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Dr. HumbertSTEWART JUSTMAN

W I T H N AB OK OV 'S F IN G E R S fiying over the keyboard of our lan-guage in Lolita we find it hard to believe that English wasn't hisnative tong ue. Ha d I not bee n such a fool or such an intuitivege niu s to preserve that journal, fluids pro du ced by vindictive angerand hot shame would not have blinded Charlotte in her dash to themailbox. But even if they had blinded her, still nothing might havehappened, had not precise fate, that synchronizing phantom, mixedwithin its alembic the car and the do g and the sun and the shade andthe wet and the weak and the strong and the stone. Fo r the Napo -leonic Humbert Humbert even incriminating evidence is blessedby fate, as, indeed, his free play with words results in sentencesbetter than even he could have planned. Convinced that everythingis perm itted him , Hu m bert H um bert stands in the tradition of Ras-kolnikov and the child-rapist Stavrogin, though his musical Englishobscures this bloodline. We are enchanted with his confessionsand, somewhat like Lolita, imprisoned in his solipsism. Passageslike the one just cited attest, therefore, not only to Nabokov's un-doubted virtuosity but to the narrator's skill in distracting our gazefrom his sheer criminality and inducing us to join in his admirationofhimself

Nabokov wasn't the first foreigner to write better than perfectEnglish alive with intonation and playful effects and to carry it offwith an appearan ce of ease. Two hu nd red years and m ore before Lo-lita Bernard Mandeville, having moved to London from the Nether-lands,held up the inverting mirror of satire to the nasce nt consu m ersociety in hisFable of theBees.As if an outsider who laughed at m ore

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34 R RIT N

To say, that if all Men were truly Virtuous, they might, withoutany regard to them selves, consum e as much out of Zeal to servetheir Neighbours and promote the Publick Good, as they donow out of Self Love and Emulation, is a miserable shift and anunreasonable supposition. As there have been good People inall Ages, so, without doubt, we are not destitute of them in this;but let us enquire of the Ferdwig makers and Taylors, in whatGentlemen, even of the greatest Wealth and highest Quality,they ever could discover such publick spirited Views.... If it beurg'd, that if the re are not, it is possible tha t the re m ight be such People , I answer, that it is as possible tha t G ats, instead of killingRats and Mice, should feed them, and go about the House tosuckle and nurse their young ones.

The Dutchman too has perfect pitch. Delivered in serio-comic prosecalculated both to offend and delight, Mandeville's argument con-tains many insights later purged of their roguery and reduced toreputable maximshis dismissal of the fantasy of public spirit, forexam ple, beco m ing Adam Sm ith's It is not from the bene vole nce ofthe butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner.Mandeville's language is racier than Smith's, freer, more caught upwith other voices, closer to common speech, the coffeehouse, andthe pam phlet. And this instrum ent proves equal to the analysis of th efirst consumer society on earth. In the continual expansion of wantsand needs Mandeville identified the mechanism of consumer soci-ety as it exists even now. (Th e new slogan of Vietnam , Rich pe o-ple, strong nation, carries a distant echo of Mandeville's no torious Private vices, public benefits. ) Few writers have better expoundedth e essential dizziness of a way of life tha t m obilizes d esire as an eco-nomic force. Perhaps, too, it took an outsider to advance such a thor-oughly ironic interpretation of the might of eighteenth-centuryEng land. We all look above our selves, and , as fast as we can, striveto imitate those, tha t in some way or othe r are sup erior to us, and on

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STEWART JUSTMAN 35bis goodsmodels for Emulationin effect reducing tbe great toman nequins and tbereby exposing tbeir notbingness, but witbout tberbetoric and violence of tbe Frencb Revolution.

In bis vivid study of eigbteentb-century Englisb society, RoyPo rter rem arks on tbe buzz of activity in Ce orgian En gland , apbrase tbat picks up tbe bee metapbor of Mandeville's fable, just asbis analysis of tbe consumer way of life reads like Mandeville minustbe cynical note. Especially cynical is Mandeville's argument tbat tbemore vice-ridden tbe citizenry, tbe more fioudsbing tbe common-we altb. As tbe ideology of progress took sbape over tb e course of tbeeigbteentb century, it came to be said tbat commerce does not sim-ply enricb a commonwealtb but improves it, making its membersmore polite, sociable, civil. Mandeville wanted notbing to do witbsucb vam isb. Progress as be defines it refers to tbe adv ance of wealtband luxury as needs become more elaborate and as luxury itself awo rd once loaded witb connotations of degeneracy, becom es our sec-ond nature. By writing a second language as if it were bis motbertongue, be bimself offers a striking instance of cultural acquisitionsbecoming second nature.

