NTU Studies in Language and Literature

51

Number 12 (June 2003), 51-78

© 2003 by the NTU Press and the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, NTU

Nomadic Subjectivity in Nabokov’s Lolita

Chia-chin Tsai 蔡佳瑾

Chung-hua University

ABSTRACT

Many critics tend to regard Nabokov’s Lolita either as a pedophilia’s confession or,

with the prevailing verbal games in the novel, as the expression of Nabokov’s own
attachment to words. The following paper argues that rather than a romance about a
pedophilia’s love for a nymphet, Nabokov’s Lolita is a discourse of desire delivered by a
middle-aged intellectual with obscure origin and protean identity. Taking a line of
escape from the homogenizing force of the Establishment, i.e. the socius, Humbert
Humbert, the protagonist-narrator, is a “nomad” in the light of Deleuze and Guattari’s
schizoanalysis and nomadology. Defying a fixed and collective identity, the nomad
keeps roaming about without a telos. For him, it is, in fact, the willful but free-floating
desire rather than the object of desire that matters. Moreover, from the viewpoint of
schizoanalysis, his desire for Lolita appears to be one for becoming animal and child,
which is a form of deterritorialization of desire from the reterritorializing Oedipal triad.
Nevertheless, his schizoescape inevitably encounters the paranoiac integration of the
socius. It is his oscillation between the schizophrenic tendency and the paranoiac one
that constitutes the fluidity of the nomad’s discourse of desire.

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NTU Studies in Language and Literature

The reader of Lolita can easily perceive a fluctuant, unsettled movement

running about in the novel. The author, Vladimir Nabokov, through the
puppet-narrator he manipulates, has created in this novel characters that are
“infinitely fluid” and that can never be “stilled” or “fixed” as particular types
(Bader 67). The fluidity emanates from and streams along the discourse of
desire articulated by the protagonist-narrator Humbert Humbert. His
unchained desire and migratorial propensity make this asocial middle-aged
European intellectual’s perversity figurative. With his nonidentity and
unconscious impulses to take a “line of flight” from normalization, he is
nomadic and even “schizophrenic” as viewed in the light of Deleuze and
Guattari’s nomadology and schizoanalysis. Finding the intermingling of desire
with all kinds of metaphorical or actual prisons worth further exploration, I will
focus on the analysis of the discourse of desire and its confrontation with the
homogenizing social power in the novel. Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanal-
ysis serves to clarify the oscillation between the liberation of desire and its
withdrawal shown in the novel.

I. Lolita--The Schizophrenic Process of Becoming Nomad

Lolita, the most well-known of Nabokov’s and now considered one of the

great English novels written in the twentieth century, adopts a semi-porno style
that seized the attention of the critics in the first few years of its publication.

1

In fact, ever since its publication, what Lolita is really about has been a major
critical concern. Critics like Brandon S. Centerwall and Margaret Morganroth
Gullette insist that Lolita should be about pedophilia, Humbert’s “nympholepsy”,
and nothing else.

2

Gullette, comparing Lolita with Mann’s Death in Venice,

maintains that it belongs to the genre of “decline story”; that is to say, it

1

In the States, Lolita failed to arouse public and academic attention to the author until its full-lengthed

review, indebted to Graham Greene's recommendation, firstly appeared in 1957 in New York,

almost

two years after its infamous publication in Paris by Olympia Press, a “Parisian erotica house”, known
for its “green-backed” pornographic books (Hollander 81).

2

Centerwall claims that the novel, perhaps the talking cure for one who had been abused in childhood

(479-80), is really about pedophilia and molestation and that in spite of his posterior self-justification,
Nabokov is actually a “closet pedophile.” The critics who regard the protagonist's nympholepsy as
pedophilia seem to treat the novel as a case history of psychoanalytical therapy, falling into a trap
Nabokov deliberately set up for the reader because in the “mock foreword” of the novel, the made-up
editor John Ray Jr. purposely misinforms the reader that the novel is the confession of a psychopathic
murderer, and thus a parody of the eighteenth-century literary convention.

Nomadic Subjectivity in Nabokov’s Lolita 53

represents the author’s attempt to deter his aging by possessing the bodies of the
young. The title that appears in the foreword, “Lolita or the Confession of a
White Widowed Male” intentionally associates this text with psychiatric case
histories and also creates a false impression that it is solely pornographic.

3

In

contrast with the pedophile-asserting critics, Trilling reveals that along the
reading process, the reader would find that the text becomes less morally
offensive and more “human and understandable”; thus, he concludes, “Lolita is
about love” (95). John Hollander alleges that Nabokov’s focus is fixed upon
the “sentimental treatment of the love affair itself, and the satiric portrayal of the
American kitsch through which the lovers peregrinate” (82). After almost three
decades, Laurie Clancy still maintains that Nabokov’s writings contain as theme
an “intense and ill-fated love” in variation (103).

Among those who affirm the moral ground of the novel, Howard Nemerov’s

viewpoint may serve as an overall accessory. He states that even though
Nabokov’s artistic concern “has no more to do with morality than with sex. . .,”
Lolita is nonetheless a moral work under the condition that “by morality in
literature we are to understand the illustration of a usurious rate of exchange
between our naughty desires and virtuous pains, of the process whereby
pleasures become punishments. . .” (91-2) [emphasis added]. Nemorov’s
remarks unwittingly points to the transgressive game between desire and the
Law, which characterizes the discourse of desire revealed by the novel’s
protagonist-narrator. Lolita, as a discourse bespoken by a misfit and deviant
nymphet-lover, is the illustration of Dionysian desire; it expresses the irrational
and heterogeneous substance of human life. The exile motif, the pervert desire,
the contradiction between personal desire and social order, as well as the
confession to the jury do contain great significance in the context of verbal game
as an escape from society’s (re)channeling of desire.

The protagonist-narrator Humbert Humbert as represented in his capricious

narration is “migratorial” and “precarious” in regard to both his disposition and
identity. This characteristic is especially apparent in his willful “doodling”
with his own name. Humbert is sometimes called “Hamburg,” “Hummer,” or
“Humbug.” He is, as he says about his father, “a salad of racial genes” and that

is why his origin is puzzling. His identity is as uncertain as his language. In

3

In his annotations on the novel, Appel points out that the term “white widowed male” appears in case

histories as an identification, and the whole subtitle parodies the confessional novel as well as the
expectations of the reader hoping that “Lolita will provide the pleasures of pornography” (391 n. 1)

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other words, Humbert is characteristic of what Deleuze and Guattari term
“nomadic subjectivity.” Instead of being segregated into a fixed and
collective identity, the nomadic subject embraces multiple possibilities of
subjectivity (Holland 39). Besides, Humbert even appears to be everything
marginal and minoritarian in his relationship with social establishments.
Nabokov implies that Humbert bears a close resemblance to a Jew. For
instance, in his fatal confrontation with Quilty, his adversary, Humbert is taken
as a German refugee in a Gentile’s place (297).

