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I doubt I ever would have been able to connect Charles Dickens and Vladimir Nabokov on my own, but such is the pleasure of reading good exegetic works that literary scholars will draw such combinations for us, as Ellen Pifer does in her essay “Nabokov’s Novel Offspring: Lolita and Her Kin.” If one should have any doubts over whether Lolita was entirely innocent and wronged, on the grounds that she was a fast little number herself, Ms. Pifer draws for us a full, vivid picture of the offense, the despoiling of romantic childhood, just in case the prosecution needs more firepower, not that it really does. A well-made literary argument can be a work of art in itself.
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The affinities between Nabokov’s and Dickens’s visions of the child confirm what careful readers of “Lolita” may discover for themselves: far from sounding a death knell for the romantic myth of the child, Nabokov breathes new life into that resonant myth. For him as for his literary precursors, the child - whose innocence has not yet been ravaged by experience, whose wonder at the world is still fresh - emblematizes the human being’s creative potential. In a manner that recalls Wordsworth’s immortality ode, Nabokov marvels in his autobiography at “the dark-bluish tint of the iris” in his infant son’s eyes. Their depth of color seems “to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests… where, in some dappled depth, man’s mind had been born.” The birth of human consciousness, he postulates, was a sudden, glorious flowering - an intuitive leap, a “stab of wonder” by which the dreaming mind awakened to the world. Each child, in turn, repeats the miracle of that original awakening - which Nabokov calls “the initial blossoming of man’s mind.” To borrow from F. R. Leavis’s comments on Dickens, Nabokov “can feel with intensity that the world begins again with every child.”
-- Ellen Pifer, “Nabokov’s Novel Offspring: Lolita and Her Kin,” in Pifer’s Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook
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The affinities between Nabokov’s and Dickens’s visions of the child confirm what careful readers of “Lolita” may discover for themselves: far from sounding a death knell for the romantic myth of the child, Nabokov breathes new life into that resonant myth. For him as for his literary precursors, the child - whose innocence has not yet been ravaged by experience, whose wonder at the world is still fresh - emblematizes the human being’s creative potential. In a manner that recalls Wordsworth’s immortality ode, Nabokov marvels in his autobiography at “the dark-bluish tint of the iris” in his infant son’s eyes. Their depth of color seems “to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests… where, in some dappled depth, man’s mind had been born.” The birth of human consciousness, he postulates, was a sudden, glorious flowering - an intuitive leap, a “stab of wonder” by which the dreaming mind awakened to the world. Each child, in turn, repeats the miracle of that original awakening - which Nabokov calls “the initial blossoming of man’s mind.” To borrow from F. R. Leavis’s comments on Dickens, Nabokov “can feel with intensity that the world begins again with every child.”
-- Ellen Pifer, “Nabokov’s Novel Offspring: Lolita and Her Kin,” in Pifer’s Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook
