See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/269798149

Augustinian Evil and Moral Good in Lolita

Article in Renascence · June 2012

DOI: 10.5840/renascence201264435

CITATIONS READS

0 1,819

1 author:

Sean Benson
University of Dubuque
9 PUBLICATIONS 11 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Sean Benson on 17 February 2015.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 Sean Benson

Augustinian evil and moral good in Lolita

M
ore than a half century after Lolita’s publication in 1955, the
question persists as to “whether it is an incitement to vice or an
encouragement to virtue, whether it is art for nothing but its own
sake, or a work of rare moral force” (de la Durantaye 4). Along with some
early critics, the four American publishing houses that initially refused to
publish it found the novel deeply disturbing, if not immoral, a judgment
still shared by many readers (Alexandrov 182, Appel xxxiii, Prescott 17).
At the same time, other scholars offered a high-culture reading of Lolita
as amoral; that is, as steadfastly refusing to accept “bourgeois” valua-
tions of virtue and vice, which find themselves brilliantly parodied in the
“McGuffey-like moral” John Ray Jr. tries to impose on Humbert’s tale
(Rothstein 37; de Rougemont 51-52). These readers have long insisted on
the novel’s “refusing all allegiance to non-aesthetic schemes of value,” and
Martin Green has further argued that Nabokov himself shares his narra-
tor’s “rebellion against all morality” (376, 366; Fiedler 510).
Increasingly, however, Lolita is viewed as neither amoral nor immoral,
but as a powerful example of a life lived viciously and the consequent
grave harm inflicted on the twelve-year-old Dolores (Edelstein 46-48;
Pifer 29-30). Nigel Nicolson of Weidenfeld and Nicolson, the firm that
first published the novel in Britain, asserted that “Lolita has a built-in con-
demnation of what it describes” (qtd. in Boyd, American Years 375). But
if the novel contains a built-in condemnation, it is certainly not overt —
many astute readers have missed it or, as the early history of Lolita criti-
cism makes clear, denied it outright. In addition, as the philosopher Colin
McGinn remarks, Humbert’s actions pose serious questions that are not
easily answered: “What should our moral reaction to this complex book
be? What moral stance does it embody? It describes a series of highly
immoral acts, certainly, and in their perpetrator’s own words; but what
does it tell us about these acts?” (37). What indeed?
I submit that what unites these acts is the idea of privation. Humbert’s
actions deprive Dolores both of her childhood and of a healthy father-
daughter relationship that, if it had existed, would have constituted a great
good in the life of the young Dolores. In both cases, the novel repeatedly
points to the absence or privation of what could and should have been.
Moreover, Nabokov’s depiction is entirely consistent with St. Augustine’s
classical privation theory of evil, which remains a powerful — arguably

REN 64.4 (Summer 2012)

353
 renascence

the best — account of the nature of evil. Because of this close corre-
spondence between Nabokov’s novelistic depiction of moral evil and
Augustine’s philosophic account of it as absence, Lolita becomes no less
than a work of rare moral force. Second, although John Ray Jr.’s claim
that the story is “a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than
a moral apotheosis” that should have an “ethical impact” on the reader is
often disputed (Annotated Lolita [AL] 5), I plan to validate his claim and to
locate the ethical impact not so much on the reader as on Humbert himself.
In particular, both Humbert’s belated love for Dolores qua person as well
as his mountainside recognition that his actions deprived her of the good
of human flourishing lead to his belated and partial, but finally unmistak-
able, moral amelioration.

L et us first revisit Augustine on the problem of evil. In his view, all of

God’s creation is intrinsically good: “it was made clear to me that thou
madest all things good . . . whatsoever is, is good. Evil, then, the origin of
which I had been seeking, has no substance at all [non est substantia]; for
if it were a substance, it would be good” (Confessions 148). In Augustine’s
view, goodness is an essential property of being; insofar as something is,
it is good. Although evil exists and is very real,1 it has no substance; its
essence is absence in the same way that darkness has no physical sub-
stance, but exists nonetheless as the absence of light. Evil is “a privation of
the good. Where there is no privation of the good, there is no evil. Where
there is evil, there is a corresponding diminution of the good” (Enchiridion
343). Evil is thus, paradoxically, parasitic on the good, a tear in the fabric
of being: “there can be no evil where there is no good” (344). Augustine
asks by way of summation, “What, after all, is anything we call evil except
the privation of good?” [Quid est autem aliud quod malum dicitur, nisi
privatio boni?] (342).
Nabokov’s own view of evil is tantalizingly close to Augustine’s pri-
vation theory. In his lecture “The Art of Literature and Commonsense,”
Nabokov remarked that the “goodness” of something seems to be in its
substance, in “something round and creamy, and beautifully flushed,
something in a clean apron with warm bare arms that have nursed and
comforted us.” “Badness,” on the other hand, “is a stranger to our inner
world; it eludes our grasp; ‘badness’ is in fact the lack of something rather
than a noxious presence; and thus being abstract and bodiless it occupies
no real space in our inner world” (375-76).2 To my knowledge, Vladimir
Alexandrov is the only critic to have observed that Nabokov’s comments
on good and evil “resemble St. Augustine’s view” (55). He further noticed
that “the conception of evil that emerges from Lolita is thus comparable

