Abstract
Leland de la Durantaye argues that Nabokov considered morality—as opposed to “moralizing,” which he detested—to be inseparable from a work of art. Lolita, for example, “is a moral book” because it continually alludes to the very question of whether or not Humbert’s behavior is moral. In “The Art of Morality, or on Lolita,” Durantaye identifies the formal strategies by which Nabokov leads his readers to ponder such questions; he shows, for example, how Nabokov carefully orchestrates the tension between lyricism and parody in Humbert’s narration as well as the shift from blindness to insight in Humbert’s understanding of himself.
Parts of this essay are adapted from Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov, by Leland de la Durantaye. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.
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- 1.
For one further example: “I am not ‘sincere,’ I am not ‘provocative,’ I am not ‘satirical.’ I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer. Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of ‘thaw’ in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent” (BS xii).
- 2.
For a brief compendium of such remarks, see my Style is Matter 7–9.
- 3.
“I am unable to foresee and to fend inevitable attempts to find in the alembics of Despair something of the rhetorical venom that I injected into the narrator’s tone in a much later novel. Hermann and Humbert are alike only in the sense that two dragons painted by the same artist at different periods of his life resemble each other. Both are neurotic scoundrels, yet there is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year; but Hell shall never parole Hermann” (Des xiii).
- 4.
See Rorty’s remark that “Lolita does have a ‘moral in tow.’ But the moral is not to keep one’s hand off little girls but to notice what one is doing, and in particular to notice what people are saying. For it might turn out, it very often does turn out, that people are trying to tell you that they are suffering” (164).
- 5.
“To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy” (Russell 314).
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de la Durantaye, L. (2016). The Art of Morality, or on Lolita . In: Rodgers, M., Sweeney, S. (eds) Nabokov and the Question of Morality. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59221-7_11
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