Critic Leo Bersani famously claimed, in his essay “Against Ulysses,” that we should put James Joyce’s novel down and get on with our lives. Joyce, responding to what Bersani calls “the performative contradiction of epistemological nihilism,” manages, as opposed to authors like D.H. Lawrence or Marcel Proust, to uphold the integrity of his novel. Lawrence, in the foreword to Women in Love, claims that “[the] struggle for verbal consciousness should not be left out in art, [that it] is a very great part of life [...], [that i]t is the passionate struggle into conscious being.” The realist novelist, wanting to capture life in its totality, to grasp all of its elements, comes to the conclusion that her medium is limited, that it strains to give life to some fundamental parts of human experience. This is much like what critic Elaine Scarry claims about the representation of work in the late-nineteenth century novel in her book Resisting Representation. The “problematically abstract” and the “problematically concrete,” she argues, are some of the places that verbal art attempts to capture, but finds itself struggling to render: in that regard, sentences are lengthened or broken down, novels begin to include symbols, forms that permit the capturing of certain experiences, … Language, in the age of Realism’s attempt at capturing the whole of reality, becomes an unwieldy instrument, and the struggle to master it, Lawrence claims, must be rendered in the work of art. Thus, much of Modernist literature, coming at the end of Realism, and attempting to extend its representational possibilities, finds itself in Bersani’s “performative contradiction”: it claims that language cannot fully accommodate certain experiences, while still attempting to represent, through language itself, the impossibilities of linguistic representation. The novels of Lawrence and Proust, then, find themselves claiming to the truth of a representation that claims the very impossibility of truly representing anything linguistically. This paradox, known to every reader of French and German theory, is one of the fundamental problems that Ulysses is contending with. 

As Richard Ellmann recounts in his biography of James Joyce, the latter famously claimed about Ulysses: 

“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what [he] meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.”

Whether Joyce really did say that is up for debate, as William Chace argues in his article “Did Joyce Really Say That?” Nonetheless, this explains one of the fundamental issues that any serious reader of Ulysses has encountered: it seems impossible to put the book down, to stop interpreting it. From the tumultuously intellectual stream of consciousness of Stephen Dedalus, wherein references to Hamlet, Dante, or Aquinas are constantly competing for our attention with nudges to Irish history and folklore, the city of Dublin, or even Joyce’s earlier fiction, to the fifteenth chapter, Circe, which, in its dream-like nature, seems to rearrange all the atoms of experience of the novel in new forms, prompting novel interpretations for almost everything we have read thus far, Ulysses seems to be predicated on an interpretive struggle that will never end. This interpretive struggle, however, is not just a Joycean eccentricity: it is, as Bersani argues, what allows the novel to go beyond language’s inability to accurately convey experience. In effect, in including countless atoms of meaning, of potential interpretive combinations, what Joyce does is create a novel that can effectively represent everything. This is part of its encyclopedic nature: in giving the reader the grounds for forming any number of interpretations, Ulysses manages to grasp any number of things that the reader wants to see in it. Sally Rooney indeed claims in her essay “Misreading Ulysses,” after offering up her own interpretation of the novel, that “another reader reads another Ulysses.” This is exactly what Ulysses is about: offering up thousands of different versions of itself, constantly rearranging and reconstituting itself at every interpretation. The novel then goes beyond the impossibility of language at representing certain experiences, beyond the performative contradictions of Proust and Lawrence: in allowing itself to mean any number of things, it begins to mean everything. 

It is this vision that Vladimir Nabokov emulates in Lolita. Through the many equally correct interpretations which his novel suggests, Nabokov emulates Joyce’s vision of art as an “entelechy of forms.” Transgressing traditional modes of expression for a pedophile, Humbert unsettles his reader through the aestheticization of his predatory relationship with Dolores Haze. He creates a disruption in our initial mode of moral judgment: thinking of ourselves as the jury, sitting and judging him, we are stopped in our immediate societal need to condemn him morally by the unsettling aesthetic he uses to give his account. Humbert leads us to question whether there might not be more to understand, whether there might not be another meaning to this confession he has provided us with. The reader is thus engaged in a practice of constant interpretation: an attempt at understanding what Humbert Humbert really thinks. And in this practice of perpetual interpretation, Humbert Humbert seems to lay clues for two major lines of meaning, whose coming together signifies an eternalization of the interpretive practice and a feeling of constant uncertainty as to what Humbert really thinks. 

