/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.2705367]

Did Herbert love Delores?

My opinion: no. He was a child, frozen after his childhood love Annabel died. He never progressed past this, and his wanting Delores was nothing more than selfish, infantile lust.

[Anonymous No.2705372]

Two Lolita threads? Sure is paedophile in here.

[Anonymous No.2705377]

>>2705372
Paedos would argue that Herbert loved Delores. I am of the opposite opinion.

[Anonymous No.2705381]

I think he did, it felt like he loved her even after seeing her married and pregnant when she wasn't a nymphet. So it wasn't lust.

[Anonymous No.2705385]

>>2705381
I thought that was more guilt than love. He doesn't want to be with her, he just gives her money and leaves.

[Anonymous No.2705404]

>>2705385
True, he could easily have killed Dick but he didn't and he expresses remorse because "robbed" her of her childhood and doesn't want to mess thinks up for her even more, plus in the letter she only asked for $300, he gives her about 4 grand if I remember right.

[Anonymous No.2705969]

>>2705367
I fear one cannot answer this so plainly.
Annabel is his cause and object of his life-long nostalgia. He experiences true joy through her and is abandoned from it shortly after.
When meeting Dolores, his desire is threefold:
Desire for his ideal, Annabel, that he seems to have found in Lolita.
Desire for his spleen, that is to love which is forbidden too love (surely everyone can notice Humbert is no mindless beast, but more than fully aware of his affection and its implications)
Desire for pain, which follows of the combination of spleen and ideal experienced through lolita.

As the text itself consists of multiple layers of meanings so does Humberts love to Lolita. It is perverted, innocent and religious at once. And this circumstance is one of the main attractions of the relationship between Humbert and Dolores that guarantees the reader to discover new facettes of it whenever they approach it.

[Anonymous No.2706550]

Was Humbert seduced?

[Anonymous No.2706591]

>>2705381
But, if his feelings were just a kind of strange, fermented remeberance of things past (the Annabel of his childhood, by his own account, but this could as well be a fabrication), then whatever feelings he seemed to have toward the "adult" (or at least, adolescent) Lola were just more of the same hopeless reminiscence for something he never really had in the first place (this is in tune with Annabel's status as a pure invention, by the way).

This isn't particularly deep stuff, but it's still hard to say. I did most of my critical work on Nabokov's later works, particularly Pale Fire, and I haven't thought through every level of Lolita or even read much of the published analysis. I think Nabokov-the-man must've had experiences after the publication of Lolita that changed Nabokov-the-author, because if Lolita is the height of his first "movement" as an author, then Pale Fire and onward (really just Pale Fire and Ada, I guess) are part of a different authorial sub-canon altogether. The point of all that, I suppose, is that Lolita might not be the kind of novel that asks us to doubt its premise (that any of the characters really appeared, that the events of the novel, at least insofar as we can objectify them, really happened to those characters, etc.). If Lolita is a psychological novel, HH isn't so insane as to create a simulacrum that swallows the novel in its entirety. Perhaps that means something about it is "real"--that is to say, maybe it's even "sincere." Love might not be impossible in Lolita. Whether Humbert had it, I don't know. It doesn't seem likely, I suppose, but I believe that someone, some character, somewhere, might've been able to love. Did Dolores's mother love Humbert? Did Lola love any of her various companions? The possibility exists.