354
 Benson

to that described in ‘The Art of Literature and Commonsense’ — it is the

absence of good, even in the limited sense of empathy or attentive sympa-
thy, rather than a ‘noxious presence’” (185). Alexandrov made the anal-
ogy almost in passing, and as such he never delved into the particular and
numerous ways in which evil as privation informs Lolita.
Humbert sounds early the leitmotif of privation when he speaks of the
“nymphets” he molested: “could it be that the hidden throb I stole from
them did not affect their future? I had possessed [Lolita] — and she never
knew it. All right. But would it not tell sometime later? Had I not somehow
tampered with her fate . . . ?” (AL 21, Nabokov’s italics). Her childhood
is taken from her, a fact conveyed most poignantly by those rare glimpses
Humbert allows us of “her sobs in the night — every night, every night
— the moment I feigned sleep” (176). He also alludes to his depriving
Dolores of a future, of a possible world (one never actualized) in which
she is unmolested and grows to maturity as she should. He even realizes
that his molestation matters sub specie aeternitatis:

nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted
upon her. Unless it can be proven to me . . . that in the infinite run
it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named
Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac,
unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke). . . .
(283, italics mine)

Humbert here inadvertently but unmistakably speaks the language of

Augustinian privation.
Nabokov employs similar scenes and images throughout Lolita in
order to depict the privation of Dolores’s childhood. The novel opens with
an apostrophe, the trope in which a speaker addresses “some person or
thing, either present or absent” (OED) — in this case the absent, already
dead, Dolores: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins” (AL 9). Legally,
she was “Dolores on the dotted line,” but Humbert substitutes his pet name
— “She was Lo, plain Lo” — and fetishizes the alliterative sound and den-
tal feel of his nomenclature: “Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip
of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta” (9).
The name Lolita arouses him; Dolores is far too prosaic for his fantasies.
Humbert’s artifice in renaming Dolores is an attempt to erase her given
identity (Boyd, American Years 229). Just as her name is largely effaced
from the text, so too is her childhood.
Humbert sees a real twelve-year-old before his eyes, but in the cor-
rupting currents of his mind he wants to distort her normal childhood into
a salacious nymphetage: “Why does the way she walks — a child, mind
you, a mere child! — excite me so abominably?” (AL 41; Goldman 93,