Sucb is Mandeville's mastery of bis adopted tongue tbat bisprose bas som ething of tbe natural flow of spee cb, as bis way of bait-ing critics and preempting objections also mimics speecb. Tbere is avocal quality in H um be rt H um bert's narration as well, for all its bigb-art effects; from tim e to time be pr ete nd s to address a jury. Alsoricbly colloquial is tbe speecb-prose of Marlow, Conrad's deputy andtbe teller of tbe tale in Heart of Darkness So supple and expressiveis Marlow's language tba t we can bardly credit wbat we know full wellto be true, tbat tbe autbor's motber tongue was Polisb:

You can't understand. How could you?with solid pavementunder your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheeryou or to fall on you, stepping dehcately between the butcher

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STEWART JUSTMAN 37marketing of the therapy mytha quasi-medical and thereforeespecially potent variant of the story-line of progressacceleratedduring the postwar surge of prosperity when Lolita was published.That prosperity is personified in Lolitaherself the ideal consumer,the subject and object of every foul poster, as H um be rt H um be rtdescribes her. Joyce Brothers received h er Ph .D . in psychology fromColumbia in 1953. In i960, five years after LoZiia, Philip Rieff notedin his Reflections on Psychological Man in Am erica tha t nowadays the patient comes armed with Freud's own jargon, and may evenbring along his own diagnosis. Com m ercia l and psychological break-through coincide.

The transmutation of the traditionally deplored passion of ava-rice into self-interest in the eighteenth century was inspired by thehope that by harnessing the passions, instead of simply repressingthem, as Albert O. Hirsc hm an p uts it, civil society would be thegainer. Civil society represents a breakthrough both commercial andpsychological. Hirschman quotes Vico as marveling at the Provi-de nce th at transforms the passions of m en en tirely occupied with pri-vate concern s into a civil ord er which perm its m en to live in hum ansociety. As Providence brings forth from men's pursuits a higher e ndthan the y have in view, it points (says H irschm an) tow ard the F reu d-ian concept of sublimation.

While Nabokov himself detested Freudianism ( Let me say atonce, he stipulates in th e opening lines of his autobiography , that Ireject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval worldof Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols. . and its bitterlittle embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life oftheir parents ), psychiatric allusions and traces of the therapeuticidiom are as conspicuous inLolita as the signs of consumer culture.H um be rt Hu m be rt spent more than a year in a sanatorium, afterwhich, so he alleges, he served in an expedition to the Canadian far

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3 8 RARITANThe able psychiatrist who studies my caseand whombynowDr. Humbert has plunged,Itrust, intoastateofleporine fasci-nationisnodoubt anxioustohavemetakemyLolitato theseasideandhavemefind there,at last,the gratification of alifetime urge,andrelease fromthe subconscious obsessionofan incomplete childhood romance with the initial little Miss Lee.

Poetically, Dr. H u m b er t is locked in a love-hate relationship withpsychologyitself. He drops references toFreu d, plantshisnarrativewith som ething like witt ing Fre ud ian slips,andafter com posinganodetoDolores Haz e do tted w ith allusionstomovies, cars,andjuke-boxes, promptly psychoanalyzesit.

Peering characteristically into the reflecting poolof his poem,he pronounces it amaniac's m asterpiece andnotesits stark, stiff,lurid rhymes. Inactualitytherhymesinquestion, like scarlet and starlet or hardest and stardust, seem hap py strokesof genius,likeall therestof the narrator's word-tricks. Theyare the produc tofthe same mentality that gaveus the wet and theweakand thestrongand thestone. Effects like the se suggestamindin love withits coinages, lostin an enchanted forest of itsov^oi making.Hum-be rt Hu mb ert 's play with words representsakindof free associationthat leads nowhere, certainlynot to any transforming insight. Myaccursed ^nature could not change. Like the patient armed withFreud'sownjargon,heknowsthe language gameof psychotherapyinsideout, but inaccordance withthelogicofsatire, that institutionishisdisease,not hiscure.At onepoint the rapist professes himself therapist ofLolita.

Perhaps the reason Lolita whilea brilhant novel,isneverthe-lessnot adeeply interestingone (orelse interesting mainlyas akindof verbal chess problem) isthatitallowsforonlyonevoiceand onemind,thenarrator's.Noteventhe nominal heroineis really granted

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STEWART JUSTMAN 39taughtU to esteem the novel as a dialogical form. olita is a mono-logue in which the therapeutic rituals of introspection and confes-sion serve only to feed a moral autism. Dr. Humbert's language isself-refiexiveplaying on its own sounds, a maze of echoes and dou -blingsbecause he himselfisso. A theoretically ideal patien t, h igh-ly intelligent, well versed in the conventions of psychiatry, willing totell all, an anthology of symptoms, is revealed as both ruthless andincu rable. I was always a good little follower o ft h e Viennese m ed i-cine man, he says as he fingers his gun . The sam e radical deta ch -ment from the world of others that makes Humbert Humbert ascold-blooded as he isthat underwrites his description of tears asfiuidsalso makes him a rapt historian of himself

Martin Amis is right: olita is a study in tyranny. It is ironic,thou gh consistent with the Nabokovian conception of art as a gam eof intricate ench antm en t and deception, that such a study allowsus to m isread it as an elegy to love. Ironically, too , the supp osedlyliberating infiuence of psychiatry figures in olita as the tyrant's toy.Just as Nabokov uses the English language with a skill that seem s be-yond the possibihties available to us who are born into it, so does hetreat what remains of one of our dearest fablesthe emancipationof humanity through the unlocking of the psychewith an ironybeyond anything familiar to us.

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