Modern Language Studies

The Interaction of Aestheticism and American Consumer Culture in Nabokov's "Lolita"

Author(s): Dana Brand
Source: Modern Language Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Spring, 1987), pp. 14-21
Published by: Modern Language Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3194952
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 The Interaction of Aestheticism and American Consumer
Culture in Nabokov's Lolita

Dana Brand

Throughout his life, Vladimir Nabokov resisted the attempts of

"literary mythists and sociologists"' to find satire or moral didacticism in
his work. In the "Afterword" to Lolita he insists that he is "neither a reader
nor a writer of didactic fiction" (286) and in an interview, he once flatly
denied that his work has anything in particular to say about the contem-
porary world.2 It is, I think, because of Nabokov's unusually vehement
resistance to such interpretations that the only aspects of Lolita which
have been neglected in the criticism of the past thirty years have been the
book's moral and satiric dimensions. In the following article, I would like
to explore these dimensions. I wish to propose a satirical and morally
didactic reading of Lolita that is both respectful and skeptical of Nabok-
ov's stated feelings on the subject. I do not believe that Nabokov wrote
Lolita with a clearly didactic intention. But I think that, considering that
Nabokov had, as he put it, some very "strong opinions" about a wide
range of moral and social subjects, it is hard to believe that these opinions
do not manifest themselves in some way in Lolita, his most comprehen-
sive representation of modem American life.
In the interviews collected in the volume Strong Opinions,
Nabokov repeatedly makes clear that the strongest of his moral and social
opinions is his advocacy of the right to unlimited freedom of thought and
expression. When asked to describe his notion of an ideal political state,
Nabokov could only say that it should provide "Freedom of speech,
freedom of thought, freedom of art. The social or economic structure of
the ideal state is of little concern to me."3 This value of freedom of
expression is central to Nabokov's closest approach to overt moral didac-
ticism, his representation of a totalitarian society in Invitation to a Behead-
ing.4 It was an important source both of his hatred of the Soviet Union and
of his strong patriotic feelings for his adopted United States of America.
Yet for all of his affection for the country and its ideals, the author of Lolita
appears to have had few illusions about the degree to which individual
autonomy is actually respected in the United States. I think that Lolita
addresses itself to this issue. Like another European observer of America,
Alexis de Tocqueville, Nabokov suggests in Lolita that the society which
claims to have freed itself from traditional forms of coercive authority has
evolved new and more covert forms to replace the old. Each of the
Americans Humbert encounters constructs their identity and view of the
world according to the images of normalcy provided by advertising, mass
culture, and applied social science. Only Humbert the foreigner is able to
resist the influence of these new and powerful forms of coercion. He does
this by aesthetically distancing himself from the American commercial
and social environment. By representing this act of distancing, Nabokov
implicitly offers a theory of "aesthetic" morality. Ultimately Humbert

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transgresses against the principles of this morality by permitting his aes-
theticism to degenerate into a version of the consumerism against which it
served as a shield. By tracing this dynamic in the text, I hope to show that
Nabokov's disavowals of moral or satiric intention, in the "Afterword" to
Lolita, should not perhaps be taken much more seriously than Twain's at
the opening of Huck Finn.
The clearest and most obvious example of Nabokov's satiric
treatment of the standardizing pressures of American life is his characteri-
zation of Charlotte Haze. As Humbert notes and describes in detail, her
behavior and view of the world are determined entirely by homemaking
guides, Hollywood films, movie magazines, advertisements, psycho-
analytic cliches and such "deadly conventionalities" as book clubs or
bridge clubs. In order to be able to control Charlotte, Humbert quickly
learns to manipulate the languages of her interior life. He takes a great deal
of pride in the ease and art with which he does this when he describes the
artificial romantic past he creates for her consumption. He writes:

The sincerity and artlessness with which she discussed what she called
her "love life," . . . were, ethically, in striking contrast with my glib
compositions, but technically the two sets were congeneric since both
were affected by the same stuff (soap operas, psychoanalysis, and cheap
novelettes) upon which I drew for my characters and she for her mode of
expression. (75)

Making up a past for Charlotte, or making up a psyche for the

psychoanalysts in the sanatorium, Humbert constructs "pure classics in
style" (34) out of the material of sign systems for which he has nothing but
contempt. In the process, he drains these sign systems of the immanence
so necessary for their functioning. In the following passage, describing
Lolita, Humbert defines the quality of immanence which is the source of
the coercive power of each of the popular American sign systems he
represents. He writes:

She it was to whom the ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the
subject and object of every foul poster ... She believed, with a kind of
celestial trust, any advertisement or advice that appeared in Movie Love
or Screen Land-Starasil Starves Pimples or "You better watch out if
you're wearing your shirttails outside your jeans, gals, because Jill says
you shouldn't." If a roadside sign said: VISIT OUR GIFT SHOP-we
had to visit it, had to buy its Indian curios, dolls, copper jewelry, cactus
candy ... If some cafe sign proclaimed Icecold Drinks, she was automat-
ically stirred, although all drinks everywhere were ice cold. (136)

For those who have this "celestial trust," advertising contains an authorita-
tive presence. Those who trust will buy products expecting to enjoy the
idealized existence represented in ads. As Humbert represents them, all of
Charlotte's desires are of this nature. Going to Europe, for example, is to
enter a travel poster. As an image of a more desirable existence than that
which we ordinarily experience, advertising is, in Nabokov's own terms, a
false double of art. In the "Afterword" to Lolita, Nabokov offers a

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 conception of art as an ideal realm when he writes that the art of fiction
exists to give him the sense of being "connected with other states of being
where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm." (286) Yet
art, as Nabokov conceives of it, is merely an image of such an existence.
Nabokov implies that we do not cease to be aware of the discrepancy
between art and the world in which it is not the "norm." As he cheerfully
admits elsewhere: "All art is deception."5 Advertising differs from art in
that it attempts to go beyond the mere presentation of an image. Its
message is that if one buys the product referred to by the ad, one will
actually be able to experience the felicity represented in it. Advertise-
ments purposely obscure their deceptive nature. They insist that what
they represent can be had and that the spending of money is all that is
necessary to deliver the referent.
What is true of advertising is true of all of the aspects of American
culture Humbert comes into contact with. Psychoanalysis and mass cul-
ture are also, as Humbert represents them, efforts to replace reality with
imaginative representations that, unlike art, insist that they are real and
that what they represent can actually be had. In Lolita, Humbert strips
advertising, mass culture, and psychoanalysis of any power they might
have had over him by denying them the referential nature they claim for
themselves. He turns them, in other words, from advertisements into art.
He accomplishes this by separating images from their referents. Once
they have been abstracted, Humbert can either impose a personal form on
the images (creating his own "pure classics in style") or he can appropriate
them poetically. Humbert's description of a town in Appalachia is a
striking example of the latter process:

The town was dead. Nobody strolled and laughed on the sidewalks as
relaxing burghers would in sweet, mellow, rotting Europe. I was alone to
enjoy the innocent night and my terrible thoughts. A wire receptacle on
the curb was very particular about acceptable contents: Sweepings.
Paper. No garbage. Sherry-red letters of light marked a Camera Shop. A
large thermomenter with the name of a laxative quietly dwelt on the front
of a drugstore. Rubinov's Jewelry Company had a display of artificial
diamonds reflected in a red mirror. A lighted green clock swam in the
linenish depth of Jiffy Jeff Laundry. On the other side of the street a
garage said in its sleep--genuflexion lubricity; and corrected itself to
Gullflex Lubrication. An airplane, also gemmed by Rubinov, passed,
droning in the velvet heavens. (257)

The quiet deadness of the town is a readiness for Humbert's imaginative

impregnation. He takes advantage of its silence just as he wanted to take
advantage of a sleeping, drugged Lolita. The world becomes animated
with Humbert's consciousness. The wire receptacle becomes very
particular. A thermometer with the name of a laxative "dwells" on a
drugstore. A green clock "swims" in a laundry. A garage talks in its sleep
and says something that only Humbert's misreading could make it say. An
airplane is gemmed by a jeweller. A world of shop windows, signs,
laxative and lubrication advertisements becomes a beautiful realm of
anthropomorphic colored light in Humbert's consciousness. The advertis-

