Lolita - III

Voici les derniers extraits de Lolita. Analyse cette après-midi.
Le premier rappelle à quel point, on l'oublie souvent, ce n'est encore qu'une enfant, qui ne méritait pas cela (II, 3). La deuxième, une des plus belles déclarations d'amour possibles (II, 30). La dernière, remords de Humbert Humbert (II, 31).

And so we drove East, I more devastated than braced with the satisfaction of my passion, and she glowing with health, her bi-iliac garland still as brief as a lad’s, although she had added two inches to her stature and eight pounds to her weight. We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy enormous country that by the, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tyres, and her sobs in the night – every night, every night – the moment I feigned sleep.

She closed her eyes and opened her mouth, leaning back on the cushion, one felted foot on the floor. The wooden floor slanted, a little steel ball would have rolled into the kitchen. I knew all I wanted to know. I had no intention of torturing my darling. Somewhere beyond Bill’s shack an afterwork radio had begun singing of folly and fate, and there she was with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and her goose-flesh white arms, and her shallow eras, and her unkempt armpits, there she was (my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at seventeen, with that baby, dreaming already in her becoming a big shot and retiring around A.D. 2020 – and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had never seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. She was only the faint violet whiff and dead echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past : an echo on the brink on a russet ravine, with far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds… but thank God it was not that echo alone that I worshipped. What I used to pamper among the vines of my heart, mon grand péché radieux, had dwindled to its essence: sterile and selfish vice, all that I cancelled and cursed. You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and half-throttled, I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child, but still grey-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine : Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque part où nous ne serons jamais séparés ; Ohio . the wilds of Massachussetts . No matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and wrack, and her lovely young velvet delicate delta be tainted and torn – even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice my Lolita.

On those frosty mornings in the rime-laced Quebec, the good priest worked on me with the finest tenderness and understanding. I am infinitely obliged to him and the great Institution he represented. Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might fin, whatever lithophanic eternities may be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget that foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to me – to me as I ma now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction – that in the infinite run does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless it can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the very local palliative of articulate art. To quote an old poet:

The moral sense immortals is the duty

We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.