Allusions to the Garden of Eden are rampant in Part One of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
The first allusion occurs on the very first page of the novel proper, in the introductory section of Part One: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns” (9). What is interesting about this particular allusion is that Humbert casts his audience in the role of “misinformed” and “simple” seraphs, as if to imply that the beauty and love in the story we are about to read is fated to be misunderstood, as if we were to look at a rosebush and only see a tangle of thorns.
The Edenic allusions continue in Humbert Humbert’s first sexual experience with Annabel, the child who will serve as the Platonic form for all of Humbert’s future loves. The experience takes place “in a nervous, slender-leaved mimosa grove” (14), a paradise-like “garden” (15) of “tender trees” (14), between whose leaves could be seen “a cluster of stars [that] palely glowed” (14), a “vibrant sky…as naked as [Anabel] was under her light frock” (14). It is an experience that will stay with him, “until at last, twenty-four years later, [Humbert] broke [Annabel’s] spell by incarnating her in [Lolita]” (15).
It should also be noted that Humber first meets Lolita in a garden:
All I know is that while the Haze woman and I went down the steps into the breathless garden, my knees were like reflections of knees in rippling water, and my lips were like sand, and—
‘That was my Lo,’ she said. (40)
While there are dozens more allusions throughout Part One, perhaps the most revealing is that while Humbert may be “perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve,…it was Lilith he longed for” (20). As Robert Graves tells us:
God…formed Lillith, the first woman, just as He had formed Adam, except that He used filth and sediment instead of pure dust. From Adam’s union with this demoness…sprang…innumberable demons that still plague mankind.
[Or]
Adam and Lillith never found peace together, for when he wished to lie with her, she took offence at the recumbent posture he demanded. ‘Why must I live beneath you?’ she asked. ‘I was also made from dust, and am therefore your equal.’ Because Adam tried to compel her to obedience by force, Lillith, in a rage, uttered the magic name of God, rose into the air, and left him.
If we accept the first myth, then we understand better why Humbert is attracted to “nymphets,” which Humbert describes as “maidens [between the ages] of nine and fourteen” (16), but not just any girl-children of that age, only those with “the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm that separate nymphets from [other girl-children of the same age group]” (17). Unlike “ordinary…essentially human little girls,” (17), nymphets are made from a wholly different material, and “you have to be an artist and a madman…with a bubble of hot poison in your loins…in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs…the little deadly demon among the wholesome children” (17).
If we accept the second myth, then we appreciate just how much foreshadowing Nabokov includes in his book. Lolita will never be happy with Humbert, and she will resent most of Humbert’s amorous advances; for example, at the very moment when Humbert becomes free to fulfill his desires with Lolita, “and…as a lovely, lonely supercilious grove (oaks, I thought; American trees at that stage were beyond me) started to echo greenly the rush of our car, a red and ferny road on our right turned its head before slanting into the woodland, and I suggest we might perhaps…” (140), all Lolita will do is cry shrilly, “Drive on…You chump…[y]ou revolting creature…you dirty, dirty old man” (141). While she does allow sex to take place between them, it is only under her terms. Like Lilith, Lolita will not be compelled to obedience.
The allusions go on, with close to a bushel of apple references, a variety of gardens, ever surfacing serpents, “bubbles of paradise” (78), “immemorial fruit” (59), “the exquisite stainless tenderness seeping through the musk and the mud, through the dirt and death, oh God, oh God…” (44), etc.
But after Humbert finally lays claim to the subject of his desire, after he has tasted her fruit, his allusions to paradise, to that singular time outside of good and evil, they all fade into the background, only to be replaced with pages and pages filled with the literal descriptions of roadside haunts of America.
Could this, perhaps, support the argument Lolita is a brilliantly told tale of lover’s remorse, but here the remorse is not Humbert’s, but Nabokov’s?
Nabokov was a Russian immigrant to America. Is it fair to assert that he must have had fantasies about America before he arrived? And would it be fair to assert that, judging by his (true) descriptions of American settings, he found the reality much less than what he saw in his American dream?
In a short essay included at the back of the second Vintage International edition of Lolita, Nabokov wrote that the book could be fairly characterized as “the record of [his] love affair with the…English language” (316), but his use of allusions in the First Part also allows us to think Humbert’s desire for Lolita could be a(n unconscious?) metaphor for Nabokov’s original desire to experience the slick and sexy possibilities of the New World, and the lack of allusions in the Second Part as his response to the fallen state of America’s reality.
Perhaps that is too much assert. Perhaps we should conclude with the thesis that the presence and absence of Edenic allusions refer to the changing state of Humbert’s relationship with Lolita, and leave Nabokov’s (unconscious) motives alone. Perhaps.
