The point is that, if Humbert were truly repentant, either after
hearing the children's voices, or, later, after visiting Mrs Schiller,
he would not immediately rush off to murder another pervert whom, by
the narcissism of small differences, he judges to be infinitely more
criminal than himself (Clare Quilty is the pseudonym he gives
him, "clearly guilty"). In his splendid poem imitating Eliot's Ash
Wednesday which Humbert hands to Quilty, he accuses Quilty of
taking advantage of Humbert, who is, admittedly, a "sinner", but a
"sinner" who is at a "disadvantage", namely, his "inner / essential
innocence". Humbert does not even claim to be justly ridding the world
of an evil man, but, rather, makes the point that Quilty has to die
because he has "cheated" Humbert.
Nabokov thought Eliot a "fake". He could hardly make it more plain
that he thinks Humbert's self-justification, his phoney repentance
which justifies murder, is also fake. And not just fake, but far, far
worse. Eliot was bad to his first wife, but he was not a child rapist
or murderer.
Note that Humbert, in gaol, says that he would give himself a long
sentence for his crime against Lolita, but would "dismiss the other
charges". Does anyone suppose that Nabokov endorses this trivialising
of murder, even the murder of a bad man like Quilty? Nabokov knew what
murder was. I need not spell out why. I well remember one of the first
English reviews of "Lolita", I think in the New Statesman, by
the fine critic V. S. Pritchett, who wrote: "Mr Nabokov's murder is
horrible. Murder is horrible." (I quote from memory, but this
is almost exact, I think.) If Nabokov thought Raskolnikov was a "filthy
murderer", then why would he not have thought the same of Humbert?
I agree with Jansy Mello that the passage she quotes is, together
with the passage about the children's voices, the closest Humbert gets
to the truth of what he has done to Lolita. But if we, as readers, end
up accepting his rationalisation of his murder, then are we not just
settling for a kind of frivolous pornography? Nabokov's "aesthetic
bliss" is not amoral. Rather, his position seems akin to Wittgenstein's
in the Tractatus, that "ethics and aesthetics are one". Not
for nothing did Nabokov envisage the "reappraiser" who would see him as
a "rigid moralist". We should not let his wonderful humour mislead us.
Anthony Stadlen