“The Poor Woman”—Charlotte Haze, mother of Dolores Haze, alias Lolita, chosen nymphet of the gay madman Humbert Humbert—

busied herself with a number of things she had foregone long before or had never been much interested in, as if (to prolong these Proustian intonations) by my marrying the mother of the child I loved I had enabled my wife to regain an abundance of youth by proxy.¹

(I.18)

Vladimir Nabokov has Humbert express his amused disdain in what is indeed a capsule parody of Proust's analytic style, in a sentence which is briefer than most Proustian incantations, but which retains the Proustian love of intellectual exploration and syntactical qualification. Similarly, many of Nabokov's lyrical passages offer a light parody, or at least a reminiscence, of the verbal ecstasies of Proust's narrator. The strongest Proustian imprint, however, appears not on Nabokov's style but on the narrative structure and content of Lolita. Humbert informs his readers:

This book is about Lolita, and now that I have reached the part which (had I not been forestalled by another internal combustion martyr) might be called ‘Dolorès Disparue,’ there would be little sense in analyzing the three empty years that followed.

(II.25)

The allusion to Proust's Albertine disparue suggests this imprint: Lolita often follows the Albertine episodes of A la Recherche du Temps perdu in the content and in some of the methods of narrative and characterization. Sometimes Nabokov uses parody and comic exaggeration, and sometimes he writes a straightforward Proustian story of love and jealousy.

Humbert Humbert's obsession with the nymphets of the world forms something of a parallel with the enchantment which Proust's narrator experiences for the young girls of Balbec, “les jeunes filles en fleurs”; and the younger Humbert's “princedom by the sea” (I.1), where he loved the doomed young Annabel, is an echo of the Proustian seascape. Young Humbert's love for Annabel, like the love of Proust's young narrator for Albertine and her companions, is of course a normal love, free of the perversion which marks the love of middle-aged Humbert for twelve-year-old Lolita. But even Humbert's nympholepsy has its Proustian parallel, for Proust's narrator retains a marked (if technically chaste) interest in young girls as he grows older.

The important sexual perversion in Proust's story, however, is not the narrator's but Albertine's. The narrator first sees Albertine and her friends as rather loose and undisciplined girls whose nature is “hardie, frivole et dure,” girls who are “incapables de subir un attrait d'ordre intellectuel ou moral” (I, 790).² Soon, in a different setting, Albertine impresses him as a more cultivated young lady, though her vaguely suggestive smiles disturb him. Still later, he observes her “prononciation … charnelle et … douce” (II, 361), her “beau rire … voluptueux” (III, 130), “la riante expression causée par le désir qu'elle inspirait” (III, 150). He becomes skilled in detecting the slightest sign of her suppressed sensuality and lesbianism. His jealous fears perhaps magnify and distort such signs, much as the desires of Humbert Humbert sharpen his eye for detecting the nymphet in a young girl. But in both novels the reality of the heroines' sensuality remains: both Albertine and Lolita are marked by a demonic quality, a possessing or a being possessed by a dynamic sexual power. Even when Albertine consciously tries to repress her perverse tastes and remove all possible causes of jealousy, the narrator is shocked by the unconscious betrayal in a word or a gesture. Humbert Humbert says that the nymphet is “demoniac,” a “deadly little demon … unconscious herself of her fantastic power” (I.5). Lolita throws off—for Humbert's eyes at least—a “special languorous glow,” “a diabolical glow” (II.2, 16). The two young ladies differ sharply in one respect. Albertine, even when she first appears in Balbec, has a veneer of cultivation with which she can sometimes cover her adolescent brashness, and as she matures the narrator is subtly tortured by the contrast between the sensitive, intelligent young lady and the depraved sensualist. Humbert is also tortured, but ludicrously, comically, by the cheap and imitative sensuality of Lolita, “for all the world, like the cheapest of cheap cuties. For that is what nymphets imitate—while we moan and die” (I.27).

