Distortions of Reality
In both Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita, and Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49, the protagonist is consumed by an obsession. These obsessions affect the characters' behavior, actions, and interaction with the world. Most importantly, however, both authors reveal that obsession distorts a person's perception of reality.
In Lolita, the protagonist and narrator, Humbert Humbert, has an obsessive lust for nymphets which warps his view of the world, ultimately driving him to paranoia. His sexual fixation for nymphets is projected on all that he sees. It prevents him from seeing the world clearly, void of nymphet-sexual overtones. His interactions and perceptions of girls are consumed with sexual fantasy, which obstructs their true nature. He becomes delusional due to paranoia, causing his imagination to take hold of his notions of reality.
Humbert writes the following accounts from a prison cell, where he is able to use his retrospect to narrate the novel. He describes his obsession with nymphets at great lengths. Whenever he comes into contact with them he is overcome with sexual lust and yearning. He tells the reader, "I was consumed by a hell furnace of localized lust for every passing nymphet" (18). His obsession is intensified by the agony and frustration he feels due to his inability to act on his desires. Humbert even convinces himself that there is nothing wrong with being infatuated with girl-children, justifying it as, "a question of attitude" (19). This rationale is further justified through his numerous references to man-nymphet sexual relationships throughout history. He has done thorough research on the topic because of his utter fascination with girl-children. This fascination has also led him to pursue the detailed study of the pubescent stages of female development.
Humbert describes the feelings that his obsessive lust evokes. He says that his random infrequent interactions with girls on the metro or in the park created "a revelation of axillary russet...[that] remained in my blood for weeks" (20). Whenever nymphets are near him he feels euphoric and becomes enraptured in his fantasies. The world around him stops, and he dreams of being left "alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up" (20). He uses imagery of a mossy garden to emphasize his forbidden desire of young girls. Moss is green, which symbolizes youth or something that is unripe, while the garden refers to Eden, where Eve was forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge.
Nabokov similarly uses imagery to reveal Humbert's misconceptions of reality. His obsessive lust for young girls is reflected in the world that he sees, which is expressed through images of a mirror. While he is with a nymphet prostitute he notices his reflection "that distorted my mouth" (22). This mirrors his distorted view of young girls that he projects throughout the novel. He cannot see himself clearly in the mirror, just as he cannot see young girls clearly. His inability to see outside of his world, which is consumed by thoughts and feelings of obsessive lust, is also seen through imagery of a window. The prostitute is wrapped in the gauze of the window curtain, which symbolizes that Humbert's obstructed view of reality is just like the obstructed view that a curtain provides a window.
Similar imagery is seen during Humbert's life with his first wife Valeria. Humbert and Valeria, who resembles a little girl, live in an apartment that has a "hazy view in one window, a brick wall in the other" (26). Humbert cannot see outside the box within he lives. He cannot see past his warped sense of women. His mind has slipped into a world confined by his sexual desire. While living in this apartment he is driven mad by the shadow of the grocer's little daughter (26). This image reveals that his picture of girls is only a ...
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Similar imagery is seen during Humbert's life with his first wife Valeria. Humbert and Valeria, who resembles a little girl, live in an apartment that has a "hazy view in one window, a brick wall in the other" (26). Humbert cannot see outside the box within he lives. He cannot see past his warped sense of women. His mind has slipped into a world confined by his sexual desire. While living in this apartment he is driven mad by the shadow of the grocer's little daughter (26). This image reveals that his picture of girls is only a dark reflection of light, thus it lacks substance and clarity. Similar images persist when Humbert notices through the store window of an art dealer, "a locomotive with a gigantic smokestack, great baroque lamps and a tremendous cowcatcher, hauling its mauve coaches through the stormy prairie night and mixing a lot of spark-studded black smoke with the furry thunder clouds" (26-27). This image of smoke, light, and clouds reflects Humbert's obscured understanding of his world. Instead of seeing things clearly and illuminated, his "head is in the clouds."
The novel's theme of obsession leading to the distortion of reality is reiterated through the work that Humbert does when he goes to America. The intense research that is involved in his job of writing the history of French literature causes him to have a nervous breakdown and he is sent to a sanatorium twice. This reflects the larger theme of the novel that intensity, like compulsion or obsession, leads to mental disorder. While Humbert is on an expedition to arctic Canada, he feels "curiously aloof from [himself]...seated on a boulder under a completely translucent sky" (33). Nabokov uses imagery of clarity to make Humbert feel disconnected from himself. Under a clear sky he cannot see himself clearly.