355
 renascence

101). He is likewise aware of her prepubescence: the “tracery of down on

her forearm” (41), the “gooseberry fuzz” on her shin (45), and the “puerile
hips” (39) that evoke such Latinate delight from him. Although she has
clearly had sexual encounters with a boy her own age, Dolores is none-
theless “an ordinary, juvenile girl whose ‘normal’ sexual development is
warped by a maniacal, myth-making pedophile” (Goldman 88). Humbert
obsesses over, and no doubt distorts, “the swellings of her tense narrow
nates clothed in black, and the seaside of her schoolgirl thighs” (AL 42).
The anatomically correct but pedantic reference to her buttocks — “nates”
(OED) — is the language of the scientist (perhaps a lepidopterist) gazing
at an object of study under a magnifying glass. In effect, Humbert dehu-
manizes Dolores in order to sexualize her. She is silent beneath his gaze,
but only because “the seventh-grader enjoyed her green-red-blue comics”
(42), which is hardly the picture of a depraved nymphet.
Humbert wants to deprive Dolores of a normal childhood and to
replace it with his pedophilic fantasies: in his eyes, she “ceases to be an
ethical subject and becomes an aesthetic object” for his pleasure (de la
Durantaye 71, italics his). Even when she finally runs away, he merely
incorporates her literal absence as an aesthetic feature of his memoir:
“This book is about Lolita; and now that I have reached the part which . . .
might be called ‘Dolorès Disparue,’ there would be little sense in analyz-
ing the three empty years that followed” (AL 253). Likewise, when he first
masturbates with her in his lap, Humbert enters a realm of imaginative
fancy where she becomes simply a mental construct: “I felt I could slow
down in order to prolong the glow. Lolita had been safely solipsized” (60).
He explains, “What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own cre-
ation, another, fanciful Lolita — perhaps more real than Lolita . . . ” (62).
His solipsism of Dolores is parasitic on her goodness and, according to
Augustine, on the inseparable reality of her being. Solipsized, she has “no
will, no consciousness — indeed, no life of her own” (62).
But Dolores has a life and will, as Humbert belatedly realizes when he
overhears a comment she makes to a school friend: “it struck me . . . that
I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite pos-
sibly . . . there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate” — the
goodness of which he cannot help but acknowledge as “dim and adorable
regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me”
(284). A few critics have noted the idea of absence in Lolita, yet without
realizing its full significance. Leland de la Durantaye, for example, com-
ments, “The tragedy is the loss of Lolita — and she is lost from virtually
the beginning of Humbert’s memoir. She can be said to be absent from the
book” (91). Absent from Humbert’s narrative, the real Dolores surfaces
only intermittently, and then only by way of the occasional narrative slip,

356
 Benson

until we meet her grown up and married. But by that time her childhood is
lost, and it is the Augustinian context that helps us to understand the moral
evil of Humbert’s deprivation.
Let us turn now from the privation of the good of Dolores’s childhood
to the related absence of the father-daughter relationship. For Nabokov’s
art to approach the complexity of life — to attain, that is, verisimilitude —
Lolita inevitably must come to terms with what actually happens when a
father molests his daughter. To that end, Nabokov keeps us acutely aware
of the simulacrum their incest bears to a healthy father-daughter relation-
ship: “As she bent her brown curls over the desk at which I was sitting,
Humbert the Hoarse put his arm around her in a miserable imitation of
blood-relationship” (48). Likewise, in Charlotte’s letter confessing her
love for him, she asks, should they marry, “that you want me as much as I
do you: as a lifelong mate; and that you are ready to link up your life with
mine forever and ever and be a father to my little girl” (68). She proposes a
possible world — again, imagined but never realized — that is replaced by
his perverse vision of a “seraglio” (60). After Charlotte’s death, Humbert
assures a “blue-chinned cleric” that “Yes, I would devote all my life to the
child’s welfare” (100). The perversion of their father-daughter relationship
is routinely, even mundanely, brought home with euphemistic force: “How
sweet it was to bring that coffee to her, and then deny it until she had done
her morning duty. And I was such a thoughtful friend, such a passionate
father . . . ” (164-65).
Even as he exploits her, Humbert recognizes “that as father to Lolita
the First I was a ridiculous failure. I did my best; I read and reread a book
with the unintentionally biblical title Know Your Own Daughter” (174).
“For all practical purposes I am your father,” he tells Dolores: “Two people
sharing one room, inevitably enter into a kind — how shall I say — a
kind” — she finishes his stumbling effort — “The word is incest” (119).
Refusing his attempts to sidestep the reality of their relationship, Dolores
asks him, “Can you remember . . . what was the name of that hotel, you
know . . . the hotel where you raped me?” (202, Nabokov’s italics). To
maintain his own charade, Humbert asserts to Quilty, “You see, I am her
father,” only to be rebuffed: “Nonsense . . . You are not” (296). Quilty
further claims that he helped Dolores, having “saved her from a beastly
pervert” who had raped her (298), a point he again iterates when he is
pleading for his life: “but really, my dear Mr. Humbert, you were not an
ideal stepfather, and I did not force your little protégée to join me. It was
she made me remove her to a happier home” (301). Comparatively speak-
ing, Quilty is probably, if grotesquely, correct.
In addition, any attempt to discuss God or even abstract ideas seems
ludicrous in light of their incestuous relations:

357
 renascence

I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of total

evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to
discuss something she and an older friend, she and a parent . . .
might have discussed — an abstract idea, a painting, stippled
Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of a
genuine kind. (284)

He concludes, “oh my poor, bruised child,” and the bruising here, unlike
the occasional physical beating he gives her, extends to the absence of
meaningful conversation that “she and a parent” could have had. Such
absence is literally and figuratively brought home to them when the father
of Dolores’s schoolmate Avis comes to pick her up. Humbert sees a healthy
— bourgeois, he would no doubt say — father-daughter relationship:

Suddenly, as Avis clung to her father’s neck and ear while, with
a casual arm, the man enveloped his lumpy and large offspring,
I saw Lolita’s smile lose all its light and become a frozen little
shadow of itself. . . . It had become gradually clear to my con-
ventional Lolita during our singular and bestial cohabitation that
even the most miserable of family lives was better than the parody
of incest, which, in the long run, was the best I could offer the
waif. . . . Avis who had such a wonderful fat pink dad and a small
chubby brother, and a brand-new baby sister, and a home, and two
grinning dogs, and Lolita had nothing. (286-87)

Speaking of nothing, Étienne Gilson remarked of Augustine’s theory,

“Evil is the privation of a good which the subject should possess, a failure
to be what it should be and hence, a pure nothingness” (144).
Dolores’s life with her stepfather is one of evil configured as a void, as
absence. Late in the novel Humbert attempts to take her away from what
he thinks is her squalid married life and — in an unrelated but generous
gesture — to give her the money she is owed from the sale of her mother’s
house. Dolores connects the two actions in light of their corrupted past:
“you mean you will give us that money only if I go with you to a motel.
Is that what you mean?” (278, Nabokov’s italics). For once it is not, but
after what he has done to her, she can only imagine her stepfather as a
man who views her as a prostitute. What is remarkable is that despite the
degradations to which Humbert and Quilty subjected her, Dolores not only
survives but thrives: she marries a decent man and lives, for once, a nor-
mal, seemingly well-adjusted life until her untimely death in childbirth. As
Boyd notes, Nabokov “wanted to show Lolita as an extraordinary young
girl who triumphs over her fate in the only way left to her” (American
Years 237). Her resilience in the face of such deprivation is a real triumph.

358
 Benson

Remarkably, Humbert also appears to achieve a real victory over his own
vicious impulses, even though it is partial, belated, and comes of course at
Dolores’s expense.

O ne of the reasons Lolita has divided so many of its readers is the dif-
ficulty of deciding whether the novel is, to use de la Durantaye’s
conundrum, “a sterile exercise of linguistic virtuosity or a deeply human
account of loss and love” (4). Perhaps, though, we need not choose
between these alternatives. On one level, Humbert’s linguistic virtuosity,
and the sterility it embodies, cannot be denied, but out of that linguistic
exercise there emerges, on a deeper level, a stirring account of loss —
what I would call privation — and love. Nabokov apparently came to see
Humbert’s experiences in the novel, like those of Dolores, as constituting
a Bildungsroman, complete with what Alexandrov calls Humbert’s “moral
awakening” (161). If he were simply morally evil through and through,
it would be hard to explain why Nabokov grants him in the foreword to
Despair a yearly respite that he denies to the murderous Hermann of the
earlier novel:

Hermann and Humbert are alike only in the sense that two dragons
painted by the same artist at different periods of his life resemble
each other. Both are neurotic scoundrels, yet there is a green lane
in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a
year; but Hell shall never parole Hermann. (9)

Nabokov’s annual reprieve by no means excuses Humbert’s actions, which

include the heinous desire to drug both “mother and daughter so as to
fondle the latter at night with perfect impunity” (AL 71). Such impunity
is impossible, even if he does not live long enough to stand trial for the
statutory rape of his stepdaughter, and thus he never pays civil or criminal
penalties for his crimes. Yet even if he were to have lived, any temporal
punishment would be hopelessly incommensurate with the enormity of his
violation of her person.
Humbert is nonetheless punished, both in his conscience and in the
realization of the privation he causes her to undergo. While he is able to
suppress his conscience at times, it resurfaces intermittently to remind him
of the “cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile” (44).
He even grows, with tragic belatedness, to love her for herself: “he realizes”
at last, as Nabokov remarked, “that he loves her like any woman should
be loved” (qtd. in Rampton 202, n.34). Yet at the same time Humbert also
recognizes his priapic deformity:

359
 renascence

I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despi-
cable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je
t’aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it
was hell to know it, my little one. (AL 284-85)