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ing message in the light is of no importance to him. The name of the liquor
store is of less importance to him than the fact that the letters on its sign are
"sherry-red." The name of the lubrication is important only for what it
suggests to him. By aestheticizing the objects he sees, Humbert neutralizes
the coercive power they have as signs in commercial American culture.
This town is as complete a symbol as we may find of the America
Humbert represents. It is dead, but filled with a dazzling artificial life.
People have been replaced by commercial images. This is true of the
world of the novel in at least two senses. The American environment
Humbert has been passing through consists of an enormous profusion of
images that prevent one from seeing the people behind and among them.
Also, people have become so thoroughly determined by these images that
the images may be said to replace them. But if this moment in the sleeping
town represents Humbert's America, it also represents what Humbert
does to America. By reducing the commercial world to dead images he
may then revivify, Humbert gains an imaginative control over that which
controls the imagination of those around him. This mode of establishing
control is evident in all of Humbert's interactions with the external world.
Humbert's aesthetic appropriation of people, things, and events is
figured, first of all, by the profusion of photographic images in the book.
Humbert's first sexual responses are to the photographs in Pichon's La
Beaute Humaine. His only souvenir of Annabel is a photograph of her
eating an ice cream cone. Humbert asks to see a photograph of Charlotte
as a child so that he can have a greater sense of her resemblance to Lolita.
At several points in the book, Humbert compares his own visual impres-
sions and memories to photographs. At the opening of the book, as he is
about to describe his childhood, he writes: "I am going to pass around in a
minute some lovely glossy-blue picture postcards." (12) After some play-
fulness with Lolita, Humbert laments: "(pity no film has recorded the
curious pattern, the monogrammic linkage of our simultaneous or over-
lapping moves)." (55) After he reaches orgasm with Lolita sprawled
across his lap, he attempts to morally exonerate himself by arguing that
what he had done had "affected her as little as if she were a photographic
image rippling upon a screen and I a humble hunchback abusing myself in
the dark." (59) A photograph is a separation of surface from substance. It
provides an empty form that lends itself to the imaginative "filling" of the
viewer. The hunchback can make love to a photographic image but he
can never make love to the actress. The intention of Humbert's aestheti-
cism is apparently to reduce American reality to the status of a
photograph.
Photography is not the only model the book provides us for Hum-
bert's aestheticism. In Lolita there is a striking profusion of literal and
figurative references to murder. There is, I think, a connection. The
connection between photography, murder, Humbert's aestheticism, and
his love for Lolita is suggested in his analysis of his first masturbatory
gratification with her. Humbert writes:

Thus had I delicately constructed my ignoble, ardent, sinful dream; and

still Lolita was safe-and I was safe. What I had madly possessed was not

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 she, but my creation, another fanciful Lolita-perhaps more real than
Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; floating between me and her, and
having no will, no consciousness-indeed, no life of her own ... (it had)
... affected her as little as if she were a photographic image rippling upon
a screen and I a humble hunchback abusing myself in the dark. (59)

The creation of such a fantastic image is, like taking a picture, a kind of
murder of that which one is making an image of. As in the act of murder, a
living person is replaced by a lifeless form of one. Humbert's masturba-
tion before his image is accompanied by Lolita's singing of a song about a
man shooting his mistress (his "little Carmen") to death. Humbert refers to
Lolita several times in the book as his "little Carmen." The morning after
he makes love to her for the first time he feels in her presence as if he "were
sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed." Humbert
murders Quilty and contemplates murdering Charlotte, Dick Schiller,
Valechka, and Taxovich. Ultimately the book itself is the murder of
everyone in it since it is published only after all the important characters
are dead. The book, a series of lifeless images, replaces the living people it
purports to be about.
Humbert's replacement of the world with his own image of it is
also figured in the fact that he must re-name everyone and every place in
the book in order to disguise their "real" identities. Humbert is able to
rename his childhood sweetheart Annabel Lee. He can rename a taxi
driver Taxovich, a girl's camp director Shirley Holmes, and, on a scientific
expedition to Pierre Point in Melville Sound, he has an affair with a
nutritionist he can name Dr. Johnson. Humbert evidently delights in
names and their allusiveness. At one point, he gets a hold of a list of the
names of Lolita's classmates. Calling the list "a poem I know by heart,"
(49) Humbert invents a personality for each child according to the allusive
qualities of his or her name. This activity is another paradigm of Hum-
bert's aesthetic process. Separating names from their referents, Humbert
attaches his own imaginative referents to them. Also, by making up the
names himself, he is able to give them an imagistic transparency more
characteristic of art than of unaestheticized reality.
Not only does Humbert collect the various surfaces he separates
from substance, he classifies them as well. With his classifications, he gives
a personal meaning to objects by creating a personal context for them
which is independent of any context in which they may have had any
other meaning. Nymphets, after all, are a species. What is most important
to Humbert are the qualities which they temporarily manifest. The defini-
tion of these qualities, which are fixed and unchanging in ways that the
individuals who manifest them are not, gives Humbert a control over an
image that he could not have over an actual human being. This same
process is evident when Humbert travels across America and classifies
everything from hitchhikers to motels. Here too, Humbert deprives the
external world of its independence by reducing things to temporary
manifestations of types over which he has complete conceptual control.
Humbert's aesthetic re-invention of America, as the preceding
survey of his mental processes suggests, involves a kind of imaginative

