Mania

Unless it can be proven to me—to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction—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, life is a joke) I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art. (283)

            Lolita was always the prized doll of a possession that Humbert sought to keep and store away forever. Throughout the book he had been obsessed with keeping her to himself and away from everyone else, trying to preserve, in a sense, her nymphet-ness. However, in this passage, as reality begins to fall together in front of him, Humbert realizes that Lolita—or Dolores Haze, rather—was not just a fantasy, not just a wish he couldn’t keep, not just a sex toy. She was a child with a soul and spirit that, in being isolated with the perverted HH, was twisted and left devoid of true love and hope. His preoccupation with her as a thing left her disregarded as a person. Previously in the novel, Humbert always focused only on objectifying Lolita rather than understanding her, and while he did drop notes here and there on Lolita’s personality, they seemed to be brushed off as only nuisances. In the same way that Humbert had turned a blind eye to his own flaws, he never acknowledged (or at least was always reluctant to acknowledge) Lolita’s fatal flaw: she was a person, Dolores Haze, with a life to live and that would neither forever fall to his coercion nor stay preserved in her nymphet shell. But here he does admit to being flawed (in his putrefaction) as well as acknowledge his role in the destruction of Dolores’ childhood, proving that he at last has some self awareness of his actions. He sees this as an undeniable fact, and with it comes the pain and chaos of emotion (and possibly guilt, though the reader can only hope) as reality hits him hard enough to leave him shocked at the ugliness and imperfection of the truth that he had so long hidden away under his madness.

This passage shows HH’s revelation of the novel’s theme of obsession as a blinder of men. The title “maniac” is inflicted on Humbert himself and he states that in being such a maniac he has caused irreversible and eternally staining damage and deprivation. He also says that in order to relieve the misery of this revelation, he must create something of it in art. This seems a bit ironic in that to create such a piece of art, one must relive and reevaluate everything that happened and apply creativity to fantasy where needed—an act that seems to further obsession rather than to cure it. However, this perspective on the way that art can be used to excuse some of the uglier things in life explains Humbert's illustration of this tale in the way that he tells it. He constructs this story so that he can be forgiven, thus ensuring a telling that portrays him as a romantic, sympathetic, and beautiful soul. For this reason, the benefit of the doubt is kept away from the words as the reader goes through the novel, and much of the smear between reality and artistic creation is questioned by the spectators. 

           

Q: How do you think things might have been different if Lolita was never able to escape from Humbert?

Olivia Lin