The timing of
the moments he is reproducing, while he seems to aim at
"redemption," is complex and, at least, threefold. There's
the recollection of a long past experience that was stimulated by the
"friendly abyss" he is then admiring. But there's also
the rendering of what is taking place right at the time when he is
writing his confessions behind bars. Perhaps he is
still fighting away the realization that the destruction
of Lolita's childhood was criminal in more senses than one
(not only Quilty's murder or driving on the wrong side of the road).
It's fairly obvious
that HH only became a victim of remorse
and guilt after he stopped seeing Lolita as a nymphet and
his wild urge was under restraint. The winding road he takes in his
first recollection, may transgress the
straight one, but it also runs in parallel to it
once in a while .However, after he kills Quilty, it's his car and his
thoughts that oscilate and turn a straight road into a
crooked.one (the image, not the spirit, is similar from Charles Kinbote's
reference, in PF, to the Biblical "the crooked made straight" and
a Daedalian plan).
My chronology may be incorrect It most
probably is - and it's a cold comfort to realize that this
is not unusual. with readers of HH's
confessions.
(we may even forget
that there's only his words to prove that Lolita
had always loved creepy and dissolute Quilty, making her
equally dissolute, even before she met HH). Right now this is as far as I
managed to go...
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*"... Alas, I was
unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might
find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could
make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be
proven to me to me as I am now, today, with my heart and by beard, and my
putrefaction that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North
American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a
maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see
nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local
palliative of articulate art. To quote an old poet: The moral sense in mortals is the duty/We have to pay on mortal
sense of beauty."(The
Annotated Lolita, page 282)
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