Sex, Love, and Violence--Past and Future, Present

        Throughout Nabokov's Lolita, H. H. is haunted by Clare Quilty in many poetic and parodic ways. Both H.H. and C.Q. pursue and conquer the idea of Dolores (Lolita), both sexually and violently, physically, metaphysically, and metaphorically, while all the while both H.H. and C.Q. claim innocence from immorality, repentance from sin, and above all else: Love.
     
        But for all their similarities and mirrorisms, the actual existence of H.H.'s "subhuman" doppleganger, C.Q., is often left blurry and undefined, leaving the reader with questions--Is C.Q. actually real, or just an unplanned guilt trip?  A passage that highlights this is shown in H.H.'s cornering and eventual murder of C.Q.:

        "To have him trapped, after those years of repentance and rage...To look at the black hairs on the back of his pudgy hands...To wander with a hundred eyes over his purple silks and hirsute chest foreglimpsing the punctures, and mess, and music of pain...To know that this semi-animated, subhuman trickster who had sodomized my darling--oh, my darling, this was intolerable bliss!" (Lolita, 295)

        For when H.H. looks at his nemesis and describes him thusly to the reader, the physical similarities seem to pile up and their actual individual distinctions seem reticent and benign. At this point in the story we could almost imagine H.H. in purple robes; H.H. in his presently detailed state revels in trapping his reflection, and delights in the idea (spoken here I believe without metaphor) in "the music of pain." Nabokov further test's the limits of the reader's suspensive powers by having C.Q. and H.H. call each other "Punch" in two discursive lines before one obliterates the other, signaling, potentially, at the possibility of C.Q.'s reality within Lolita as nothing but a dark joke.

       In the opening lines of his autobiography, Speak, Memory, Nabokov beautifully paints how and why characters such as H.H., C.Q., and Lolita can, and do, exist. Nabokov writes:

       "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).... I feel the urge to take my rebellion outside and picket nature. Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life. That this darkness is caused merely by the walls of time separating me and my bruised fists from the free world of timelessness is a belief I gladly share with the most gaudily painted savage." (S.M., 19-20)

      Nabokov here seems the elegiac H.H., while the "gaudily painted savage" is none other than the "semi-animated" C.Q. For both characters doubtlessly seek the immortality of timelessness described by Nabokov--H.H. through words; C.Q. through film; both through the youth and inhumane characterization of Lolita--and both fear and (what's possibly worse) understand the terrifying abyss that waits on the other side of their present, brief, crack in the seamless orb of Time.