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

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him "hopelessly worn at seventeen" (270), he accepts
her for the first time as a human being, and as she
; s, and loves her for what she is:
...
there she was with her ruined looks and
her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and
her goose-flesh white arms, and her shallow
ears, and her unkempt armpits,
... and I
looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly
as 1 know I am to die, that I loved her more
than anything I had ever seen or imagined on
earth, or hoped for anywhere else (270).
He overcomes at this moment both his perverse
sexual passion and his metaphysical yearning that
was part of it, or was even at the root of it.
Lolita is hardly recognizable as the nymphet she
was, or that he saw in her: "She was only the faint
violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet" (270),
and it is not this echo that he now loves but "this
Lolita", as she is before him, "pale and polluted,
and big with another's child" (271), and he loves her
more than anything he "had hoped for anywhere else",
more, that is, than even that abstract beauty and
perfection he had hoped and longed to find in her
and through her.
It is curious that a "message", and from Quilty's
play, too, should sum up Humbert's experience at
that moment: "mirage and reality merge in love" (197):
Our "average reality" may contain reflections and
echoes of the superior realm of "true reality", and
through them it may be possible to apprehend that
realm. But this is as near as man can get to it. What-
ever belongs to it will never actually become part of
our "average reality", nor can anyone make it become