Like his author, Humbert is an expatriate, barely settling down as a member

of a society

4

because for Humbert, to settle down means to be imprisoned. As

Tanner points out, Nabokov’s writings are made distinct by all kinds of
prisons--political and psychological, social and personal (35). In Humbert’s
narration, it is to social prisons that the expatriate takes a deep-rooted aversion.
While challenging taboo and social establishment with his wayward discourse of
desire, Humbert reveals a strong intention to resist or evade the
homogeneous-assimilative tendency in society. This intent bespeaks what
Deleuze and Guattari call “the deterritorialization of desire,” which refers to the
unchaining as well as the decoding of desire away from the re-codifying social
apparatus

5

.

4

Nabokov, known for his identity as an émigré writer and sticking to the life of exile all his life,

considers himself “the type of artist who is always in exile” (qtd. in Pifer, “Art of Exile,” 215). When
asked whether his nationality is important in regard to his identity as a writer in an interview conducted
by his student Alfred Appel in 1966, Nabokov indicats that “the writer's art is his real passport. . . . I
think of myself today as an American writer who has once been a Russian one” (19-20). Moreover, as
Connolly remarks, Nabokov resisted “attempts to identify him with any larger, communal group,
whether it be a social class, a generational category . . . or even nationality”(6). Escape or flight is a
recurrent motif in Nabokov's stories and poems. Nabokov admits in an interview his preference of
this theme and recalls that in his early childhood he “suffered from nightmares full of wanderings and
escapes, and desolate station platforms” (SO, 132). The wandering, the escape, and deserted train
stations in his dreams imply his wish for an outlet. Nabokov himself lived in a nomadic way, never
settling down in a particular place for good and living mainly in hotels or rented apartments. Another
form of the line of escape he takes is his “art”--especially his writing of Humbert's desiring narration.
His aversion to groups, human communities, and settlement can easily be found in his characterization
of Humbert Humbert. Just as “society for [Nabokov] is a group, not of individuals, but of
non-individuals” (Rampton 13), so the protagonist of this novel remains an “expatriate” in human
society.

5

The cardinal function of the social machine or the “socius” has been to “codify” the flows of desire, “to

see to it that no flow exists that is not properly dammed up, channeled, regulated” (AOE 32). In a
primitive society, human desire is bound to “the body of the Earth”--the territory; the primitive
machine “encodes” the flow of desire. In a despotic society, the socius becomes the transcendental
body of the despot, who, with the dread of the decoded flows of desire, “overcodes” desire and makes

Nomadic Subjectivity in Nabokov’s Lolita 55

Under the pressure of human community, the expatriate struggles to have his

desire released and behaves as the “schizo”, who continually roams about,
migrates here, there, and everywhere as best as he can, and lapses into the state
of deterritorialization (AOE 35). Deterritorialization is in fact one necessary
step in the schizophrenic process of becoming nomad, i.e. a process of
decentering. However, this deterritorializing movement inevitably encounters
the blockage set up by society. Deleuze and Guattari think that human history
is in fact a procedure of deterritorialization; in other words, human nature is
prone to the deterritorialization or decoding of desire.

Choosing the pervert desire of a “pedophile” as the subject matter of the

novel, Nabokov discloses the innermost subversiveness of a human desire
revealed as man’s struggle for non-repression, which emerges in the creative
process of becoming. In his introduction to Lolita, Appel observes that there
is a “constant process of becoming” in Nabokov’s art—“the evolution of the
artist’s self through creation” (xxiii). Kristeva also recognizes in Nabokov’s
writing “the process of ongoing metamorphosis” (Pifer, “Her Monster,” 159)
[emphasis added]. This process of transformation or becoming can be
interpreted in Deleuze and Guattari’s view as the deterritorializing process of
becoming.

6

That is to say, Humbert’s desire for the girl-child is in fact a form

it the desire of desire, that is, the desire of the despot's desire (206). In contrast, the capitalist social
machine, “constructed on the ruins of the territorial and the despotic” and as the latest social formation,
“decodes” and “recodes” desire simultaneously. Deleuze and Guattari coin the terms
“deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization” to signify the twofold proceeding of decoding and
recoding desire in capitalist society. Even in a deterritorializing capitalist society, desire faces a
recoding force, a boundary or artificial territorialities, which the capital socius establishes with all sorts
of beliefs and institutions. Capitalism decodes or deterritorializes the flows of libido-desire, the
incarnated forms of which include capital money and labor power, out of the overcoding power of the
despotic social machine; however, the process of deterritorialization, the extremity of which they call
“schizophrenia,” does not go on forever without any impediment—“[capitalism] has an exterior limit
that is schizophrenia, that is, the absolute decoding of flows, but it functions only by pushing back and
exorcising this limit” (250). In other words, capitalist society unleashes desire on the one hand and
hinder the tidal proceeding of deterritorialization on the other by a “quantifying axiomatic”: “The flows
are decoded and axiomatized by capitalism at the same time” (AOE 246). Accordingly, the
schizophrenic exterior limit of the capitalist socius is always accompanied with a paranoiac interior
limit, which continues to exorcise and even propel the fringe of it so that the capitalist socius would not
collapse, falling into schizophrenic condition. Repelling the deterritorialization of the schizo-flux,

the

paranoiac pole functions as the despotic aspect of the society.

6

According to Marks, becoming is “a matter of metamorphosis and not metaphor” (34). Arguing that

all becoming is a “becoming-minoritarian”, Deleuze and Guattari maintain that in contrast with men,
who belong to the majority and constitute social standards, women, children, animals and plants are
minoritarian (TP 291).

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NTU Studies in Language and Literature

of deterritorialization. The becoming-animal, becoming-child and
becoming-woman for both men and women are a process of desiring production
and are in essence molecular, in contrast with the molar animal, child and
woman.

7

Take woman for example. Her molar entity means that she is

“defined by her form, endowed with organs and functions and assigned as a
subject” (TP, 275). Becoming woman is not the imitation of the molar entity of
the woman or the transformation into a real woman; it is a process of generating
or creating in us a “molecular woman.”

8

Therefore, both man and woman could

have a “molecular woman” inside themselves. The becoming is by and large a
way to “resist the dominant mode of representation represented by any majority”
(Jardin 52)--the majority in the sense of “the determination of a state or
standard.” Deleuze and Guattari ponder especially over the significance of the
child and the girl in the process of becoming--they are transsexual, trans-aged,
and therefore, deterritorializing:

The girl is like the block of becoming that remains contemporaneous to
each opposable term, man, woman, child, adult. It is not the girl who be-
comes a woman; it is becoming-woman that produces the universal girl. . . .
[G]irls and children draw their strength neither from the molar status that
subdues them nor from the organism and subjectivity they receive; they draw
their strength from the becoming-molecular they cause to pass between
sexes and ages, the becoming-child of the adult as well as of the child, the
becoming-woman of the man as well as of the woman. The girl and the
child do not become; it is becoming itself that is a child or a girl.The child
does not become an adult any more than the girl becomes a woman; the girl
is the becoming-woman of each sex, just as the child is the
becoming-young of every age. (TP, 277) [emphasis added]

The becoming per se, which designates “the child turning young” and “the girl
turning woman,” is by and large “becoming molecular.” In other words, the
girl and the child qua becoming are characteristic of the molecular status. This

7

The term “molar” is used by Deleuze and Guattari to refer to “a body of matter considered as a whole

as opposed to its component parts (e.g. molecules)” (Holland 140 n.6). The molar form of libidinal
investment, which is “paranoid,” joins force with social norms to restrain the free-flowing molecular
form of libidinal investment, which is “schizophrenic” (Holland 93-4).