His self-loathing, as self-interested and as ineffectual as it is while they

were together, eventually leads him to recognize the moral evil he has
committed.
McGinn would concur: “It is a very important fact about the book
that Humbert comes to recognize the depths of his turpitude” (37). Yet to
play devil’s advocate, what precisely does Humbert come to recognize?
That he can’t help himself, try as he might? That there is no real cure for
his “nympholepsy”? He would seem to mock such recognition: “Humbert
Humbert tried hard to be good. Really and truly, he did” (AL 19). His tur-
pitude is profound, and are we to believe that his recognition constitutes
a significant moral good in the novel? I think we are, if we conjoin his
recognition to the love he develops for herself qua person, which is to say
that he finally sees her as an end in herself, not as an instrumental good
for his pleasure. McGinn further notes that Humbert’s recognition teaches
him something crucial about what he has done to Dolores:

The redemptive final scene of the novel, in which he listens from

a hilltop to the “melodious unity of sound rising like vapor” from
the playground of a school, realizing finally that “the hopelessly
poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the
absence of her voice from that concord,” also contains a conspicu-
ously pedagogical theme — not only the fact that he is listening
to schoolchildren but also that he has actually learned something.
(32, McGinn’s italics)

McGinn never quite specifies what it is that Humbert learns, but with the
help of Augustine we can understand the nature of Humbert’s education.
Late in the novel, Humbert hears that chorus of voices from a moun-
tainside. A number of critics identify the moment as the “moral apotheo-
sis” to which John Ray Jr. bumblingly refers in his foreword (Alexandrov
169-70; Dawson 128-29; Appel 324). Boyd even calls the moment an
epiphany (American Years 249); I will further specify it as an epiphany of
privation. Humbert informs us how, soon after Dolores had disappeared,
he drove up “an old mountain road” and sat on a stone parapet overlooking
a valley:

As I approached the friendly abyss, I grew aware of a melodious

unity of sounds rising like vapor from a small mining town that lay

360
 Benson

at my feet, in a fold of the valley. One could make out the geometry
of streets between blocks of red and gray roofs, and green puffs of
trees . . . But even brighter than those quietly rejoicing colors . . .
was that vapory vibration of accumulated sounds that never ceased
for a moment . . . And soon I realized that all these sounds were of
one nature, that no other sounds but these came from the streets of
the transparent town, with the women at home and the men away.
Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play, noth-
ing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of
blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near,
frank and divinely enigmatic — one could hear now and then, as
if released, an almost articulate spurt of laughter, or the crack of
a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for
the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets.
I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to
those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for
background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing
was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her
voice from that concord. (AL 307-8)

This is high art articulating Augustine’s privation theory of evil. What

Humbert hears is “the melody of children at play, nothing but that” — no
more than that, but also, significantly, no less than that. Given Nabokov’s
carefully chosen metaphors — “melody,” “concord,” “musical vibrations,”
“blended voices”3 — it is clear that he views it as a childhood chorus
familiar to anyone: “laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a
toy wagon.” Such play is its own plainsong. No other mention is made
in Lolita of the simple play of children; its presence here stands in stark
counterpoint to its absence elsewhere.
Susan Sweeney would de-emphasize the moment’s significance:
“Although this American vista . . . does finally come to life with sound,
emotion, and temporal awareness, it reveals only how much Humbert
has missed” (75). Yet that revelation is profound. In dramatic terms,
Humbert’s realization constitutes an Aristotelian recognition or discovery
scene (anagnorisis): “A discovery is, as the very word implies, a change
from ignorance to knowledge” (1452a1). Humbert has hardly been igno-
rant of his actions — some awareness of his depravity is with him from
the beginning — but it is only at this moment that the full knowledge of
what he had done hits him: “then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing
was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from
that concord.” Given Nabokov’s careful attention to syntax and diction,
Humbert’s double use of “absence” in close succession underscores the
Augustinian significance of what she has lost. Privation itself is “the loss
or absence of a quality” (OED) — in this case both her absence from his

361
 renascence

side and, more importantly, the irrecoverable loss of her voice from the
sounds of childhood play.
Boyd, too, while he describes the moment as an epiphany, also regards
it as spurious because of its belatedness: “Only after her disappearance,
when she was no longer available as the thrice-daily outlet for his lust, did
he allow his moral awareness to overwhelm him as he looked down into
that valley” (American Years 254).4 Without question, Humbert’s insight
comes late, after the harm he has done is irretrievable and irreparable, yet
that does not diminish the reality of the epiphany he experiences on that
“heavenlogged” mountain (307). If anything, the belatedness and irretriev-
ability of the past make the realization, as he says, “hopelessly poignant.”
That we are meant to see the scene as a signature moment, as part
of the novel’s “moral apotheosis,” is evident in an earlier letter Nabokov
wrote to New York critic and friend Edmund Wilson in September 1951.
Nabokov had been in search, as usual, of butterflies, this time outside
Telluride, Colorado, when he found himself one day on “a steep slope,”
“quite an enchanted slope,” high above a mining town

full of most helpful, charming people — and when you hike from
there, which is 9000’, to 10000’, with the town and its tin roofs and
self-conscious poplars lying toylike at the flat bottom of a cul-de-
sac valley running into giant granite mountains, all you hear are
the voices of children playing in the streets — delightful! (AL 294)