Piste 1: Humbert the Criminal

The initial line of interpretation which Humbert seems to encourage us on presents him as a pedophile, whose fear of justice, as he stands for trial, leads him to attempt to garner the sympathy of his reader-judge. Throughout the account, Humbert seems to have developed a clearly-by-design mode of language-play by which he wishes both to distract his reader from the morally reprehensible act which he is telling and to beautify some of its aspects to make it look more socially acceptable. This method emerges in major ways as the twisted relationship to the economy of language which the telling of an account of the predatory rape of a girl requires. Instead of focusing on the straight fact, which traditional modes of giving such an account necessitate, Humbert plays with language and its economy to distract us from the true central event. For instance, to open the very chapter where Humbert defines what a “nymphet” (and where we confirmedly learn his pedophilia) with “the days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car” is to deeply cheat the economy of language by which the monstruous criminal’s account of his monstrosity ought to be given. The sentence sets itself up as a strange and twisted type of play on remembrance, compounded with strange and arresting figures of style, whose number and difficulty force the reader to stop and ruminate about something that is completely different from what he ought to be judging the narrator about. To create a 22-word unrelated and far-fetched simile comparing remembrance to  “snow storms of used tissue paper” which Humbert felt the need to specify are the ones “that a train passenger sees” in the very particular “observation car” is to force one’s reader to linger over the interpretation of metaphors about memory instead of directly attending to the problem of rape. This a deep aesthetic of distraction and an attempt at confusing the reader, troubling what the accepted codes of language and literature are and forcing an interpretive struggle with language instead of the morality of the story. 

Humbert Humbert further attempts to occult his actions by referring to foreign languages in both the simultaneous preservation of the truth-value of the account and the concealment of the morally-reprehensible sexual act at play. In effect, in particular when Humbert is having a sexual relation with Lolita, he resorts to the use of a variety of puns on language which keep the account he is giving true while disorienting and even misleading the reader in its understanding. For instance, as Humbert and Lolita go on a road trip following the death of Lolita’s mother, and as they are unpacking in their room at the  The Enchanted Hunters, Humbert announces that he “tried to embrace [Lolita],” to which the girl retorts “Look, let’s cut out the kissing game.” There seems to be a slight contradiction in the account which we are getting from Humbert and Lolita’s direct speech: while our narrator claims only to have attempted an “embrace,” that is a “clasp in the arms, usually as a sign of fondness or friendship,” according to OED, Lolita talks about “kissing.” This is because of the polysemy of the word “embrace” between French and English. In effect, the word which Humbert is drawing on is the French verb embrasser, which is a kiss with the mouth, as opposed to the calin, which is the English embrace, or the hug. This is a perverse play with the languages that the narrator knows: he exploits the polysemy of language to undermine the sexual nature of his actions, ultimately confounding the mind of his reader. 

But Humbert goes further: in a radical transgression of the accepted genres of the criminal account and in an attempt at creating interpretive problems at the level of language, he imitates Romantic love to create the impression that his relationship with Lolita cannot simply be read as a clearly condemnable act of rape. Indeed, the very baseline of the novel, Humbert’s theory of the “nymphet” and “nympholepsy,” perfectly exemplifies this attempt at denoting pedophilia by drawing on the Romantic idolization of the figure of the nymph, as it manifests itself, for instance, in the figure of the Undine, a Germanic water nymph about whom poet Alosyius Bertrand writes the first prose poem in literature. The similar reference to Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen, the seductive Spanish Gypsy whose name Humbert uses at various points to refer to Dolly (“Carmencita,” “ma Carmen,”  “my Carmen,”...), emerges in the very name he chooses to give his nymphet. Instead of the anglo-saxon Dolores, Humbert opts for the Spanish-sounding “Lolita,” thereby emulating the exotic and untamed Gypsy seductresses of nineteenth-century Romanticism, in the style of Victor Hugo’s Esmeralda. The Romantic motif of incest, which pervades the British Romantics, from Wordsworth’s strangely profound love for his sister Dorothy to Byron’s relationship to his half-sister Augusta Leigh, also seems to emerge in Humbert’s characterizations of his relationship with Lolita. The novel very clearly chooses to set up Humbert as Lolita’s father, even by blood as he makes Jean believe, to create the impression of an incestuous relationship. Moreover, Humbert often hints at how “with an incestuous thrill, [he had] grown to regard [Lolita] as [his] child”, or at the way in which Lolita “let the word [“Dad”] expand with ironic deliberation.” This creates a confusion of sentiments in the mind of the reader: just like distraction aesthetically disorients, and language occults, the exploitation of Romanticism as a mode of understanding the relationship with Lolita is a tour-de-force to further establish confusion, to create a need for further clarification which leads the reader not to condemn but to delay the judgment of his actions.