8

According to Holland, it is on the molar level that sexual identity is recognizable due to external

object-choice and identification, whereas on the molecular level, sexual identity contains “a
multiplicity of 'internal' features . . . that are not reducible to the reproductive organs alone” (44).

Nomadic Subjectivity in Nabokov’s Lolita 57

special feature of becoming is observed and used by Nabokov as the unique
quality a nymphet has--Lolita is characterized as the molecular girl-child qua
becoming. Nabokov contrasts Humbert’s desire for Lolita with cases of
middle-aged men marrying young girls: “[C]ases of men in their forties
marrying girls in their teens or early twenties have no bearing on Lolita [sic.]
whatever. Humbert was fond of ‘little’ girls--not simply ‘young girls.’
Nymphets are girl-children . . .” (SO 93). The nymphet is discerned by her
“tender, dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity” that always drive the
nympholept insane. The childishness is capable of summoning in him “the
molecular child.” Humbert, with a keen insight, can perceive two kinds of
sexuality in the female--the big woman and the girl-child. As Field sees it,
Lolita, with a tomboyish personality, is a third sex for the desirer (327). This
third sex stands for a trans-sexual and trans-aged status, in which Humbert’s
desire is deterritorialized.

By associating with Lolita, Humbert himself experiences a deterritorializing

procedure of not only becoming-child but also becoming animal. Lolita has
been “metamorphosed” into a monkey in Humbert’s depiction: she has
“long-toed, monkeyish feet,” two little “claws,” instead of hands, and thus
displays a “monkeyish nimbleness” (51, 58, 166). Corresponding to Lolita’s
monkeyishness, Humbert depicts himself as an ape: he is simian, has two “ape
paws,” and, moreover, looks “boyishly manly” (104). In other words, the
“assemblage”

9

with the monkeyish girl-child makes him an ape-like boy-child,

instead of an adult man. This metamorphosis, or de-anthropologization,
represents a becoming, deterritorializing phase. Be it an ape, a spider, an
octopus, or a hummingbird into which Humbert transforms himself, it is
certainly not an “oedipal” pet animal. In Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari
comment on the significance of the becoming-animal:

To become animal is to. . . stake out the path of escape in all its positivity,. . .
to find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the
significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter
of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs. (13) [emphasis added]

“Becoming” animal is distinct from “being” an animal; it is being in a status of

9

The word “assemblage” is a neutral term that Deleuze and Guattari use instead of “desiring-machine”

in A Thousand Plateaus (Massumi 82).

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NTU Studies in Language and Literature

neither human nor animal, i.e. a status of libido without the (re)codification of
signifying chain. Hence, both becoming-animal and becoming-child impel a
deterritorializing movement away from the authoritarian dominion, especially
from the Oedipalization omnipresent in society--the familial, the bureaucratic,
and even the commercial triangle (Kafka 9-15).

Nevertheless, in Humbert’s gamesome narration, it is not difficult to detect a

constant fear of being dominated, a mood that goes along with his unchecked,
on-going float of desire. Like his author, who expresses in an interview his
distaste for the oppression or domination of any sort, including the
regimentation of thought (SO, 48), Humbert has a dread or suspicion of
conspiracies against individual autonomy, if ever this autonomy does exist.
However, what he apprehends is more likely the social reterritorialization of his
unchained desire rather than the deprivation of autonomy, thought and action.
The incompatibility of the desire in terms of the measurement of society is
represented in his identity or role as a “psychopath,” or a “sociopath” (Maddox
67), which serves to highlight the conflict. The most obvious form of the
reterritorialization of desire as the result of his being aberrant is psychoanalysis,
which, Humbert feels, conspires to “forge” his desire as the consequence of a
lack or trauma.

II. An-Oedipal Desire

Desire represented by Nabokov is closer to the schizoanalytic perspective of

desire as a nomadic free-floating flux than to the psychoanalytic view of desire
as one caught in the oedipal triangle. That is to say, the immanent current of
desire in Humbert’s narration is more like a mobile, productive, and assembling
vigor than one motivated by a sense of loss or absence. To grasp the
subversiveness of Humber’s desire, one needs to distinguish between these two
views of desire.

The psychical lack, from the Freudian-Lacanian point of view, is an

aftereffect of the castration fear, which arises from “le non/nom du pére”(the
“no”/”name” of the father). That is, the infant is forced to renounce its
symbiotic relationship with the mother because of the intrusion of the father
with the threat of castration. The incest taboo thus causes the loss of the
primary mother-object, which leaves a rift in the psychical structure of the
subject. Lacan indicates that this unforgettable “prehistoric” (m)Other, which

Nomadic Subjectivity in Nabokov’s Lolita 59

he also calls das Ding, is excluded from the signifying chain but exists at its
center as a constitutive void (Seminar VII, 63, 71, 73).

10

Since the subject’s

relationship with objects is based on the lacuna, all the objects the subject find
are actually the stand-in of the objet petit a. The lacuna, as Lacan points out in
Seminar XI, “can be occupied . . . by any object” (180). He also maintains
that all the objects that drives and desire aim at are partial objects owing to the
fact that “in the unconscious only the pleasure-giving function of these objects is
represented, while their biological function is not represented” (Evans 135).
Besides, that which marks certain zones of the body as partial objects is “not
any biological given but the signifying system of language” (Evans 135)
[emphasis added].

What draws the demarcation between psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis is

Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of the psychoanalytic view of the lack as
something a priori and of its reinforcement of Oedipus complex. Opposing to
the Hegelian-Lacanian representation of desire as a lack and adopting from
psychoanalysis only the concept of free-floating libido without fixation and
facilitation, Deleuze and Guattari maintains that desire is more like production
(“desiring production”) or the Nietzschean will to power,

11

free-floating,

a-signifying, and unbound since “what is productive is nomadic” (Foucault,
Preface to AOE, xiii). Besides, considering the lack to be the “deprivation of
objects of desire by social organization” (Holland 52), they argue that the
pre-linguistic/pre-Oedipal state of unification with the (m)Other is “not the
debilitating lack of an old unity but a real capacity for new connection”
(Massumi 85). As Best and Kellner both observe, the schizoanalytic view of
desire is “neither inherently good nor bad, only dynamic and productive” (105).
For Deleuze and Guattari, the repetition compulsion to return to the maternal
object is the aftermath of Oedipalization or normalization, which is one with the

10

In Seminar VII, Lacan points out that at the level of representation (Vorstellungen), das Ding is

“characterized by its absence, its strangeness” and it is “at the center only in the sense that it is
excluded” (63, 71). Das Ding and objet a, defined as “a privileged object, which has emerged from
some primal separation”(Lacan, Seminar XI, 83), are indistinguishable in Lacan's theory: both stand
for the cause of drive and desire

10

. He even identifies das Ding with “the impulse to find again,” i e.

the impulse to retrieve the lost object--which “establishes the orientation of the human subject to
the object” (Seminar VII, 58) [emphasis added].

