdowns. Ah, but then came Lolita, standing four ten in one sock, and he had to try to make his dreams come true. He broke down his psychological bars in a mad bid for paradise, hoping that he would be able to avoid finding himself behind real bars.
Personally, I see a more general case. Humbert and his pedophilia is an extreme case. Oh, I almost hate to borrow from Freud, since Nabokov and Humbert so disdain Freudian analytics, but maybe this anti-mirroring is appropriate. The argument is that human nature and higher civilization are necessarily at odds. Our civilized ideals are much too refined for our primate spirits, so that we have to repress our wilder desires, putting our inner ape behind psychological bars, or else risk being a fugitive from society, a wild animal that must be put in the zoo in a real cage. It would seem that if we want civilization, we must suffer our discontents.
At the risk of going beyond Freud, I suppose that human nature wins out over civilization in the long run. As a society advances, it gives rise to a super ruling-class, and one of the privileges of being in this exalted social class is that the risk disappears of being locked away in prisons, and without this constraint, these privileged people no longer see a need to impose psychological bars on their desires. The inner-ape is let free, and they can just take all the wealth and sex they want, while the common people are helpless to do anything about it. Our leaders run mad. And so even great empires decline and fall.
