America in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita - Research Paper Example

So much of the consumer society must have been a shock to him, after the deprivations of wartime in Europe, and yet he identified very strongly with many features of his new home. Sweeney quotes Nabokov saying to a journalist in 1966 “I am as American as April in Arizona” (1994, p. 325) and links this curious alliterative statement with the period when Nabokov and his family lived in Arizona in the Spring of 1953: “On sunny afternoons that April (and all day long during one rainy week) Nabokov worked at telling one story in particular: Lolita, his most acute observation of America’s beauties and vulgarities, the most cunning, incisive and poetic American novel of this century.

(Sweeney, 1994, p. 328). Lolita is set in working class provincial America, and its characters speak the idiom of that milieu. The object of his desire is a world weary twelve year old and Humbert indulges her love of vulgar and transient aspects of American culture: “Mentally, I found her a disgustingly conventional little girl. Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth.” (Nabokov and Appel, 1991, p. 148)The character of Humbert is portrayed as an immigrant of French origins, and in this character Nabokov plays out part of himself, quoting the narrative style of the realist novelist Flaubert in French with the phrase “Nous connûmes” and contrasting this learned reference with the tacky motels that they visit (Nabokov and Appel, 1991, pp. 145-146). He sees the tackiness that is on offer as something faintly ridiculous, but uses it as a means to ingratiate himself with Lolita: “we had to buy its Indian curios, dolls, copper jewelry, cactus candy.

The words ‘novelties’ and ‘souvenirs’ simply entranced her by their trochaic lilt” (Nabokov and Appel, p. 148). Humbert merges his own intellectual delight in the language with Lolita’s love of trivia. Through her he learns to both love and hate