11

As Michel Haar points out, by the term “will to power,” Nietzsche did not mean a universal will but a

“plurality of instincts and impulses in constant battle with one another to gain the upper hand”(9).
The Nietzschian undertaking in Anti-Oedipus is manifested in Mark Seem's introduction to the theory
as well as in Bogue's critical interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari.

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NTU Studies in Language and Literature

function of the signifying system, i.e. the symbolic. The “orientation of the
human subject to the object” appears to be, on the one hand, “an imaginary
confusion between the present and the past” and becomes a trap in the same
fantasies (Massumi 79); on the other hand, the mechanism of repetition is
constituted by the memory traces inscribed by the parental-social Other’s gazes
and value judgements (Massumi 68-80).

In asserting that desire per se should be an-oedipal rather than pre-oedipal

(Holland 46), Deleuze and Guattari regard the Lacanian objet petit a as a
real-producing desiring machine rather than a structural void--the partial objects
which constitute the real are fundamental but the symbolic represents the
real-object as lacking (Holland 53). Moreover, they reprehend the idea that
only some of the partial objects are “metaphysicalized,” or decided as
pleasure-giving, by “the grid of exclusive disjunctive syntheses adding up to a
system of value judgement” (Massumi 74, 76). All the fixed objects of desire
are the consequence of oedipal repression--without repression, the subject
experiences an ideal psychic state in which there is only “deterritorialized,
antiproductive, and uninterrupted continuum of excitant desire” (Reynolds
192-4). That is to say, it is the daddy-mommy-me structure that welds the
aimless desire to what it is not. The Lacanian view of “desire as the desire of
the Other” is, hence, the “desire under castration,” which is “mediated desire of
the transcendent Other’s desire” (Holland 90).

Humbert’s desire is neither caught in the daddy-mummy-me structure nor

motivated by a lack. As an object of desire, Lolita the girl-child is an-oedipal
to Humbert, who never repines at the absence of the mother(11). Instead of
being a repetitive quest to retrieve the lost maternal object, Humbert’s desire for
the girl-child is depicted as an unmediated desire--a flight from the familial triad
and the molar personhood. The representation of Lolita as transsexual,
trans-aged, and even trans-human makes the desire for her everything opposite
to “the molar-moral drive of Oedipal desire” (Massumi 119).

12

The whole

process of becoming minoritarian and the third sex commingles with an-oedipal
desire, i.e. desire that is not trapped in the family romance.

In addition, Humbert’s floating desire multiplies and “assembles” the

identity of his object of desire. His play with Lolita’s name makes her identity

12

Deleuze and Guattari maintains that drives are the repercussion of normalization: “[A] drive [channels]

the baby's actualization of its bodily potential toward a favored satisfaction” (Massumi 74). Since
drives are the result of normalization, they are both molar and moral.

Nomadic Subjectivity in Nabokov’s Lolita 61

as fluctuating as Humbert’s own, as revealed in his doodling with his own name
and his puzzling origin. Lolita’s given name is Dolores; yet, for Humbert, she
is Lolita. The reason why Humbert gives her the name is not specified in the
novel but apparently it is the phonetic effect that fascinates Humbert/Nabokov:
“Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of the three steps down the palate
to tape, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta” (9). In addition to Lolita,
Dolores is also called “Dolly,” “Lola,” “Lo” and “Lee,” not only because they
are the diminutives of her name but also because they induce a certain joui-sense.
Lolita is associated with the fictional Annabel Lee in Poe’s poem of the same
name in Humber’s account of the primal scene of his traumatic love with the
nymphet: “All I want to stress is that my discovery of [Lolita] was a fatal
consequence of that ‘princedom by the sea’ in my tortured past” (40). This
allusion to Poe adds a mythical touch to Humbert’s desire and enhances
Humbert’s identity as an unfulfilled artist., In fact with the deliberate allusions to
Poe and Dante, this nympholepsy, or pedophilia, by extension becomes the
artist’s identification: “Oh Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe’s and Bea
Dante’s”(107).

Besides the affiliation to Annabel Leigh (Annabel Lee) and all the “writers’

ancient lust” (45), Dolores’s multiple identity is also revealed in Humbert’s
lexical play. The mishmash of her names—“Annabel Haze, alias Dolores Lee,
alias Loleeta” (167)--further makes it clear that Humbert’s desire is multiple and
ployvocal. This finds an echo in Deleuze and Guattari’s cogitation of the
nature of desire: “desire is fundamentally polyvocal, and its polyvocality
makes of it a single and unique desire that flows over everything” (Kafka 57)
[emphasis added]. By calling Dolores Haze “Lolita,” “Annabel,” and “Dolly,”
Humbert enunciates his desire as a disseminating and productive current since
the nymphet is born from his ceaseless desire, which not only creates but also
multiplies. As Humbert himself reveals, there are “Lottelita,”

13

instead of

just one Lolita. Dolores Haze in Humbert’s desiring discourse is “hazy” and
multitude.

It seems more appropriate to say that Lolita is the incarnation of desire since

one cannot separate one’s desire from the desired object. As Roland Barthes
remarks about the nature of desire in his amorous discourse, “It is my desire I

13

Lottelita is the blend of a diminutive of “Charlotte” and “Lolita”; it is also, according to Appel, a

phonetic transcription of American idiom and diction—“Lot of [Lo]lita” (The Annotated Lolita, 371, n.
76/1).

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desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool” (31) [emphasis added], the
desiring process becomes the object of desire for the desiring subject, who
intends to make the process perpetual. When confined in jail and feeling that
he has lost his Lolita, Humbert writes in agony: “Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita,
Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer” (109).
He reduplicates his desire by repeating the name of his love in this mental
message to the printer, which is a metafictional emphasis of the textuality of the
novel. As Butler remarks, what matters is not the desired object but the
incessantness of desire: “In effect, Nabokov tells us that the object of a passion
is unimportant, but that nature of passion is constant” (69). That which Butler
holds to be passion is actually desire.

