Paper Commentary---Kyle's Blog

I haven't finished reading through all the wonderful papers on the blogs, so I can't say if my choice is necessarily "the best". What does that really mean, anyway? However, Kyle's paper, entitled The Barber's Son, really caught my eye.

As Dr. Sexson pointed out, the scene with the Kasbeam barber was one of Nabokov's personal favorites; he said it gave him a great deal of difficulty. However, I never fully realized the significance of that short passage. Kyle's paper was like a puzzle piece finally fitting in place. One passage that particularly struck me was when Kyle talked about the difference between, in his words, potentially existing and existing immortally. To be imagined, to live on in memory or in art, this is the truest lasting form of existence. Photos, paintings, great novels, these places offer us a "refuge", a last hiding place from ultimate oblivion. This is why photos are so significant! True, there lies in them a certain element of death or decay, the fleeting moment barely captured. But there is also, as Kyle's blog helped me to realize, a sense of immortality. Why else would we, the human race, be so fully obsessed with recording, in this manner, ever moment of our short and meaningful lives?

Fragments of Immortality

After reading several of Vladimir Nabokov’s greatest works, one can only hope to become increasingly familiar with the enchanter and his grand illusions. From the macrocosm of overarching themes, one begins to see the finite world of imagined connections as well as those suspiciously insignificant details. The reverse is also true. Within the microcosms of simple words, mere fragments, lie the whispers of eternity. One line, on page 125 of Nabokov’s Lolita, encapsulates, in the simplest way, the nature of Humbert Humbert’s affliction.


Humbert, having safely secured his Lolita from the eyes of the world, remarks, “I wandered through various public rooms, glory below, gloom above: for the look of lust always is gloomy” (125). Beneath the darkness of Humbert’s obsession, burns something small and tentative, a deep and abiding love, albeit crippled by a web of lust and lies. Limitless heaven and torturous hell combined, this is the nature of Humbert’s lust. The word glory in this seemingly offhand statement foreshadows the emergence of a value far greater than the beastly Humbert thinks himself capable of.


This man, this monster, lives a wretched existence. He struggles in vain to gratify his desires while preserving not only the innocence of Lolita’s childhood but also the innocence of his earliest encounters with love. In Lolita, his beloved Annabel lives on, as does a love that was guiltless and full. Beneath the violence of Humbert’s desire, lies a sea of calm, beneath the beast, a timid soul. As he struggles to unite himself with that earliest vision, through the person of Lolita, in order that he too may be guiltless and radiant, he generates the antithesis of that love.


On some level, Humbert Humbert knows this self-deception exists. In one poignant scene, he describes, painfully, an episode of remorse in which “at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again” (285). Redemption lies forever out of Humbert’s reach as he continually condemns himself to an animalistic state of continual gratification rather than heeding the tortured spasms of a soul yearning to be human. Instead, he exiles himself from this humanity, becoming the beast he proclaims himself to be, like a disgusting worm crawling over the petals of a delicate rose, marring its perfection.


Humbert Humbert achieves a broken sort of redemption in the discovery that he truly loved Lolita, that there was “glory” beneath the “gloom”, but the moment he realizes this truth, Humbert is forced to realize that he has destroyed the very innocence he sought to capture in her. Lust destroys his broken love in the end. As he stands on the precipice of this realization, listening to the melodic cries of untarnished children at play, he recognizes, finally, that the true tragedy “was not Lolita’s absence from [his] side, but the absence of her voice from that concord” (308). This, the totality of that destruction is all Humbert Humbert can see.


In the artful depiction of this “glory” beneath the “gloom,” perhaps Humbert Humbert has earned his immortal legacy, as one of the most sublimely eloquent yet despicably monstrous creatures to have fallen short of paradise.

One Page Annotation

Dr. Sexson asked us to annotate a single page from Lolita. I have procrastinated, sadly, this project for some time now, but in the spirit of putting Lolita to rest, if only for a moment, here are my discoveries from page 45 of Part One.

(Some of my annotations may echo Alfred Appel's. Rather than glancing to the back for every line, I simply researched whatever caught my attention as I scanned the page, line by line for all those hidden gems and details).

"Look, make Mother take you and me to Our Glass Lake tomorrow".
>Humbert misspells Hourglass Lake as Our Glass Lake. The hourglass symbol implied in the first lines of the Foreword with these words, "the Confession of a White Widowed Male" (3). The White Widowed Male references the Black Widow Spider, whose markings greatly resemble an hourglass.

"The leafage of a voluminous elm played its mellow shadows upon the clapboard wall of the house. Two poplars shivered and shook."

>The elm tree is said to signify "strength of will and intuition," however, the poplar reference, a recurrent symbol in the novel, holds much more significance.
>Poplars are sacred to Hercules, as he wore a crown of poplar leaves around his head when performing one of his labors in the underworld. The legend says the leaves are darker on the top due to the flames of Hades and lighter on the bottom because they were drenched with Hercules' sweat. Another legend tells of how the nymph Leuce was turned into a white poplar either by Persephone or by her abductor, Hades himself. The reference here to the abduction of a young girl by an older man parallels Lolita's abduction by Humbert Humbert.

"'Little Carmen' record"
> Carmen (in Italian or Spanish "carmel" or "carmelo"). The Hebrew form, Karmel means "garden", perhaps a reference to the garden of Eden. There are numerous references to Eden and temptation throughout the novel (see apples, the color red, garden references, and the line "when I stood Adam-naked" on pg 299). In Latin, the name means "song". In several cases the name is used for both men and women, making it ambiguous. We see here a reference to Quilty's own ambiguous name, as Clare can be used for women as well. On page 61, the Carmen song itself foreshadows Quilty's death in the lines, "And the gun I killed you with, O my Carmen".
> Carmen here also refers to the violent opera by Georges Bizet.

"finished relating in great detail the plot of a movie she andL. had seen"
> Though I could not find a reference to the exact movie Humbert describes, this article goes into the various movie references in the entirety of Lolita.

"when I had ocmpletely enmeshed my glowing darling in this weave of ethereal caresses"
>The reference here is, again, to the spider symbol. Humbert traps unknowing Lolita in his devious web.

"I dared stroke her bare leg along the gooseberry fuzz of her shin"
> Here is a picture of a gooseberry. Though I could find no definite symbolic significance, the fruit itself greatly resembles that of the pomegranate. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Persephone eats pomegranate seeds in Hades, forcing her to return and stay there one month for every seed eaten, explaining the seasons. The reference to Hades and Persephone has particular significance in this novel (see above).