Humbert Humbert Through the Looking Glass

Abstract

than in Lolita. Not only is the wonderland (Lolita, p. 133)3 motif recurrent, but Nabokov also conceived an affinity4 between Lewis Carroll and Humbert Humbert: I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll because he was the first Humbert Humbert.5 In this context, the similarities between Lolita and Through the Looking Glass acquire a real interest. Seen together, Humbert's whole narration has a Looking-Glass world (Alice, p. 341) perspective: time and space move backward, doubles proliferate, language fractures into new combinations. At the same time, within Humbert's story itself, there is a concurrent dramatization of Humbert's struggle to penetrate the looking glass. When he finally does break through to the queer mirror (Lolita, p. 308), the book ends, which is just the point where Lolita begins. Two levels of the novel, then, seem to be at work simultaneously. Humbert the protagonist of the confession (Lolita, p. 5) pierces the mirror only to arrive at imprisonment; Humbert the author writes from the nether side of the mirror only to come to self-bafflement and entombment. The trap is double-locked. Fictional Humbert's search for escape no sooner circles on itself, than it seeks another release from time behind the looking glass, which also boomerangs. To be sure, the art work remains, but Humbert's ultimate fate, like that of so many of Nabokov's