Lolita and Mimetic Desire

From the mediator, a veritable artificial sun, descends a mysterious ray which makes the object shine with a false brilliance. There would be no illusion if Don Quixote were not imitating Amadis. Emma Bovary would not have taken Rudolph for a Prince Charming had she not been imitating romantic heroines.

—René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel1

And Humbert Humbert would not have chosen Lolita for a lover had he not been imitating romantic heroes. Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, probably due to its controversial subject, is regularly analyzed as a piece of “technical virtuosity and hilarity.”² In this essay, I will attempt to show how the novel unfolds with René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. This approach will highlight how the plot, style, and hero of Lolita are underpinned by the same mechanism of mimetic desire. I will argue that Lolita is the falsely shining object, and that Humbert Humbert, the hero, narrator, and writer of the novel he supposedly composes in prison, is the subject, blinded by the mediator.

Humbert proves amply to the reader that he is madly in love with Lolita. Dolores’s nickname opens and closes the novel, accompanied by Humbert’s declamation of his passion: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul” (9), and “this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita” (309).³ In between, Humbert regularly reaffirms his love with ardent proclamations: “I loved you. I was a pentapod monster but I loved you. I was despicable, and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais!” (284). As well as more gentle ones, as when he cradles Lolita with “human agonized selfless tenderness” (285). At the end of the novel, Humbert’s love even seems to have transformed into a saner, less lustful feeling as he confides to the reader in an apparently sincere tone: “You see, I love her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight” (270).

However, Humbert’s clear obsession for Lolita should not be seen as a proof of spontaneity. On the contrary, Humbert is the romantic vaniteux par excellence. The romantic vaniteux is the individual who believes in the absolute authenticity of his desires, although he systematically borrows them from others. In the novel, Humbert sees himself as a poet, in quest of capturing lyrically the magical beauty he perceives in Lolita. The first night he spends in the same bed as Lolita, as somnolent Humbert struggles between the desire to touch her and the fear of waking her, he declares to the reader “the gentle and dreamy regions through which I crept were the patrimonies of poets’—not crime’s prowling ground” (131). Lolita taken as a novel written by Humbert the poet, can be seen as a work of “romantic literature,” as defined by Girard. On the nature of triangular desire, where the mediator’s prestige gives an illusory appeal for the subject to an object, Girard states: “Romantic literature does not disregard this metamorphosis; on the contrary; it turns it to account and boasts of it, but never reveals its true mechanism.”⁴ Humbert boasts of Lolita’s value as a desirable object through the prism of artistic beauty, but he never questions the origin of his desire and her value. The deception is revealed by the novelist, Nabokov.

Nabokov’s decision to make the hero of Lolita also its writer is an invitation to the reader to probe into the narration. Behind Humbert’s “I,” Nabokov is always concealed. In introduction to a scene where Humbert inconspicuously attains sexual bliss with Lolita by the friction of her legs across his laps, he declares “I want my learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to replay; I want them to examine its every detail and see for themselves how careful, how chaste, the whole wine-sweet event is if viewed with what my lawyer has called . . . ‘impartial sympathy’” (57). Here, Humbert’s goal is to gain the reader’s sympathy. But, the direct address to the reader...