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

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only lead to disaster. Being lost in a world of
images, he is in the end even physically blinded to
the finite realm and reality of "mere mortals"87 to
which he has been morally blind all along. It is
ironical that recognition of the truth should come
to him only "in the dark-room of his blindness"88
but it must not be forgotten that, strictly speaking,
it does not even "come" to him (Albinus, unlike Humbert,
never becomes aware of things himself), but that the
truth is revealed to him by his brother-in-law.
Humbert Is blindness seems to be very much like
Albinus', but whereas Albinus ends up in total darkness,
Humbert becomes seeing in the end. From the
conventional point of view, Humbert is guilty of
continually abusing a child to satisfy his perverse
sexual desire. In terms of his metaphysical obsession
he is guilty of seeing in Lolita not the little girl
she is, but one of those "chosen creatures I propose
to designate as 'nymphets"', whose "true nature... is
not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac)" (L, 18).
From the start, then, Humbert denies that Lolita's
true nature is human. In a way, this adds to the
comedy of their relationship. Lolita has been seen
as incongruous and comic in her role of the cruel be-
loved mistress, La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Now there
is the additional incongruity between Humbert's
idealized, unearthly version of her, and the very
human, very terrestrial Lolita, who constantly inter-
feres with, and threatens to destroy, Humbert's own
reality.
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