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The novel thereby suggests a first line of interpretation for the strangeness of Humbert’s narrative: a man, about to stand trial, attempts to confuse his reader as much as possible to avoid being condemned. And indeed, this is what the trial set-up of the novel seems to be suggesting. For the novel, before being Humbert’s memoir, is a legal plea. It initially emerges, as he claims, as “notes in toto at [his] trial,” and throughout the text, we are reminded that this an appeal to a “jury” whose sympathy he is trying to garner. The nature of the text as an object of rhetoric, a play with language in order to achieve the sympathy of reader-juror is established quite explicitly, not least in the variations of these exhortations to the “Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury,” especially alongside lines of gender. In effect, it seems that Humbert Humbert maps his understanding of his jurors on archaic, possibly European-as-seen-from-America, gender roles. For instance only the “Gentlemen of the jury” are called upon in the description of his sexual relationship with Lolita, as in Chapter 13, when Humbert masturbates while Lolita is sitting on his lap — these moments of pure sexual gratification, which might be thought to be exclusively masculine and which would be interpreted as rape by most women, only invite the men to judge them, hopefully with the compassionate of the fellow mean of lust. The “Gentlewomen of the jury” on the other hand are called upon when Humbert begins to doubt Lolita’s innocence in the sexual relationship and pen her as a witting seductress. Indeed, “the frigid gentlewomen of the jury” are called upon as he claims that “it was [Lolita] who seduced [him]” (I, 29), that he “wasn’t even her first lover” (I, 32). Drawing on the idea of an American middle-class woman who enjoys, in puritanical fashion, the judgment of promiscuous girls (like Charlotte Haze), Humbert attempts to cater to his judge’s needs — that indeed, he is trying to save his head rather than his soul as he suggests on the last page of the novel. He thus emerges as a simple criminal trying to garner support, a pedophile on trial whose fear of condemnation leads him to create a plea which might confuse his juror.

But this line of interpretation soon appears dissonant, for the very telling of the story of his relationship with Lolita is an unnecessary, Humbert-provoked admission to crimes he was never and would never be accused of. By the end of the final chapter of the novel, we know that Humbert Humbert has been taken out of his car and arrested by the police for the murder of Clare Quilty. We may thus infer that if he is to stand trial, it should be for the crime that he was arrested for: murder. But if Humbert had set up his narrative as a defense, as a way of garnering sympathy from the jury, he has utterly failed insofar as the text seems to indict him of another crime, that of pedophilia. As Humbert himself claims, that very well might be what gets him “at least thirty-five years for rape.” That the man who is able to conjure up elaborate metaphors and wordplays to cover his tracks ends up stupidly telling a story that further condemns him is absurd. Moreover, the novel seems to point out that nobody would ever know about his relationship with Lolita had it not been for his account. In effect, Mrs. Richard Schiller, who is Lolita upon marrying, is living a relatively happy and unencumbered life and shows very little rancor for Humbert’s relationship with her. Having run away with Quilty, the pornographer whose “idea was for [two girls and two boys] to tangle in the nude while an old woman took movie pictures,” she probably looked back to her Humbert times when she could demand money every time she had to perform a sexual act with a certain nostalgia. This is not a girl with middle-class standards of personal sexuality: her abuse from a very young age has normalized it in her head.  And indeed, her surprise and subsequent crying at receiving the 4000 dollars seems to show a practically non-existent moral judgment of Humbert’s actions. There thus seems to be an obvious dissonance between Humbert’s account of his relationship with Lolita and the initial interpretive line he sets us up on: he wittingly shows the limitations of the initial interpretation and the shadow of a deeper type of reading.

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Piste 2: Humbert the Aestheticist

The closing of the first line of interpretation opens up the second line. Humbert Humbert, in the secular confrontation with death, the understanding of the absence of a religious providence which might bring about immortality after death, chooses to embrace art as a timeless refuge. The representation of death in the novel, as unromanticized, prosaic, and random, signals Humbert’s deep realization of the powerlessness of the singular human in the face of a cold cosmos. For instance, Humbert recounts his mother’s death as “a freak accident (picnic, lightning).” Beyond the obvious reduction of the account of his mother’s death to parentheses, so radically different from or “Mrs. ‘Richard F. Schiller’ [who] died in childbed” rejects the traditional and romanticized account of death. He chooses to represent its meaninglessness, to draw on the coldness of the parenthetical aphorism. We, who have spent 300 pages reading and thinking and wondering about the morality of Humbert’s actions to the poor young Lolita whose name we must have read more times than we can remember, have all of our moralistic musings put to rest by the singular sentence of Ray’s foreword: “Mrs. ‘Richard F. Schiller’ [who] died in childbed.” The cosmos is not made up of the “starry heavens”: it is the world of Pascal’s thinking reed, a cosmos where luck and randomness toy with human life. The concern with death seems to pervade Humbert himself: if we are told that he dies of coronary thrombosis in Ray’s letter, throughout the novel we get mentions of Humbert’s strange relationship to his own mortality as it relates to his heart disease. Indeed, in Chapter 30, as his car got stuck in the mud and he walked  four miles in the rain, Humbert sees the need to claim that “such incidents have convinced [him] that [his] heart is basically sound despite recent diagnoses.” He is therefore deeply conscious of his own disease, of his potential mortality, so much that in the fight with Quilty, he goes as far as describing himself “as handicapped by a heart condition.” And in the realization of his own death, Humbert chooses to embrace “the refuge of art.”

