Humbert Humbert as Mad Man: Art and Advertising in Lolita

This paper approaches the problematic intersection of the aesthetic and the ethical in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita by noting the prominent role in it of advertising, a quasi-artistic genre that has to do precisely with the rhetoric of persuasion. It has gone strangely unnoticed that Humbert Humbert is not just a madman, the criminal author of a memoir written by a psychiatric patient, but an adman, whose travels across America with his pubescent captive are bankrolled in part by his sinecure as a writer of advertising copy for perfumes. The agonistic mimicry between art and advertising, both of which ask audiences to suspend disbelief in fictional worlds, illuminates Humbert’s predatory rhetoric in relation to the high modernist aspiration for the autonomy of the artwork, and allows us to read the novel as encoding Nabokov’s effort to discredit the power of commercial rhetoric even as he assumes its privileges.