Although Lolita's initial experiences, like Albertine's, are lesbian, her real “perversion” consists of nothing more than sexual precocity. But Lolita's precocious heterosexuality and Albertine's habitual lesbianism are alike in being furtive activities, frowned on by society. In the essential narratives of love and jealousy, however, the furtiveness of both girls consists not in deceiving society at large but in deceiving their lovers. Humbert rues the day that he allowed young Lolita to study acting, for he “suffered her to cultivate deceit” (II.20). Lolita's lying and deceit grow as her desire to leave Humbert for Clare Quilty grows. Proust's narrator believes that Albertine is “par nature … menteuse” (III, 98), but her specific lies are often caused less by natural inclination than by her lover's criticism and by her desire to gain his respect. In fact the narrator is often impressed by Albertine's frankness, which seems (to the reader if not to the narrator) more natural than her fearful deceptions. In the younger Albertine, this frankness often takes the form of adolescent sarcasm and rudeness: during his first sojourn at Balbec the narrator observes Albertine's “ton rude et ses manières ‘petite bande’” (I, 876). Similarly, Humbert Humbert notes that a nymphet frequently possesses “vulgarity, or at least what a given community terms so” (I.5), and on one occasion he observes that Lolita is “her usual sarcastic self” (I.15). This ebullient youthful effrontery spills over into the speech of both girls. Lolita uses a slangy and (to Humbert's ears) vulgar vocabulary, and the younger Albertine sometimes employs “des termes d'argot … voyous” (I, 793). Such speech is not an indicator of innate vulgarity, but simply a mode of adolescent conventionality. The brashly cynical and spirited Lolita is a rather intelligent lass, but her normally adolescent tastes and language lead Humbert to classify her as “a disgustingly conventional little girl” (II.1). The older Albertine develops, under the narrator's guidance, a certain social and intellectual savoir faire which Humbert misses in his Lolita. Proust's narrator succeeds in playing the part of a third-rate Pygmalion, although he fails, tragically, to realize how well Albertine is filling the part he has created for her. But Nabokov sets out to create a comedy of unfulfilled desire and allows Humbert Humbert to squirm between the ecstasy of Lolita's physical maturity and the frustration of her emotional and intellectual childishness.

Both Proust's narrator and Humbert Humbert pursue an elusive ideal woman, but the essential narrative concerns their jealous efforts to capture and retain an actual woman. The tragic jealousy of Proust's narrator sometimes skirts the comic as he contemplates the complexities of guarding Albertine from the attentions of not one sex but two. Justifiable as his concern may be, his jealousy often runs to painful excesses: he is afraid to leave Albertine alone for even a minute during the Verdurins' evenings at la Raspelière, and he decides against taking her to an exhibit at the Louvre for fear some of the paintings might prove too suggestive. Humbert's jealousy, which becomes entangled “in the fine fabrics of nymphet falsity” (II.8), proves justified, but his exquisitely comic suffering in his bizarre social and sexual situation caricatures the strange problem and the intense suffering of Proust's narrator.

The narrative pattern in both books might be outlined so: jealousy, incarceration, alternating submission and revolt, and flight. Proust's jealous narrator subjects Albertine to a virtual imprisonment in his parents' Paris apartment, and Humbert Humbert isolates Lolita in an endless chain of motels. Nabokov transmutes the gray and somber imprisonment of Albertine into a garish picaresque comedy of the American highway: the different settings reflect the contrast between Lolita's brash adolescence and Albertine's nascent maturity. Albertine usually remains passive and docile during her imprisonment, partly from love and partly from fear, but the narrator's unreasonable scrutiny of her slightest word or action sometimes drives her to revolt. Even after she has fled from Paris, she writes the narrator that she is willing to return—“si vous aviez besoin de moi” (III, 452). But the pathological tragedy of the narrator's pursuit of the elusive reality of Albertine continues after her flight, and even after her death. Lolita, during her imprisonment, is physically docile, regarding her sex life with Humbert first as a game and later as a boring duty, but emotionally she is indifferent and often rebellious. Lolita's flight with Clare Quilty involves Humbert in a hilarious cross-country pursuit of his wayward nymphet, but as his emotional involvement with Lolita grows the comedy begins to shade into a pathological tragedy which parallels more than it caricatures the tragedy of Proust's narrator.

Proust's narrator is aware of his great sensitivity, but he is ultimately incapable of recognizing how extreme his treatment of Albertine has been. Even after Albertine's death, he feels his own loss much more acutely than the torture he has inflicted on his mistress. Nabokov sets out to caricature the Proustian psychology by creating a character who is aware of his own psychopathic nature and glories in it. Humbert refers to his mental instability and his visits to sanatoria. He admits that he is a “naïve … pervert” (I.8) and an “internal combustion martyr” (II.25), and he speaks of his “Dostoevskian grin” (I.17) and the “cesspool of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile” (I.11). And yet Humbert is often driven by the intensity of his feeling to consider his internal, personal world of perversion as the real world, the normal world. “I have but followed nature,” he says a bit flippantly. “I am nature's faithful hound” (I.31).

