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

- 143 -
No hereafter is acceptable if it does
not produce her as she was then,...,
with everything right: the white wide
little-boy shorts, the slender waist,
the apricot midriff, the white breastkerchief
whose ribbons went up and encircled
her neck to end behind in a
dangling knot leaving bare her gaspingly
young and adorable apricot shoulder
blades with that pubescence and those
lovely gentle bones, and the smooth
downward-tapering back (225-226).
This is how he sees Lolita when she plays tennis,
and this is how he wishes he had filmed her. Quilty,
too, was to give her a bit-part in a tennis match.
scene in a film, but his private films are of a
different
kind.
There is at least one passage which shows that
Lolita is for Humbert not just the sex object she
is for Quilty; there are moments at which he is ca-
pable and in need of nearness and tenderness which
has nothing to do with sex, and at which there seems
to be in him a protective and almost painful aware-
ness of Lolita's youth and fragility and loveliness:
... you never deigned to believe that I
could, without any specific designs,
ever crave to bury my face in your plaid
skirt, my darling! The fragility of those
bare arms of yours -
how I longed to enfold
them, all your four limpid lovely
limbs, a folded colt, and take your head
between my unworthy hands, and pull the
temple-skin back on both sides, and kiss
your chinesed eyes... (188)
Humbert's feelings for Lolita have so far been
talked about almost exclusively in terms, of sexual
perversion and obsession to which moments like this
one are the exception. But his emotions have another
dimension by which parody is at last overcome, and
which allows one to see this novel, too, as dealing,