In his Sonnet 18, Shakespeare, in the confrontation with the decay of all things, the fact that

        And every fair from fair sometime declines,

        By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd, [...]

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

    So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

    So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The poem here recognizes aestheticism as the only escape from the decay of all things, the fact that “the imagination [may] trace the noble dust of Alexander till he finds it stopping a bunghole” (Hamlet, Act. 5.1). That the loved one can only find eternity in the repose of the “eternal lines” of a poem, or a story in Hamlet’s case. This concern of Renaissance artists with the search for the persistence of life in an age that has come to doubt the existence of the afterlife is what Humbert Humbert seems to draw on. That indeed, as he acknowledges, in the very last lines of the novel that the real point of what he has written is “to have him make [her] live in the minds of later generations [...] in the refuge of art [...] the only immortality [which] you and I may share, my Lolita.” Humbert Humbert here tells us that his novel doesn’t lead up to the pseudo-redemption of the penultimate page: that it is an attempt at enshrining Lolita in the “eternal lines” of art, to “make [her] live in the minds of later generations.” Responding to Shakespeare’s desire to enshrine his young and beautiful beloved before decay and death take him away, as they do for Lolita as she marries and subsequently dies, Humbert establishes the very category of the nymphet as a spatial universe based on time terms: he imagines “an enchanted island” which takes the ages of  “nine” and “fourteen” as its “mirrory beaches” and “rosy rocks.” This is exactly what the world of art is: it is the creation of a reality, the island, with all of the spatial characteristics which the material world has, but which defies time. Humbert endeavors to create an alternate universe, the eternal universe of art.

These signs of Humbert’s aestheticism co-opt the initial interpretative line which Humbert leads us on: beautification and the reference to the Romantics becomes signs of this new interpretation. In effect, the opening of the chapter when Humbert defines the nymphet, which this paper dismissed as distraction, can be understood as remembrance, being cherished as a refuge against the passage of time. In recognizing that Humbert “looks back” on “the days of [his] youth,” and is deeply concerned with the fact that they “seem to fly away from [him],” one interpret the 22-word ultra-specific simile to an experience of Humbert’s, that maybe Humbert is attempting to enshrine his memory of “a morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car” into the world of art. Similarly, the reading of the text as the confession of an aestheticist leads us to read the many references to Romanticism as derisive, as condemnations of Romantic thinking in favor of the Elizabethans. Humbert is indeed shown to be indebted to the Renaissance, which he establishes in the aestheticization of Lolita not as a picture of Romantic love but as one of courtly love, of the beautification of the base things of life which we encounter in literature prior to Romanticism. For “the aurochs and angels,” the cave paintings of Lascaux and the angels of Botticelli and Raphael, “the secret of durable pigment,” which allowed us to continue to think and revel in Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Raphael’s Velata, “the prophetic sonnet” of Shakespeare and Petrarch, which Humbert sets up as the forebears of what Humbert and Lolita’s finding themselves again in the “refuge of art,” is a deep expression of the narrator’s indebtedness to the traditions of Early Modern and pre-Romantic writing. 

The text thereby presents us with a new interpretation of all of its contents. It makes the claim that everything ought to be re-read to accommodate the new narrative which the last few lines of the novel helped to fully establish. Yet, upon further thought, even the aestheticist interpretation can be doubted in the confrontation with the dark moral backdrop of the novel. Is Humbert an aestheticist because he raped Lolita? Or is he a deeper, more dangerous kind of aestheticist who doesn’t even view the rape of Lolita as a problem? Or is this depth of the aesthetic account supposed to distract us from what he has done to Lolita? We thereby encounter a variety of open, equally-plausible questions of interpretation as the two main lines of meaning which Humbert suggests come together. And the novel, in staging the quest for its meaning as an eternal fight between interpretations, creates its eternality. As in James Joyce’s Ulysses, the fight of meanings in Lolita, the primacy of the work of art, if undermining Humbert’s aestheticism, ultimately establish the novel’s.