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

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150
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rr, y Lcl;. ta inside out and apply voracious lips to her
young matrix, her unknown heart... " (161), and, with
the old Biblical meaning of "to know" in mind (to
which Humbert himself refers mockingly on a different
occasion), one might even venture to see his sexual
desire as an expression of the wish to know beauty
and to capture beauty, that thing of which Albinus
feels that it is impossible to capture.
Lolita has nothing to do with all this. She is
left out. Even though Humbert may turn to Charlotte's
old Know-Your-Child Book for Lolita's measurements
and consult "a book with the unintentionally biblical
title Know Your Own Daughter" (170), he remains blind
to the human being beside him. It sometimes dawns
on him that
I
... simply did not know a thing about
my darling's mind, and that quite possibly,
...
there
,
was in her a garden
and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim
and adorable regions which happened to
be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to
me... (277).
Although they live as closely together as it is
possible for two persons, they are distant from each
other, isolated, and lonely. Lolita is for Humbert
not a child, real, alive, and "rooted in the pres-
9
ent"0, but something fanciful, no more than the
vessel of some abstract, metaphysical quality. Hum-
bert is for Lolita, who is less metaphy. ýically-
minded, "... not even a person at all, but just two
eyes and a foot of engorged brawn... " (276). It
is a long way from The Eye to Lolita, but by their
relation and their suffering Humbert and Lolita prove