The Tragic Triumvirates of Time in Nabokov & Lolita

         As Nabokov leads us, "the men and gentlewomen of the jury," with his poetically-pitched, prose pipe, through the quagmire of Humbert Humbert's memories, tingles of "aesthetic bliss," and the verbose, verbal virtuosity that make up the pages of Lolita, the reader is propelled, enchanted, and even asked to participate in H.H.'s literary, pot-au-feu of a story, and would not be remiss to note, as the late Prince of Denmark once did (and still does), that "the time is out of joint." 
         In Nabokov's life and fiction, the issue of Time--its incessant negation and non-negotiable forward movement--is an immortal suffering that plagues both him and his characters in their search and desire for the eternal. Nabokov states in his autobiography Speak, Memory that,

         "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's desire for literal immortality is literarily mirrored by H.H., who also finds himself in an eternal antagonism with the falling sands as stated by Matthew Winston in his essay, Lolita and the Dangers of Fiction; mixing literature and life not only in the world of Lolita, but dually in Nabokov's literature and life as well.

         "Humbert's desire for the literary immortality of his book reflects his need to stop the passage of time in his life or at least to pretend it does not exist. His actions, as we shall see, are designed toward this end, and his language is consistent with his actions. Twice in a single paragraph he mentions that his interrupted sexual liaison with Lolita's predecessor took place on an "immortal day." He says that his ultimate quest is for the "eternal Lolita." Even when he is on the verge of his final separation from Lolita, Humbert still pleadingly holds out the hope that "we shall live happily ever after"....Lolita, then, is Humbert's bid for the immortal future of which he and his nymphet are personally incapable. But the book is also a memorial of the past, a "souvenir" of Humbert's travels, a record of events that have already happened. Humbert is preoccupied with memory, that dead thing which was once living experience, now resurrected and transmuted by the imagination..... He is obsessed by his memory of Annabel Leigh to the point that his entire life becomes an attempt to make his immortal moment with her in the past eternally present, to possess her forever. He fails to perpetuate Annabel through Lolita, who effaces her, and he cannot make his liaison with Lolita permanent, but he does succeed by writing his memoir." (Dangers of Fiction, 422)

        Humbert desires the immortality of the self and others, namely his beloved Lolita; an attainable immortality that had been taught to him through the effluvium of the past, literature and stories, just as his own creator, Nabokov, desires the kleos and timelessness that are physically and logically impossible under his mortal constraints. In the end, both writers are forced to succumb to the physical limitations of Time that are imposed upon us all, ever so tongue-in-cheekily proclaiming immortality from the dead words of their forgotten loves.

       "The artist wants 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. The lover wants to write a history which will glorify his beloved for future generations (it is to be published only after both of them are dead). In his final words, 'this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita,' Humbert appears as Renaissance sonneteer, boasting that he will make his love immortal in his writing, while ruefully admitting that such permanence is no adequate substitute for possessing the lady, or, as Humbert expresses it, 'Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!'" (Dangers of Fiction, 421)

        In Nabokov and H.H.'s aesthete-like way of continually, and ever-foolishly, fighting against, being conscientious of, and diligently recording the tragedies that are all subsequently consumed by the exacting power of Time's tick, the pair transcends their role as two-faced, duplicitous fool and transforms their personal expression and individual recollection into art--the true escapee of Time.

       "How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!...But even so, the individual mystery remains to tantalize the memoirist. Neither in environment or heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp or art is made to shine through life's foolscap." (Speak, Memory 24-25)