As Deleuze and Guattari specify in Kafka, desire coexists with the

suppressing power of society: “where one believed there was the law, there is in
fact desire and desire alone”(49). In Lolita, Nabokov also demonstrates this
subversive nature of desire; by wanting what he wants, Humbert as the subject
of this desiring float is inevitably forced to confront the social curb. One of the
forces Humbert encounters and plays with is what Deleuze and Guattari call “the
priest of psychoanalysis”--the psychoanalyst who guards the homogeneous
society by means of psychoanalytic therapy

A hostile reaction to psychoanalysis has been Nabokov’s “pet theme,”

14

to

quote Frosch (87). This pet theme becomes more significant when presented in
the context of a desiring discourse addressed by a deviant. Humbert never
relinquishes his attempt to escape the control of the “secular priest.” As Shaviro
remarks, “psychoanalysis remains unable to affirm nonidentity and nonadequacy;
it continues to represent them only as negative conditions” (71). This inability
is, without doubt, an impediment that obstructs any access to heterogeneity.
The domination of psychoanalysis is continually exposed and mocked through
the lexical play and parody, despite the fact that Humbert’s nomadic subjectivity,
i.e. his fluidity of identity and desire, appears as a heterogeneous element to be
reassimilated by the socius. In the novel, the Freudian black-and-white
obsession and symbolism, and the return to the primal scenes are parodied and
taunted repeatedly in the lexical game. A good illustration of the author’s

14

Considering Freudianism medieval, Nabokov even predicted that in the future psychoanalysis,

especially Freudian interpretation of dreams, would become something like astrology and phrenology
(SO,

47). What he objects is its stereotyped sexual symbolism and mythical representation of the

unconscious. In Lolita, the author did not give up any handy chance to tease both; with or without
self-realization himself, he presents psychoanalysis as a form of oppression rather than a cure.

Nomadic Subjectivity in Nabokov’s Lolita 63

repulsion to the Freudian stock symbolism is the absurd name of the Freudian
psychiatrist Blanche Schwarzmann--White Blackman--whom Humbert and John
Ray, a clinical psychologist himself, mention in dialogues. The author also
starts the novel by providing a misleading impression that the novel is
intentionally presented as a case study, especially as the demonstration of
Freudianism: “In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not
loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child” (9). This statement is no doubt
a parody of Freudian trauma. However, manifesting the fictitiousness of his
story about his first fixation with girl-child, his subsequent allusion to Poe’s
poem “Annabel Lee” soon undermines this parody of Freudian trauma, as Appel
indicates in his annotation of Lolita (333-4, n. 9/6).

Humbert is so familiar with the “rules” psychoanalysts rely upon to treat

their patients that he becomes capable of being one himself and calls himself
“King Sigmund the Second” (125). Owing to his knowledge of the
“maneuvers” of psychoanalysis, he expresses rightly his distaste for or even
resistance of the psychoanalytic dominion upon him. Yet, he does not stop at
this point but continues his game with revenge: he fools them with false
“libidreams” and decoys them with their own maneuvers:

I owe my complete restoration to a discovery I made while being treated at
that particular very expensive sanatorium. I discovered there was an
endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists: cunningly
leading them on; never letting them see that you know all the tricks of the
trade; inventing for them elaborate dreams, pure classics in style (which
make them, the dream-extortionists, dream and wake up shrieking); teasing
them with fake “primal scenes”; and never allowing them the slightest
glimpse of one’s real sexual predicament. (34)

As Frosch observes, Nabokov’s “defense” against a psychoanalytic reading of
his novel is “to admit it readily and dismiss it as trite and unhelpful” (87). By
calling psychoanalysts the “dream extortionists,” he is doing a subversive job,
satirizing the Freudian interpretation of dreams. Such a conscious defiance
against psychoanalysis prevails in Humbert’s narration. Parodying
psychoanalytic theory, Humbert nevertheless admits its supremacy in the aspect
of Freudian representation of libido. With his “excruciating” desire tagged
with his insanity, Humbert regards psychoanalysis as a “reterritorializing”
potency that curbs his desire with jargons and false concepts: “Psychoanalysts

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wooed me with pseudoliberations of pseudolibidoes” (18). The liberation that
psychoanalysis offers is deceptive for Humbert due to the fact that
psychoanalytic theories would, no doubt, attribute his aberration to a manqué, a
childhood trauma, or Oedipus complex. The libido is hence always
“personalized,” “personologized,” “imaginarized,” and even “structuralized”
(AOE 55). The pseudoliberation of the pseudolibidoes operates only to
“civilize” desire since social repression is enacted only by sexual repression
(AOE. 118).

Searching for a real liberation of desire and defying the repressive repre-

sentation of libido, Humbert is no stranger to sanatoriums, which, as a kind of
social institution, estranges the incompatible from human community. Aware
of his otherness, he has in his mind the latent jeopardy he could bring to society
in regard to his perversity: “The reader will regret to learn that soon after my
return to civilization I had another bout with insanity (if to melancholia and a
sense of insufferable oppression that cruel term must be applied)” (34).
Nonetheless, this realization cannot help him run away from the secular priest.
Calling the psychoanalyst his “comrade,” Humbert intentionally destabilizes the
expectation of the reader preoccupied with psychoanalysis and taking the novel
as a case history—“The able psychiatrist who studies my case. . . is no doubt
anxious to have me take my Lolita to the seaside, that is, the primal scene of his
trauma where he lost his Annabel”(166). He lays bare the psychoanalytic
formula that the patient gains in the primal scene “the ‘gratification’ of a lifetime
urge” and liberates from the “subconscious obsession of an incomplete
childhood romance” (167). At first, the deviant narrator seems to follow this
formula but later on he reveals with his habitual playfulness that the quest for a
Kingdom by the Sea, “a Sublimated Riviera,” turns out to be “the rational
pursuit of a purely theoretical thrill” rather than an impetus of the unconscious.
His “quest” for the primal scene is an undesirable theoretical imposition, which
ultimately impels him to flee away from the “police state of sexual myth”
(Nabokov, SM

,

300). His “theoretical thrill” implies normative characteristics

of psychoanalysis, which serves to rechannel, disfigure, and even curb his desire.
Its deliberate referentiality to childhood memory, in contrast to the
child-becoming, is also a manifestation of reterritorialization due to the fact that
“[m]emories always have a reterritorialization function”(TP, 294).

One of the barriers the socius builds up with the help of psychoanalysis to

circumscribe desire is family, where the repression and the reterritorialization of

Nomadic Subjectivity in Nabokov’s Lolita 65

desire starts. Psychoanalysis makes family the locale in which the child’s
desire is “civilized” through a psychic dissension from the “rival-parent.”
Deleuze and Guattari argue that Freud “closes” the familial triangle over the
unconscious and that while over-emphasizing the Oedipal triangle, he
“neuroticizes” everything in the unconscious (AOE 55).

15

The Oedipal triangle

is what Humbert tries to evade. In addition to the constant hospitalizations and
the reterritorialization done by psychiatric therapy, family, especially familial
triangle, also stands for a form of the social recodification of desire. In his
unique playful way, Humbert transcend the daddy-mommy-me structure because,
for him, family means a re-territorialized condition, in which his unruly desire is
frustrated and blocked by social homogenization. Neither retaining an Oedipal
fascination nor yearning for his father’s phallus, Humbert reveals little
attachment to his parents. What he enjoyed in his childhood is, on the contrary,
a “cheerful motherlessness” (11). Metaphorically, he assumes the role of what
Deleuze and Guattari regard as “the deterritorializing figure”--the orphan (Kafka
79). Humbert’s obscure origin and (non)identity even manifest every possible
sense of the word “orphan.” As Holland remarks, schizophrenic subjectivity
cannot be “defined” in terms of Mommy and Daddy, “for if a schizo does
identify with parental figures, it is only temporarily and as one among many
polyvocal substitutes for other figures altogether: some animal, group, god or
planet having nothing to do with the Oedipal family” (43). Based on this
explication, Humbert’s becoming animal and boy-child can also be regarded as
the nomadic subject’s defiance against the oedipal family.

