The Barber's Son.

Please skip down to the previous post for the forward which is, sadly, one of those that you would normally skip at the beginning of a book.

The Barber's Son

Humbert Humbert's understanding of immortality is shaped by an old barber, with a tremulous hand, in the small town of Kasbeam. On Humbert and Lolita's second trip, the fact that Lo is scheming to leave is quite apparent to the contemplative reader, which is to say, the second time reader. First time readers are grasped helplessly in the artful hand of the enchanter Nabokov, though they are not alone in their naivety. Humbert is along for the ride as well, he allows his paranoia to whisk his attentiveness away.

The barber tells Humbert of his son, a ball player, who adorns many pieces of paper by way of pictures and print. When H.H. realizes that the young man has been dead for thirty years, he is shocked. For most of the haircut, Humbert has not been paying enough attention, and in that span of time, the young man actually exists.

There is an important distinction here between existing and potentially existing. It was not enough that the barber's son was written about and that his physical image was copied, this process only allows for him to potentially exist. It was not until Humbert allowed the story of the young man to enter his imagination that he actually became immortal.

Nabokov crafts his novel, Lolita, as if Humbert wrote the story after this experience. The barber could therefore have caused Humbert to write the powerful lines that beg the reader for help earlier during the Enchanted Hunters scene. “Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me” (129). Humbert understands that he has the potential to be immortalized, however it is imperative that the reader imagine him, just as he imagined the barber's son and thus gave him immortality.

This is Humbert's hope at the end of the novel. The only immortality that he and Lolita may share is that of art. Not only of art, but of art that resides in the imagination. Humbert uses the words, “refuge of art,” to describe the medium by which the girl and her lover will obtain immortality (309). The word “refuge” projects connotations of a shelter, or the safety of a confined area. This refuge is the imagination of the reader that is necessary for Humbert and Lolita to be immortalized.

In analogy form, the barber is to Humbert, as Nabokov is to the reader. The reader is entreated to the enchanter's story just as Humbert is treated to the barber's. In this, the reader feels a sense of solidarity with Humbert. If the enchanted allows the characters refuge, then those characters are allowed existence. An existence based on the brilliance and freedom of imagination, and this existence can only occur alongside the renewing power of memory. If the reader forgets the story, then Humbert and Lolita will no longer dwell in the immortality that H.H. desired for them. Or is it Nabokov, the real enchanter, who desires this for his work? Just as the barber's son was brought alive by Humbert's imagination, so too will the doomed characters of Lolita be immortalized in the imagination of the reader.

Works Cited

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Print.







By the way, who else totally digs the new MLA style? I know, I'm a nerd.