This is almost certainly the inspiration for Humbert’s own epiphany. Given
Nabokov’s lifelong indifference to religious dogma of any stripe,5 it is
highly unlikely that he had Augustine’s systematic theology in mind when
he wrote the passage. Nonetheless, it is a remarkable confluence as the
artist’s existential vision of absence joins the theologian’s ontological
account of evil. Nabokov did not need to know the privation theory of evil;
what he strove to express, as did Augustine, was a truth of human life.
Consider once more how in Dolores’s life there is a distinct absence
of the unadulterated delight of childhood. Her nighttime crying stands in
pointed contrast to the joyous “cries” Humbert hears from the mountain-
side. Dolores is never allowed just to play in the street for fear that she will
flee. Early in the novel as he sees her, “rosy, gold-dusted, beyond the veil
of my controlled delight,” Humbert envisions his relations with her:

I had ceased to be Humbert the Hound, the sad-eyed degener-

ate cur clasping the boot that would presently kick him away. I
was above the tribulations of ridicule, beyond the possibilities of
retribution. In my self-made seraglio, I was a radiant and robust
Turk, deliberately, in the full consciousness of his freedom,

362
 Benson

postponing the moment of actually enjoying the youngest and

frailest of his slaves. (60)

His reality is imaginary, his freedom spurious. What is missing is any

imagination of the life he could have lived with Dolores had he acted as
a father rather than as a sultan keeping her as an inmate of his harem.
As William Mann remarks of St. Augustine’s privation theory, “sin is
an abandonment of better things” (45), and that aptly describes what
Humbert has done in raising Dolores. His sense of freedom to have his
way with her is in reality a privation of his most basic paternal duties; it is
also, sadly, a privation of the joy that could attend his fulfillment of those
responsibilities. He cannot change the past, but in finally loving Dolores
for who she is, and in understanding what she and he both have lost, he
shows the first semblance of moral virtue. In Augustinian terms, insofar
as Humbert has being, there is still goodness in him, and we see it here,
too late but at last.

A s noted at the outset of this essay, the morality of Lolita has been
much discussed, even by Nabokov: “I am neither a reader nor a writer
of didactic fiction, and despite John Ray Jr.’s assertion, Lolita has no moral
in tow” (“On a Book” 314). Nabokov was never much interested in pro-
nouncing an explicit verdict on Humbert’s actions beyond his almost bland
statement, made in an interview with Anne Guérin, that “there is” in Lolita
“a very serious moral: don’t harm children. Now, Humbert commits this
evil” [“il y a une morale très moral: ne pas faire du mal aux enfants. Or,
Humbert fait ce mal”]. Yet he also remarked, “one day a reappraiser will
come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a
rigid moralist kicking sin” (Strong Opinions 193). Pace those commenta-
tors who thought the novel constituted both Humbert’s and the author’s
repudiation of traditional morality, Nabokov further informed Wilson in a
letter from 1956, “When you do read Lolita, please mark that it is a highly
moral affair” (Karlinsky 331). Moral considerations in the novel are in fact
inescapable: “Lolita is a moral book in the simple sense that from its first
page to its last it explicitly treats moral questions” (de la Durantaye 190).
Lolita has, moreover, the moral gravitas of the great tragedies. Nabokov is
no moral prescriptivist but a first-rate artist; as such, he shows with unerr-
ing fidelity the human and moral consequences of Humbert’s actions.
Nabokov also observed, “I do think that Humbert Humbert in his
last stage is a moral man because he realizes that he loves Lolita like any
woman should be loved. But it is too late, he has destroyed her childhood”
(qtd. in Rampton 202, n.34). This is apparently the reason he consigns