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violence against it. Everything outside of Humbert's consciousness is
deprived of its independence and is transformed in such a way that
Humbert is ultimately surrounded by the equivalent of photographs,
corpses, and dead butterflies. He has indeed preserved his independence,
by neutralizing the influences that threaten to deprive him of it. Yet his
world, however beautiful, is a solipsistic dream, echoing himself back to
himself. Still, as Humbert himself argues, this imaginative violence, in its
original form, is comparatively harmless. Humbert assures us, after the
scene in which he masturbates while Lolita sits on his lap listening to the
Carmen record, that "still Lolita was safe-and I was safe. What I had
madly possessed was not she, but my own creation." Later, watching,
Lolita sleeping at The Enchanted Hunters, he assures us that "The gentle
and dreamy regions through which I crept were the patrimonies of
poets-not crime's prowling ground." (121) Humbert wishes us to under-
stand that, at this point, his crime is nothing more serious than that which
the Romantic narcissist perpetrates against the independent reality of the
external world. Such a crime, of course, is hardly a crime at all, sanctioned
as it is by a great deal of modern literary and artistic tradition. Nabokov
has often been accused of writing an immoral book on the grounds that
the charm, wit, and imagination with which Humbert transforms the
world is such as to seem to excuse what he does to Lolita. There is no
question but that our access to Humbert's extraordinary consciousness
makes us more sympathetic to him than we would be to anyone else who
does what he does. Still, in Humbert's defense of himself in the first part of
the book, Nabokov provides us with the moral terms with which we can
convict Humbert in the second part of the book. Art, as Humbert recog-
nizes in his apologiae, suspends the possibility of gratification in the
world. What gratification the artist or aesthete may expect is purely
imaginative. Nabokov's critique of Humbert, I believe, focuses on his
overstepping of the bounds of art in his appropriation of Lolita. His
nympholeptic images degenerate from art into advertising as Humbert
comes to believe that he can actually have Lolita in the physical world, not
merely in his imagination. Belief in the possibility of the actual possession
of an image is, as we have seen, the means by which advertisements
reduce people to thralldom. Humbert becomes a thrall to Lolita, losing
his "aesthetic" independence when he starts to treat her as a commodity
promised by the "advertisement" of his imaginative image.
As long as Humbert can draw an analogy between his love for
Lolita and a hunchback's love for a film actress, he has some control over
his gratification. When Humbert becomes Lolita's lover, he alienates this
original power to gratify himself. Humbert can only have the illusion of
possessing Lolita by spending a great deal of money to buy things for her.
When Lolita becomes, in this process, a commodity, Humbert becomes a
consumer. He has left the patrimonies of poets and entered the market-
place, as the thrall of a little girl as vulgar, energetic, flirtatious, seemingly
innocent and yet manipulative as the American commercial environment
itself. When his commodity, as commodities will, takes on a life and
independence of her own, he loses the imaginative happiness he enjoyed
when he approached her as if she was a piece of art. In Humbert's descent,