Moreover, the Oedipalization of the unconscious transmits from the familial

authority, the law of the father, to the social determination: “[T]he incurable
familialism of psychoanalysis enclosing the unconscious within Oedipus, cutting
off all vital flows, crushing desiring-production, conditioning the patient to
respond daddy-mommy, and to always consume daddy-mommy” (AOE 92).
The individual either chooses neurosis or resolves the triangulation, which
forbids desire from satisfaction, while implying the presence of desire. Family
as the constituent of capitalist society is the locale where social blockage of
desire transpires. Everything in society is in fact reduced to an Oedipus

15

To neuroticize means for Deleuze and Guattari to normalize since the neurotic conforms to the

social demands in regard to sexualization. It is apparent that their definition derives from their
understanding of psychoanalysis. Following Freud, who maintains that neurosis is caused by
repression, Lacan even argues that repression is “constitutive” of neurosis (Fink 77).

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apparatus, which, in terms of Deleuze and Guattari themselves, is “born in the
capitalist system of the application of first-order social images to the private
familial images of the second order” (AOE 265).

16

Owing to the fact that

“familial investments are always a result of the socio desiring libidinal
investments”(361), we can simply say that the Odipal triangle is produced by
capitalism—“the mother as the simulacrum of territoriality, and the father as the
simulacrum of the despotic Law, with the slashed, split, castrated ego, are the
products of capitalism” (269). The familial romance, colonizing our
unconscious (“We are all little colonies and it is Oedipus that colonizes us”),
converts desiring and social production into a “daddy-mommy-me” structure,
serving as the internal limit, which repels the schizophrenic outer limit that
jeopardizes capitalist society, and where “desire lets itself be caught” (AOE 266).
Thus, this theatrical-mythical representation of desire corresponds to social
reterritorialization--the repression is social domination (Goodheart 391).

The apprehension of Oedipal-familial determination is especially revealed in

Humbert’s feeling about mature woman: he did not and never wants to
experience maternal nourishment, which is “territorial.” He has insuperable
grudge against maternal figures, taking them simply as a shelter for his
untoward desire since, as a man, he is supposed to marry an adult woman. He
speaks of his distress:

Overtly, I had so-called normal relationships with a number of terrestrial
women having pumpkins or pears for breasts; inly, I was consumed by a
hell furnace of localized lust for every passing nymphet whom as a
law-abiding poltroon I never dared approach. The human females I was
allowed to wield were but palliative agents. (18) [emphasis added]

Valeria, Charlotte Haze, and Jean Farlow are what he calls “terrestrial women.”
The big woman gives him a sense of family but the girl-child can always lead
him away from the Oedipal reterritorialization. He married Valeria, his first
wife, not only as a “piteous compromise” but also because of her imitation of a
little girl (25). The marriage broke up three years later, for the marriage with

16

For the “first-order images,” Deleuze and Guattari maintain that individuals are at first social ures of

capitalism,” i. e. capitalists or works; afterwards, as “private persons,” they are images of the second
order, “formally delimited in the locus of the restricted family as father, mother, child” (AOE 264).
The socius rules over the family rather than vice versa.

Nomadic Subjectivity in Nabokov’s Lolita 67

Valeria is but a pseudo-deterritorialization. In human community, the
deterritorialization from family is impossible. Therefore, Humbert realizes that
he must have himself “normalized” in order to survive: “But let us be prim and
civilized. [I] tried hard to be good” (19). However, to be good means to be
reterritorialized and to lapse into the familial-conjugal triangle.

17

The conjugal

reterritorialization appears to be his inevitable fate--to have an access to the
girl-child he desires without social condemnation, he must marry the mother.
Making love with this mature woman, he must pretend that Charlotte is Lolita’s
big sister; however, the make-believe is barely possible except that he does not
“visualize too realistically her heavy hips, round knees, ripe bust, the coarse
pink skin of her neck. . . and all the rest of that sorry and dull thing: a handsome
woman” (72). After their wedding, his “brand-new,” “large-as-life” wife is
busy decorating the house to make it “masculine,” reading homemaking guides
and visiting friends. That is, she reveals an eagerness to appear
“homogeneous.”

A typical middle-class woman complying with the norms of desire,

Charlotte is, in Humbert’s eye, “matter-of-fact,” and “gregarious,” a woman of
principle who believes in Christian God, engages in church work, and attends
book club. In other words, she is a “molar” woman. Humbert marries an Eve,
a mother figure, but he longs for Lilith (20). For him, her love is a “mature,
possessive passion” which he “deplores and respects more than he cares to say”
but can never appreciate (104). The “possessive streak in her” suffocates him.
Marrying Charlotte also means integrating with human community, to which he
belongs but whose periphery he always lingers at because marriage bestows him
his required social role--a husband and father. As Clifton observes, the fa-
therhood is “the public social role he must assume in order to live with Lolita
unmolested by the law” (156). However, for Humbert, assuming the role
means a “miserable imitation of blood-relationship” (48) [emphasis added].
Ever since the marriage his life has been one of parody, of willful imitation.
As an action of showing identification, imitation is re-territorial.

18

His desire

being recoded via mimicrying human relationship, Humbert finds himself
reterritorialized in a daddy-mommy-me structure, groaning, “Lolita, with an

17

According to Deleuze and Guattari, marriage is another form of Odipal triangulation--to get married

means to be reoedipalized.

18

Imitation and memory are contrary to becoming, the former representing reterritorialization while the

latter, deterritorialization. See A Thousand Plateaus. pp. 223-309.

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incestuous thrill, I had grown to regard as my child” (80).

III. Lines of Schizoescape and Paranoiac Integration

Humbert eventually takes a “line of flight” or the “lines of escape” of desire,

i.e. the liberation of desire from the gregarious socius. The schizophrenic
process as such is subversive since “escape is revolutionary” (AOE, 277).
Contrary to the schizophrenic lines of escape are the lines of integration that the
paranoiac machine demands. After Charlotte died in a terrible car accident for
which Humbert is responsible, he takes Lolita away from the camp. Without
telling her and the teacher the mother’s death, he starts his “extensive travels all
over the state” in order to flee human community--a “schizoescape,” in term of
Deleuze and Guattari.