363
 renascence

Humbert to Hell, but permits him a yearly stroll in Paradise. While de

la Durantaye allows that the mountainside scene is “part of the change
Humbert undergoes,” he nonetheless asserts that the “‘moral apotheosis’
is best sought for in Lolita’s tenderest chapter” (89) where Humbert finds
the married Dolores “hopelessly worn at seventeen.” The nymphet of his
imagination is gone, and yet, he tells us,

I looked and looked at her and knew as clearly as I know I am to

die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imag-
ined on earth. . . . I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted
and big with another’s child. . . . No matter, even if those eyes of
hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack,
and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn —
even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your
dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my
Lolita. (AL 277-78, Nabokov’s italics)

Once again it is the absence of her childhood voice among those at

play that leads him to recognize both how he has deprived her and how
much he now loves her, at last, for herself. This constitutes a moral awak-
ening: “when he sees Lolita as she really is, he finds her more beautiful
than when he perceived her solipsistically; and a full awareness of her
physical and spiritual constitution during the present moment makes him
realize his crime toward her in the past” (Alexandrov 183). That Humbert
would now live with her and love her, despite the fact that she is past her
nymphetage (and thus no longer sexually appealing to him), is a sign of his
having gone beyond a mere awakening and into an attempt to bring about
moral good. His attempt is flawed in that he does not recognize the good
of her married life, but his action suggests at least the beginning of moral
reformation in his character.
Had Dolores been unmarried, and had she then agreed to go with
Humbert, would he have succeeded in his wish to love her for herself, or
would he have relapsed into his old ways? It is impossible to know, but in
a moment of apparent candor he warns us against trusting him too fully: “I
would be a knave to say, and the reader a fool to believe, that the shock of
losing Lolita cured me of pederosis. My accursed nature could not change,
no matter how my love for her did” (AL 257). His nature has not changed,
but his love for Dolores has, and his intentions toward her — finally —
appear to be good. As Aquinas remarked, extrapolating from Augustine, “a
thing is said to be good, not merely because it is an end, or possesses the
end; but even though it has not attained the end, so long as it is directed to
the end, for this very reason it is said to be good” (441). Belatedly, Humbert
is directed toward the end of improving Dolores’s life; as imperfect as his

364
 Benson

perceptions of her married life are, his intentions can and should be said to
be good. We also need not choose between the mountainside epiphany and
the tenderest chapter to locate the moral apotheosis of Lolita. They work in
tandem; together, they are responsible for Humbert’s belated moral ame-
lioration.6 It is the recognition of his inhuman use of Dolores that leads
him to see, and finally to love, her as a person.
Finally, Humbert frames his telling of the story on the mountainside
by calling it “a last mirage of wonder and hopelessness” (307), but the
reality of those vaporous voices has more being, more substance, than the
nothingness left him as a result of what he has done. He hears in those
voices the good that Dolores could have enjoyed as a child had he denied
his grave impulse to defile her. In Nabokov’s vision, it is only from afar
that Humbert can hear, even if he cannot see, the childhood he took from
her. His inability to see the children at play mimics his moral blindness in
regard to Dolores. Boyd finds him even at this moment “just as willfully
blind as before” (American Years 254), but Humbert and his readers gain
a vision — call it Augustinian, call it Nabokovian — of what could have
been had he in his freedom chosen the good for his daughter. He speaks
of looking over the valley as a “friendly abyss,” an ironic reminder of the
“voluptuous abyss” he went down when he first violated her (AL 60). Out
of the abyss of that valley comes an epiphany of what should have been
had Humbert chosen the substance of his own fatherhood and the sub-
stance of Dolores’s childhood rather than the privation of those great and
inestimable goods.

Notes

1) The privation theory of evil is often misunderstood, even by professional philoso-

phers. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong suggests that in Augustine’s view “evil does not exist in
reality” (Craig and Sinnott-Armstrong 89). But to say that evil has no substance is not to
say it is unreal or nonexistent. I am indebted to my colleague, the philosopher Paul Jensen,
for having helped me understand the reality of evil in the Augustinian sense. I also wish to
thank Ray Wilson of Loras College, Ed Block, and the anonymous readers at Renascence:
all responded with care and precision to drafts of this essay.
2) Augustine might insist that evil also “occupies no real space” in the external
world. Nonetheless, if not in theory then in practice — which is to say, in Lolita itself —
Nabokov’s art is consistent with Augustine’s theory.
3) Nabokov’s use of musical metaphors is all the more surprising given his lifelong
distaste for music (Boyd, Russian Years 5, 40).
4) Rothstein also locates in Humbert’s “epiphany of sudden reform” the morality of
bourgeois readers, while “highbrow readers” are drawn to the moment for its sheer conven-
tional artifice (38), a sort of Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment (Acts 9:1-18). Dawson

