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

- 153 -
part of it. Even with the intuition or knowledge of
something superior man must live in, and react to,
the world in which we find ourselves so as not to
lose touch with this world. This, however, has happened
to
Humbert.
He has been enabled to apprehend through Lolita's
beauty and loveliness that "infinite perfection",
that "immaterial, pure, eternal, unchanging beauty".
But seeing in her a nymphet, a semi-divine creature,
and thus trying to make what he has apprehended part
of his own world and of "average reality", he has
been deluded. This is what he becomes aware of when he
sees her before him "hopelessly worn at seventeen".
His Lolita, the nymphet, was a mirage with no
reality except in his own mind.
Onto this mirage is now superimposed what Humbert
has never wanted to accept until now, and what he
has in fact hardly ever been aware of: the image of
the human being that Lolita essentially and really is.
"Reality" in the quotation from Quilty's play must
certainly be taken as meaning Lolita's essentially
and unchangeably human nature. And as these images
are superimposed one upon the other, they also blend
and become indistinguishable. They blend in Humbert's
mind, and they blend and merge in his love.
Humbert has certainly destroyed Lolita's childhood,
and for this he suffers in his mind. Looking down on
a small town one day, he hears its sounds rising,
And soon I realized that all these sounds
were of one nature,... What I heard was but
the melody of children at play, nothing
but that...