Humbert's psychological tragedy springs from his perverted desire to establish a perfectly normal sexual relationship with a twelve-year-old girl, just as the tragedy of Proust's narrator results from a perverted desire to possess and to comprehend Albertine completely. Albertine's lesbianism is irrelevant here: the narrator would be psychopathically jealous even if he had only male rivals to contend with. Albertine submits to her lover's tortures as long as she believes she has a chance of winning his confidence. Then she leaves. Lolita plays Humbert's sexual games with “amused distaste” and sometimes with “plain repulsion” (II.3). Humbert is at first amused, but he is saddened as he realizes that Lolita feels no real love for him, that she regards him simply as a habit to be escaped. As his love for Lolita grows and his suffering intensifies, the novel becomes less of a caricature and more of an imitation of Proustian psychological tragedy—though Nabokov deftly mixes the comic with the tragic. Humbert not only suffers for himself but comes more and more to realize what a ruin he has made of Lolita's life. “It had become gradually clear to my conventional Lolita during our singular and bestial cohabitation,” Humbert writes, “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” (II.32). Nabokov's style here gives a subtly comic turn to Humbert's observations, but the tone becomes more somber when Humbert hears “the melody of children at play” and realizes “that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord” (II.36).

Both Proust and Nabokov tread a fine line between a real world and an unreal world—Nabokov more consciously than Proust. The isolated world in which each narrator imprisons his mistress may have its own peculiar psychological reality, but it is cut off from the moral and social standards of the external world. Albertine, a supposedly respectable young lady, shares an apartment with her lover during his parents' absence; and Lolita, a twelve-year-old girl, shares the motel beds of forty-year-old Humbert. The situations are similar in their unreality, though Nabokov emphasizes the unreality—for comic purposes. Proust's narrator and Humbert both enjoy vivid erotic fantasies which they manage to realize at least partially in their ivory towers.

Humbert Humbert several times considers the matter of nymphets from a historical perspective, noting that what modern society calls a “perversion” has been accepted as normal in other cultures. Proust's narrator makes similar comments on homosexuality—“l'opprobre seul fait le crime” (II, 617). But he tries vainly to view Albertine's lesbianism as an ignorant amorality, and he is oppressed by a growing feeling that she is consciously and habitually immoral in her sexual life. Humbert Humbert remarks that he and Lolita live “in a world of total evil” (II.32); but Lolita, who “saw the stark act merely as part of a youngster's furtive world, unknown to adults” (I.29), is simply living an undisciplined existence which has nothing to do with the moral standards of adult society. For Humbert, the whole affair with Lolita is a flight from discipline into fantasy, the sort of fantasy he had tried to escape years earlier by searching for a routine, ordered life in his marriage to Valeria. The problem of discipline is also treated by Proust: the narrator tries to order both his personal and artistic life, and Albertine pathetically tries to gain her lover's confidence by reining her natural impulses.

The task of depicting the inner world of a psychopathic narrator presents both Proust and Nabokov with a problem of artistic control. The intimacy of a first-person narrative elicits automatic sympathy from a reader, and the initial reaction of Proust's reader is apt to be an empathic immersion in the jealous narrator's intense suffering. Proust does focus on the narrator's psychological tragedy, but the richness of his world eventually compels the reader to move outside this focus. Proust constantly gives hints of Albertine's real and laudable motives, motives unseen or virtually ignored by the narrator, and the reader is led to wonder about the exact degree of her depravity and sensuality and to question the precision of the narrator's observations and interpretations. Proust has created his psychological world so fully that it sometimes eludes his control.

The problem is actually one of reality, of real and normal human action and sympathy, clashing with the abnormal psychological exaggeration of the narrator's partly realized dream world. Proust focusses on the dream world, but the shadowy world of the real, the human Albertine intrudes. Nabokov faces a similar problem, but his method of control is a comic one (depending partly on Proustian parody): he creates a world which is comic because of its difference from the normal world. But as the story moves on, and Humbert's suffering grows more intense, Lolita often becomes Proustian parallel more than Proustian parody. The very real sufferings—of both Humbert and Lolita—differ from the comic frustrations and satisfactions which dominate the earlier parts of the book. The reader's emotional attitude toward Humbert Humbert, as towards Proust's narrator, is necessarily ambivalent. The strength of each novel lies not in the consistency of the writer's tragic or comic control, but in the richness of the psychological world he creates. In this sense, the very emotional ambivalence created by Proust and by Nabokov is a strength, not a weakness.

Notes

1. Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is cited by part and chapter.

2. References are to the three-volume Pléiade edition of A la Recherche du Temps perdu.