365
 renascence

remarks that if Humbert could see the children and not just hear them, then his monstrous
nature might well reappear (129).
5) However, as Boyd demonstrates, Nabokov remained throughout his life interested
in metaphysics and was open to the possibility of “something further beyond” (Russian
Years 72, 152, 295). Alexandrov locates this in “an aesthetic rooted in [Nabokov’s] intu-
ition of a transcendent realm,” a nebulous but real “otherworld” that objectively undergirds
moral norms (3).
6) de la Durantaye asserts that the mountainside recognition “alters nothing in
[Humbert’s] behavior,” as he afterwards still “continue[s] to search for his lost love with
the same desperate intensity as before.” Yet de la Durantaye also concedes that the moun-
tainside scene is “part of the change” (89). Indeed, the fact that he searches for her is hardly
evidence that his moral reformation is not already underway. It may culminate in the scene
to which de la Durantaye refers, but in my view the tenderness Humbert displays in his
final meeting with Dolores would not be possible without his mountainside recognition of
what he had done to her. The two events are inseparable.

Works Cited
Alexandrov, Vladimir. Nabokov’s Otherworld. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.
Appel, Alfred, Jr, ed. and intr. The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated. By Vladimir
Nabokov. New York: Vintage, 1991.
Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Contra Gentiles. Introduction to Saint Thomas Aquinas. Ed.
and trans. Anton C. Pegis. New York: Modern Library, 1965. 429-77.
Aristotle. Poetics. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation.
Trans. I. Bywater. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Vol. 2. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.
Augustine. Confessions and Enchiridion. Ed. and trans. Albert Cook Outler. Philadelphia:
Westminster, 1955.
---. Opera. Vols. 27 and 46. Turnholti: Brepols, 1954. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina.
Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.
---. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.
Craig, William Lane, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. God?: A Debate Between a Christian
and an Atheist. New York: Oxford UP, 2004.
Dawson, Kellie. “Rare and Unfamiliar Things: Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Monsters.’” Nabokov
Studies 9.1 (2005): 115-131.
de la Durantaye, Leland. Style Is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov. Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 2007.
de Rougemont, Denis. “Lolita, or Scandal.” Love Declared: Essays on the Myths of Love.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1963. 48-54.
Edelstein, Marilyn. “Teaching Lolita in a Course on Ethics and Literature.” Approaches to
Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita. Eds. Zoran Kuzmanovich and Galya Diment. New York:
Modern Language Association of America, 2008. 43-48.
Fiedler, Leslie. The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler. New York: Stein and Day, 1971.
Gilson, Étienne. The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine. New York: Random House,
1960.
Goldman, Eric. “‘Knowing’ Lolita: Sexual Deviance and Normality in Nabokov’s Lolita.”
Nabokov Studies 8.1 (2004): 87-104.
Green, Martin. “The Morality of Lolita.” The Kenyon Review 28.3 (1966): 352-377.

366
 Benson

Karlinsky, Simon, ed. Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-
1971, Revised and Expanded Edition. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001.
Mann, William E. “Augustine on Evil and Original Sin.” The Cambridge Companion to
Augustine. Ed. Eleonore Stump & Norman Kretzmann. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2001. 40-48.
McGinn, Colin. “The Meaning and Morality of Lolita.” Philosophical Forum 30.1 (1999):
31-41.
Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated. Ed. and intr. Alfred
Appel, Jr. New York: Vintage, 1991.
---. “The Art of Literature and Commonsense.” Lectures on Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers.
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. 371-80.
---. Despair. New York: Putnam, 1965.
---. Interview with Anne Guérin. L’Express January 26, 1961: 26-27.
---. “On a Book Entitled Lolita.” The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated. Ed. Alfred
Appel, Jr. New York: Vintage, 1991. 311-17.
---. Strong Opinions. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Pifer, Ellen. Nabokov and the Novel. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980.
Prescott, Orville. “Books of the Times.” New York Times 18 Aug 1958: 17.
Rampton, David. Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1984.
Rothstein, Eric. “Lolita: Nymphet at Normal School.” Contemporary Literature 41.1
(2000): 22-55.
Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth. “How Nabokov Rewrote America.” The Cambridge Companion
to Nabokov. Ed. Julian W. Connolly. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 65-84.

367

View publication stats