Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"Cosmopolitan Crimes: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita"
John D. Schwetman
University of California, Irvine
jdschwet@ea.oac.uci.edu
In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, the main character Humbert Humbert offers readers a variety of explanations for his crime of kidnapping and engaging in sexual relations with the title character. Taking Lolita on a long highway journey around the United States does not only facilitate Humbert's crime, but it also connects this crime to his autobiographical explanation of his attraction to "nymphets." If a cosmopolitan is a person who has forsworn allegiances based on locality, then Humbert is extremely cosmopolitan, and his depredations in the US result from his cosmopolitanism taken to excess.
Born in a resort community and brought up among the transient Mediterranean vacationers in the Hotel Mirana, Humbert explains his pedophiliac inclinations as the result of a youthful sexual encounter interrupted before he could get past his extreme idealization of the moment. After a few furtive sexual encounters with Humbert, the girl leaves the resort town to return to her home, and soon thereafter dies of typhus. This event leaves Humbert distraught and stuck in a pattern of attempts to recreate in detail the ideal moment of his sexual fantasy even as he gets older and such relations become even less appropriate. This is, at least, Humbert's account of his pedophilia, and it firmly anchors the condition in this travel encounter that has gone awry.
As the novel progresses, Humbert depicts himself as someone whose first instinct is to leave town when conflict arises with other people. Humbert is clearly a creature of the road and a sophisticated cosmopolitan of the highest order. Consequently, when Lolita's mother dies, Humbert finds the highway to be the ideal refuge from anyone observant enough to notice that his relations with Lolita are inappropriate. Humbert's confession argues that, however wrong his acts, they are actually a logical extension of many of our own unquestioned tendencies to idealize childhood love and to seek refuge in the anonymity of the highway. This aspect of the novel reminds us of the nightmarish consequences of nostalgia and cosmopolitanism when taken to extremes.
In this presentation, I analyze Humbert's depiction of himself as a cosmopolitan whose crimes result partly from his rootless origins but also find reinforcement in an American milieu that allows the crime to continue because of its inability to notice. Lolita is not, after all, what most Americans would consider the typical teenager. Furthermore, the landscape through which Humbert and Lolita travel consists of a series of motels, restaurants and tourist sites that seem calculated to efface their own historical context and therefore obscure any vantage from which to condemn Humbert's behavior. It is disturbing that the entire novel is in Humbert's control, because it thereby lacks a reference point outside of his psyche that could give us a more critical perspective on his acts. If only his version of events did not produce such a persuasive picture of 1950's American cosmopolitan culture, perhaps we might be capable of writing the work off as the musings of a lunatic. Instead, we have to share some of his doubts about American culture with all of its mobility.
John D. Schwetman
University of California, Irvine
jdschwet@ea.oac.uci.edu
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