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we can see that just as advertisement is a false double of art in that it
deceives a viewer into thinking that an object can be possessed in actuality
and not merely in the imagination, consumerism is a false double of
aestheticism in that it involves a dependence upon the actual rather than
the merely imaginative possession of objects.
Humbert loses Lolita to Clare Quilty, a double of himself, a man
who physically resembles him and shares his appreciation of little girls,
literature, puns, and purple smoking jackets. This motif of doubling can
suggest several things. Resembling Humbert so closely and depriving
him, ultimately, of his gratification, Quilty may represent a part of Hum-
bert himself which finally makes it impossible for Humbert to enjoy what
he seems to possess. In his decline from aestheticism to consumerism,
Humbert no longer finds the source of his gratification in his imagination.
He locates it, rather, in Lolita, an external commoditized object whose
independence threatens to deprive him of all gratification. In the context
of the thesis I have developed so far, it is possible to understand Quilty as
an emblem of this process of alienation. Quilty is the monster, the debased
image of Humbert himself, who is created when Humbert seeks gratifi-
cation in reality and not in the imagination, and who serves as the agent of
the removal of that gratification. In this light, it is significant that Quilty is
so clearly identified with mass culture and consumerism. Quilty is a
creator of popular culture, he leads a "Hollywood" lifestyle, and he
actually appears in an advertisement, the Dromes cigarette ad. A pop-cult
American version of Humbert, Quilty lures Lolita with false promises
which are the equivalent of the false promises of referentiality made by
advertising and popular culture. When he finally has her, Quilty does to
Lolita essentially what Humbert did. Yet Quilty had never loved her. For
him, she had never been connected with Nabokov's sacred realm of art,
that Humbert, by actually possessing Lolita, has profaned. In sum, Quilty
may represent Humbert's degeneration, and specifically, the degenera-
tion of Humbert's aestheticism into the false double of consumerism.
At the end of this book, Humbert kills Quilty and returns Lolita to
the realm of art. His aesthetic re-appropriation of her is not, however,
identical with his earlier aesthetic image. Included in his aesthetic recrea-
tion of his lost love is Humbert's moral realization that by allowing his
aestheticism to degenerate into consumerism, he ruined Lolita's child-
hood. By coming to view her as an advertised commodity rather than as
art, he removed her from the relationships (with parents, friends, normal
people, etc.) into which she would have entered independently of him.
Humbert recognizes this as his crime when, having killed Quilty, he drives
up a grassy slope and waits to be arrested. Sitting in the car, he remembers
a day shortly after Lolita's disappearance, when he pulled over to the side
of a mountain road and looked out over a small town. Hearing the sounds
of children playing, he:

stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those

flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background,
and then I know that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's
absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.
(280)
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 As he observes in another moment of roadside meditation, "the
melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art" (258) is all that
remains to comfort Humbert in his moral misery. Humbert's aesthetic
impulse has apparently assumed a new function. Originally a defense
against consumerism, it degenerated into a form of it. In the end, Hum-
bert the aesthete is able to salvage something of his original defense by
expanding the moral scope of his art in order to denounce his own descent
from the "patrimonies of the poets" into "crime's prowling grounds." By
representing Humbert's fortunate fall, Nabokov reaffirms his own associ-
ation of art with "curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy." In the process
he may be warning us of the consequences of living in a culture in which
the sinister deceptions of advertising have replaced the harmless decep-
tions of art and in which a desperately selfish quest for gratification has
replaced the gentle, disinterested gaze of the aesthete. Such a view of
modern American culture is perhaps naive in its implicit assumption of the
comparative innocence of aestheticism. Perhaps it is impossible to dem-
onstrate that aestheticism can ever be anything more than a refined
version of consumerism. It may be that the descent from poet to criminal
is inevitable. But whatever one thinks of the plausibility of his position, it
seems to me that Vladimir Nabokov has offered, in Lolita, one of the most
subtle and interesting perspectives we have had on American consumer
culture in the middle of the twentieth century.

Rutgers University

NOTES

1. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita (New York: Berkeley Publishing Corporation,

1966), p. 285. All citations from Lolita will be from this edition. Page citations
will be found, in parentheses, within the text itself.
2. Nabokov, Vladimir. Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw Hill, 1973), p.
112.
3. Ibid., pp. 34-35.
4. See especially Ellen Pifer, "On Human Freedom and Inhuman Art:
Nabokov," Slavic and East European Journal, 22 (1978), pp. 52-63 and Dale
E. Peterson, "Nabokov's Invitation: Literature as Execution," PMLA 96
(1981), 824-36. In their efforts to demonstrate that Nabokov is, contrary to
most critical opinion, capable of moral didacticism, Pifer and Peterson offer
brief, useful summaries of the tradition of "moral" objection to Nabokov's
work.
5. Strong Opinions, p. 11.

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