Throughout the journey, Humbert and Lolita stay only in motels. It is on

the journey that his desire finds an outlet though, ironically, he must keep
playing the paternal role to avoid any suspicion. Humbert has been
preoccupied with a flight. In the hotel, The Enchanted Hunters, he even sees to
it that their room is near the fire escape (127). A line of flight is
deterritorialization per se, with its various forms represented in the status of
becoming-animal, becoming-child, and becoming-nomad. Becoming nomad,
albeit not necessarily a movement or a migration, stands for a passage of
desire-decoding without telos, which almost always means reterritorialization.
The journey that Humbert takes is not “a trajectory between two points” but a
prolonging, aimless excursion, just as indicated in Patten’s depiction of nomadic
life:

For the migrant or transhuman [sic.], a journey is simply a trajectory
between two points, whereas for the nomad, it is the journey that matters,
points along the way being no more than relay stations between successive
stages. . . . Nomadic life is essentially en route, and the routes followed
serve a different purpose to the roads and highways which enable
communication between the parts of sedentary societies. (71-2)

Likewise, the temporary stops between each travel never mean anything to
Humbert except for spending a good night with his Lolita. For Humbert the
nomad, it is the exile from social aggregate that matters.

Nomadic Subjectivity in Nabokov’s Lolita 69

However, ever since the re-Oedipalization via marriage, his desire has been

blocked and a sense of guilt is formed for the colonized oedipal subjectivity
tends to be guilt-ridden (Holland 40). In their travels, Humbert constantly feels
that they have been followed and espied by a mysterious man, a middle-aged
nympholept like himself and with an appearance similar to his own. This man,
named Clare Quilty (Clearly Guilty), is the incarnation of his guilty conscience.
Described as the red fiend hunting H. H., C. Q. always appears as a shadow
that “first complicates all of Humbert’s desires, then focuses all his frustration
and rage, and then pricks his conscience” (Maddox 68-9). The sense of guilt
that torments him implies the presence of a “supposed transcendence of law”
(Kafka, 44). Besides, although he tries hard “to keep as far away from people
as possible” (164), he cannot avoid encountering some human intrusion or
investigation. He must consider, for instance, the question of Lolita’s custody.
However, at the thought of law and the inevitable contact with human society, he
shrinks back: “And still I dared not. Keep away, be a mouse, curl up in your
hole. . . . Would some busybody, some Humane Society, butt in if I kept too
quiet?” (172-3)

The schizophrenic line of flight is always accompanied with an opposite line

of integration, just as his narrative style is a “juxtaposition of a madman’s logic
and an appeal to conventional pieties” (Clifton 157). In fact, Humbert has been
oscillating between two poles: the pole of schizophrenic flight of desire and that
of paranoiac reterritorialization of desire. Deleuze and Guattari affirm the first
pole, the schizoid currents that overturn the fascist, paranoid domination of
capitalist socius because for them, schizoid process points to the flight from the
institutionalization of capitalist society. However, one can neither adhere to the
schizophrenic pole nor to the paranoiac one. In the unconscious, there is
always a pendulation between the two extremes: “Doubtless there are
astonishing oscillations of the unconscious, from one pole of delirium to the
other” (AOE 277). At one moment, one leans to the sedentary, fascist pole of
paranoia, which subdues the flux of desire, or the desiring production, to the
“formation of sovereignty and to the gregarious aggregates that results from it”;
at the next, one switches to the nomadic, revolutionary pole of schizophrenia,
which capsizes the established social order and power, and “subjects the
gregarious aggregate to the molecular multiplicities of the productions of desire”
(376). In other words, under the possession of social body, desires are
assembled and regulated, dispatched to the place as demanded by the social

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body. The oscillation is always between the molar and the molecular, the
dispersed lines of escape and the structured lines of integration, the
revolutionary and the reactionary, the nomadic and the sedentary (AOE 340-80).
In human delirium, one can always detect the two antitheses.

While taking a line of flight from the human community, “fleeing the

social,” Humbert also feels inside him a tendency to the paranoiac
reterritorialization, that is, to be subjugated to the gregarious aggregate,
institutions, or the majority. Personally he feels in him two poles--the moralist
and the sensualist (124). The former drives him to a paranoiac identification
with the social, the latter to a schizophrenic escape from the social. Therefore,
on the one hand, he is afraid of being “institutionalized” and feels content to be a
monster; on the other, he claims, “I am your father, and I am speaking English,
and I love you” (150).

19

Expressed with guilt, this statement reveals his

willingness to be reterritorialized, to reassume the fatherhood, and to identify
with the majority (the dominant language). His dreamy travels cannot proceed
without termination, in view of the fact that the paranoiac pole forces him to
settle down and draws him to integrate with the gregarious aggregate. For
Lolita’s good, as he alleges, he decides to terminate the journey and send Lolita
to Beardsley School. Living nearby, he succumbs to the gravity of
reterritorialization:

Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which
the guilty, the great, the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the
way of mimicry. . . . I used to review the concluded day by checking my
own image as it prowled rather than passed before the mind’s red eye. I
watched dark-and-handsome, not un-Celtic, probably high-church, possibly
very high-church, Dr. Humbert see his daughter off to school. (188)
[emphasis added]

Through this statement, Humbert reveals his inclination to live in a “paranoiac”
way, albeit with reluctance. The way “the guilty, the great, the tenderhearted”
live is the consequence of the reterritorialization demanded by the socius. It is
a dominant as well as Oedipalized way of life. Once again, he miserably
imitates the blood relationship and wears a normalized “not un-Celtic,”

19

The schizophrenic always claims, “I am not your kind, I belong eternally to the inferior race, I am a

beast, a black,” whereas the paranoiac claims the opposite, “Yes, I am your kind, and I belong to the
superior race and class” (AOE 277). Humbert reveals his oscillation between these two tendencies
here.

Nomadic Subjectivity in Nabokov’s Lolita 71

“high-church” mask. To integrate further into the human society, now he
behaves as one of the majority, the dominant class--the un-Celtic and
high-church. Ironically, for several times in the novel, the middle-aged
intellectual with “an obscure European origin” is mistaken by other characters as
a Jew, a German refugee, because of his look and his name mispronounced as
the Jewish-sounding “Humberg”. And the Jewish identity is mentioned in a
careful, implicit fashion. In Humbert’s fatal confrontation with his double as
well as adversary, Quilty says to Humbert, “You are either Australian, or a
German refugee. . . . This is a Gentile’s house, you know?” (297) Nabokov
seems to suggest intentionally that Humbert is an outsider and “minoritarian,”
whether Jewish or not, in regard to his relationship with the other members of
human society. While taking the schizophrenic line of flight or entering the
status of becoming, he leads a nomadic way of life, moving only in the
periphery of the recoding social body. Now leaning toward the paranoiac line
of integration, which demands centeredness, he yearns to belong to the
majority--to be their kind.

