''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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a strident, harsh high voice, and a vulgar vocabulary
which she uses freely. "Vulgar" is a word that Humbert
uses throughout with respect to Lolita. Even by making
this vulgar little girl with turned-in toes and a
wiggly gait and bad manners the object of his love
and lust and passion he stands the traditional love
story with the traditional and conventional expectations
with regard to the heroine on its head; his
sobs and the agony and the tremors and the "dull pain"
which he feels "in the very root of my being" (5b)
because of this little anti-heroine make him appear
at once pathetic and comic, and his repeated solemn
evocation of "that Lolita, Lolita", reminiscent
of Catullus' evocation of his Lesbia34, is, in its
incongruity, one of the many comic stylistic touches
of his memoir. The comedy of this is intensified. -by
the fact that at such moments Humbert implicitly
figures as Catullus, just as he figures as Dante when
he compares Lolita to Beatrice, and as Petrarch when
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he sees Laura in her.
His decision, incidentally, to marry Charlotte
solely for the reason to be near her daughter makes
havoc of another literary cliche: "the theme of an
affair between the lodger and the mother"36, quite
apart from the fact that he looks on her with distaste
although she is "full-blown and conventionally seductive.
"37
Besides being anything but the plausible heroine
outwardly, Lolita also justifies the critics' censure
of her brainlessness and conventionality. Humbert