To Speak Ghosts and See Echoes: Longing in Lolita

Lecture Center 3A

Underneath the plot of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, which focuses on the musings of a pedophile and murderer who attempts to “confess” actions and impulses of which he feels no guilt, a secondary motif emerges of a man motivated, guided, and consumed by longing, which he cannot assuage due his fixation of desire on a subject that does not exist. Longing embodies Humbert’s greatest joy and deepest pain, a feeling of anxiety and anticipation which eclipses the necessity of completion. Lolita invokes longing, the desire towards absent things, in two ways. Firstly, Nabokov alludes to a cornucopia of other poetic, literary, and artistic works within his text which underscore Humbert’s longing for an unachievable past. Secondly, the invocation of longing perpetuates from the discordance of language and the subject it signifies. Humbert invokes a name, but the person he calls for never arrives, and thus the laceration of Lolita’s elusive character turns her into a literary ghost. I examine the rhetorical space in which longing thrives, where what is summoned cannot be conjured.