The reterritorializing potency of the paranoiac social machine is actualized

in Beardsley School, in which Lolita enrolls in order not to arouse any suspicion.
This school is constituted with beliefs in what Humbert calls
“modern-nonsense,” including Freudianism. It emphasizes four Ds for its girl
students: Dramatics, Dance, Debating and Dating (177). All of these four
activities represent the communication and socialization that an individual
undertakes in order to live in the gregarious aggregate. The four Ds are exactly
what Humbert personally would shun by all means because as a nomad, he
ought to eschew the recoding of the sedentary socius. Nor would he let his
Lolita communicate with others except for her fellow-nymphets as a result of his
fear that someone from the human society should find out their unusual
relationship and take his Lolita away from him. One of the Ds, Dramatics,
embarks their second journey. In Beardsley, Lolita attends the performance of
a play, The Enchanted Hunters, the title of which happens to be the same as the
name of the hotel they once stayed in the journey. The playwright turns out to
be Clare Quilty, Humbert’s double and rival, who intends to take Lolita away.
Humbert consequently sets out on the second “long happy journey” (209).
However, this excursion is not as satisfactory as the previous, “carefree” one
since he experiences “a cycle of persecution,” and is traced by the embodiment
of his omnipresent guilt, C. Q., who is described as a devil and a “red hood.”

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Humbert’s nightmare finally comes true. In Elphinstone, Lolita is

kidnapped by a man resembling his looks and age and vanishes. He believes
that Lolita has Electra complex for him; therefore, after Lolita runs away with C.
Q., he assumes that Quilty plays the role of her “father-substitute” (243). The
assumption is an additional parody of Freudianism, but it also manifests the
reduction of desire to familial complex in his unconscious. As a double, C. Q.
represents also the fatherhood H. H. is yoked but tries to annul in order to
retreat from the pathetic “parody of incest.” Lolita’s disappearance can be
regarded as the upshot of his being yoked with his guilt.

After Lolita’s disappearance and the ensuing cryptogrammic paper chase,

Humbert’s life is quite sedentary and even conformable. He is enclosed in a
Quebec sanatorium for quite a period of time and turns to “an old-fashioned
popish cure” for the sake of his strong sense of guilt. However, as he confesses,
“My accursed nature could not change, no matter how my love for her did,” his
nympholepsy still remains with him (257). His desire for “Lolita’s handmaids”
finds a recess in Rita, the woman whom he “carries on a genuinely mutual,
illusion-free relationship” (Bullock 195). The “prepubescent curve” of her
back, an implication of her girl-likeness, along with her nomadic inclination, is
the reason that he is attracted to her. Nonetheless, their affair is brief. He
leaves her for Lolita as soon as he receives Lolita’s letter. To his
disappointment, he finds that Lolita is no longer a nymphet but a molar,
terrestrial woman: she has become “Mrs. Schiller” and is expecting. The
following step he takes is to find the kidnaper, the cause of his loss, and get
revenged. In Pavor Manor, he has his first encounter with his reterritorialized
double, the incarnation of his guilt: “[C. Q.] swept by me in a purple bathrobe,
very like one I had. He either did not notice me, or else dismissed me as some
familiar and innocuous hallucination. . .”

(294). This delineation suggests that

H. H. and C. Q. are the mirror-reflections of each other. In “a burlesque of
B-movie violence” (Clifton 161), their identities are blended in such perplexity
that even Humbert himself cannot make distinction:

We fell to wrestling again. We rolled all over the floor, in each Other’s
arms like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under
his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me.I rolled over him. We
rolled over me. They rolled over him.We rolled over us. (299)
[emphasis added]

Nomadic Subjectivity in Nabokov’s Lolita 73

The deliberate confusion of the pronouns indicates the mixture of their identities.
In this wrestling, which commingles the two as one, Humbert Humbert kills “the
mirror side” of his self and casts off the fatherhood-guilt bondage. Nonetheless,
the killing does not represent a real deterritorialization but a trial to flee from the
colonization of the triangle. The death of C. Q., of his other self, can also be
regarded as the representation of Thanatos--his death instinct. Harold Bloom
maintains that it is barely a possible option at the modern age to reject Freud.
Regardless of Nabokov’s taunting parody of Freudianism, he considers the
second part of Lolita an “involutionary repetition of Beyond the Pleasure
Principle” (3). The relationship between H. H. and C. Q., accordingly, is the
forthright representation of that between Eros and Thanatos, a Freudian allegory,
in other words. However, Bloom himself does not appreciate the authorial
arrangement of Humbert’s murder of Quilty, thinking it “the most curious and
the least persuasive episode.” If H. H. represents Eros, it is not Eros in the
Freudian sense but in the Deleuz-Guattarian one; it is not “a regressive
satisfaction bound up with the death drive” but the “impulse behind becoming”
(Massumi 191). For Deleuze and Guattari, Thanatos is reterritorial and
Oedipal,

20

and Eros, deterritorial and schizoid. And there is always an

oscillation between the two as Humbert has experienced. Clare Quilty,
symbolizing whether guilt or death instinct (the two are the aftermath of
Oedipalization in its broadest sense), stands for the paranoiac-reterrito-
rial-oedipal status. Therefore, the murder stands for the schizoid’s defiance in
order to flee away. And this last episode is rather a departure from Beyond the
Pleasure Principle than an allegorical representation. Humbert seems aware of
the necessity of the murder even though the final reterritorialization is
unavoidable--he must be “institutionalized,” imprisoned after committing the
crime. At the end of the novel, Humbert says to Lolita as well as to the reader,
“And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H. H., and one
wanted H. H. to exist” so that H. H. could write down his story. Indeed, one

20

The death drive, in view of Deleuze and Guattari, leads to the repetition of the same--a form of

reterritorialization. Death is originally part of the desiring machine—“desire desires death also”
(AOE 8); that is, the experience of death is part of the effect of becoming as “every becoming itself
becomes a becoming death” (330). However, Freud introduces the binary antithesis between
Thanatos and Eros into the unconscious to block the schizophrenic flight of desire. With Oedipus as a
fascist colonization of the unconscious by the socius, Thanatos is also termed an oedipal impasse (AOE
332-5; Kafka 15,36).

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NTU Studies in Language and Literature

must choose between the two poles--the paranoiac Thanatos and the schizoid
Eros. And the other reason one must choose H. H. is that writing itself is
deterritorialization.

21

After the death of C. Q., H. H.’s voice remains, albeit in

a posthumous form.

Conclusion

Lolita is a novel displaying the status in which the unruly, telosless flow of

desire is constantly confronted with or blocked by the social establishment. By
creating an aberrant protagonist-narrator, Nabokov is able to disclose the power
that regiments desire, to characterize in full substance what Deleuze and
Guattari call “the schizophrenic process of desire,” and to enact an “erotic”
discourse of “transgression” because “madness is a radical break from power in
the form of a disconnection” (Seem xxiii). Humbert’s “nomadic-orphan”
mental status embodies a condition in which one shatters the fascist fetters.
However, as Deleuze and Guattari indicate, there is no pure nomad. A
thorough and perpetual deterritorialization of desire, after all, cannot be
achieved. What Humbert Humbert really attains is linguistic transgression and
deterritorialization. As is the case, the imprisoned narrator has “only words to
play with.”

21

Writing assembles everything, and is therefore a process of becoming (Kafka 47; TP 240).

Nomadic Subjectivity in Nabokov’s Lolita 75

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About the Author

Chia-chin Tsai (蔡佳瑾) is currently a Ph. D. candidate in the Graduate School
of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University and an
instructor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature in Chung-hua
University.
E-mail: chinweit@ms17. hinet. net