Humbert's arrival at the Haze household marks the beginning of his most powerful obsession: Lolita Haze. The name "Haze" is an intentional play-on-words that Nabokov uses to emphasize the obscured perception and confused state of mind that she causes Humbert. Humbert's obsession with this twelve-year-old girl is chronicled in an entire diary's worth of entries that mark every stage of his growing lust for her. It is filled with imagery and language that illustrate his lack of perspective. Mrs. Haze takes a picture of Humbert while he sits "blinking on the steps" (41). Humbert's blindness from watching Lolita is accentuated by the fact that it is captured in a photograph. In another instance, while Humbert daydreams of Lolita, Mrs. Haze interrupts by asking him for a cigarette light (43). This refers to Humbert's obscured view of Lolita and is an example of the subtleties of language used by Nabokov to reveal a greater theme. The leitmotif of the mirror is again seen in these diary entries when Humbert observes one day that he and Lolita are "in the same warm, green bath of the mirror that reflected the top of a poplar with us in the sky" (43). Their position in the sky depicts that Humbert is not grounded, nor does he "have his feet on the ground," because he is completely preoccupied with his lust for Lolita.
Humbert also reveals self-recognition of his biased perception of Lolita. He explains, "Never have I experienced such agony. I would describe her face, her ways - and I cannot because my own desire for her blinds me when she is near" (44). Humbert is both literally and figuratively blinded by Lolita. He is unable to notice anything but his lust for her. One day, as he lustfully watches her leaning through a window while talking to the newspaper boy, he confesses, "I seemed to see her through the wrong end of a telescope" (55). Again, Nabokov uses figurative language to depict Humbert's inability to see Lolita clearly while she is leaning outside of a window. By looking through a telescope from the opposite end, her image appears much farther away, and thus obscured.
Humbert's obsession with Lolita causes him to recreate reality. He figuratively takes on the role of an artist. He says, "you have to be an artist and a madman" (17) in order to lust after nymphets. This aspect of his character is emphasized when Lolita shows him a picture of a surrealist painting in a magazine (58). Nabokov uses this allusion to refer to the surreal nature of Humbert's perception of Lolita. Humbert admits, "What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation" (62). He has molded his own image of Lolita in his mind, which has objectified and glorified her. His obsession with this figment of his imagination has clouded reality.
Towards the end of the novel, Humbert's obsession with Lolita drives him to paranoia, a delusional state of reality. While he and Lolita are on a road-trip he is overcome with fear and suspicion that someone is following them in order to steal her away from him. He notices that a convertible has been following their trail, portraying the car as "that red ghost swimming and shivering with lust in my mirror" (217). This description is rich with word-plays, as the "red ghost" is a reference to Lolita, who has hedonistically haunted Humbert throughout the novel with her red lips, red nails, red apple, etc. The car "shivers with lust" in his mirror, just as his uncontrollable lust for Lolita is reflected like a mirror in his perception of his world. His paranoia is intensified when he pieces together a stream of suspicious episodes that validate his fear; strange car, strange phone call, strange man appearing and disappearing whenever he turns his back.
Humbert makes the most extreme leap from reality in this section of the novel, as he is unable to decipher hallucination from actuality. One night he is woken by a knock on the door only to find a character from a comic strip standing on the other side (217). Looking back on the incident from his prison cell, Humbert acknowledges that he is "not sure to this day that the visit was not a drug-provoked dream...it may all have been a coincidence" (217). This statement reveals to the reader that Humbert is not a reliable narrator. If he is unable to distinguish his mind's own creation from reality then his entire recollection of the past could be one large hallucination that he has experienced from his prison cell. After all, he has just killed a man, which questions his mental soundness and stability. This is an ironic twist to the novel as it reminds the reader that the novel itself is a result of Humbert's distorted perception of reality.
Reality is similarly distorted for Oedipa Maas, the protagonist of The Crying of Lot 49, due to her obsession with solving the Trystero mystery. The name 'Maas,' like the Spanish word más, which means more, is an intentional play on words to reveal that Oedipa sees more meaning in things than what they actually imply. After she is named chief executor of her ex-lover Pierce Inverarity's will, she begins her physical and mental quest to sort-out his belongings. Along the way she begins to connect a collection of clues that lead to what she thinks is a worldwide postal conspiracy known as Trystero. Oedipa becomes the ultimate paranoid as she seeks to sort through the pieces of the Trystero puzzle that consume her existence. Her obsession reaches the point in which, "everything she saw, smelled, dreamed, remembered, would somehow come to be woven into The Tristero" (64). Like Humbert, her obsession propels her to mental disarray.
Pynchon uses foreshadowing to reveal the paranoiac quest on which Oedipa is about to embark. This foreshadowing is rich with imagery, like Nabokov, in order to figuratively illustrate the protagonist's conception of reality.
"As things developed, she was to have all manner of revelations...about what remained yet had somehow, before this, stayed away. There had hung the sense of buffering, insulation, she had noticed the absence of an intensity, as if watching a movie, just perceptibly out of focus, that the projectionist refused to fix" (10).
This prepares the reader for the changes in perception that Oedipa is about to experience. Until this point in her life she has lacked passion and the ability to see the brilliance of seemingly meaningless aspects of life. She has been unable to see the full spectrum, or the interconnectedness of all things, because she has put up a barrier between herself and the world. The breaking of this barrier in the first chapter of the novel opens Oedipa's eyes to a new world that changes her perception from one extreme to another. Instead of having a blurred, detached view of the world, she adjusts the lens to the opposite extreme, which gives her a sensitized awareness of the world. This new perspective is still out of focus and its intense attention to detail causes her to obsess over the meaning of Trystero, a word that is projected into her world by Randolph Driblette, the director of the play The Courier's Tragedy. Driblette refuses to explain for Oedipa the significance of this word, and thus she embarks on her search for its meaning, which encircles her mind and detaches her from reality. The foreshadowing of her "revelations" to come also opens the eyes of the reader to the importance of paying attention to detail and looking for clues that answer the Trystero mystery.
Similar to Humbert, Oedipa's obsession causes her to recreate reality. She creates a complicated web of connections between symbols and words that suddenly permeate her world. Her paranoia takes over, and "With coincidences blossoming these days wherever she looked, she had nothing but a sound, a word, Trystero, to hold them together" (87). Her ability to create frees her from feelings of entrapment and isolation that the conformities of society have placed on her in the past. Pynchon expresses these feelings through imagery that uses the window to reveal perception of the world, just as Nabokov does in Lolita. Oedipa was deeply saddened upon looking at a painting by a Spanish exile Remedios Varo.
"In the central painting of a triptych, titled 'Bordando el Manto Terrestre,' (Embroidering the Terrestrial Mantle) were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world" (11).
The painting serves as a metaphor for Oedipa's perception and creation of the world. Like these women, when she looks through the window that connects her with the rest of the world she sees emptiness. This emptiness is due to feelings of separation and imprisonment from the conformities of society. Her only outlet from this conformity is to express her individuality through creativity. Thus, she creates her own reality.
Similar to Humbert's experience of hallucination, Oedipa's obsession with the Trystero mystery prevents her from deciphering her imagination from reality. During a night of wandering aimlessly through San Fransisco, she also experiences hallucinations. She sees the Trystero symbol of the muted post horn all over the city, including "the dark window of a herbalist" (94). Once again, the image of an obscured window reveals Oedipa's inability to see through her paranoia. She too has "trouble sorting the night into real and dreamed" (95).
Pynchon was clearly aware of the similarities between Oedipa and Humbert, because he makes allusions to Lolita. When Oedipa takes her final trip to San Narciso, the hometown of Pierce Inverarity, she finds the hippie band The Paranoids singing a song that mentions "Humbert Humbert" (120). They are situated by the pool at Echo Courts Hotel. This scene is rich with symbolic language, a characteristic of Nabokov's writing as well. The name of the town and the hotel refer to Oedipa's infatuation with something that is a mere fabrication and reflection of her own mind. The pool that is next to The Paranoids as they play their song about Humbert reveals the lucidity of this moment. The second allusion to Lolita occurs as Oedipa looks over the city of San Fransisco and from "The high point of the bridge's arc, she saw smog. Haze, she corrected herself, is what it is, haze" (87). Pynchon makes a point of drawing attention to the haze by repeating it twice and distinguishing it from smog. Haze reflects the confusion and obscured vision that Oedipa sees the world through, which is similar to that of Humbert.
Both Humbert Humbert and Oedipa Maas experience life from a level of separation due to the overwhelming nature of their obsessions. Their internal world is all that they are able to see, which is subsequently projected onto their external world. They have created their own realities, which they are unable to recognize as false.