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CRITIQUE:

Two Works From the One Source

Despite common opinion, this novella isn't a blueprint for, or a precursor to, Nabokov's "Lolita".

Instead, it simply shares a source of inspiration, without necessarily adopting or arriving at the same perspective on, or literary approach to, it.

Nabokov thought he had destroyed his only copy of the novella, when he started writing "Lolita". He didn't find a copy, until after he had finished writing the later novel.

What the two works share is a narrative in which an older male marries a widow in order to have a sexual relationship with her adolescent daughter from a previous marriage.

In "Lolita", Humbert Humbert was 37 years old, while Lolita was 12. In "The Enchanter", none of the three principal characters is named, but the male protagonist is 40, while the daughter is 12.

Step-Father as Sorcerer

The girl's mother is already ill when the protagonist meets her, and it doesn't take long for them to get married and, then, for her to die of her illness, notwithstanding the protagonist's plan to murder her.

The daughter doesn't live in Paris with her mother or her new husband. Only after her mother's death does it become possible for step-father and daughter to live under the same roof. His plan is that they go on a holiday in the French Riviera.

They are only there for one night before the novella comes to its conclusion. Hence, Nabokov avoids the need to describe the ongoing sexual relationship and the rise, decline and fall that characterised "Lolita". Here, there is only a rapid, pre-emptive fall.

Paedophilic Aesthetics

The protagonist appears to have had five or six conventional relationships (he calls them "normal affairs") in his lifetime. However, he found them unsatisfactory, and asks, "How can one compare their insipid randomness with my unique flame?" His answer: "It's not a degree of a generic whole, but something totally divorced from the generic, something that is not more valuable but invaluable.". He grants himself "a licence to grow savage", to circumvent the generic norm, which casts this novella as both savage and enchanting.

He proceeds with what he calls a "refined selectivity...:"

"I'm not attracted to every schoolgirl that comes along, far from it - how many one sees, on a grey morning street, that are husky, or skinny, or have a necklace of pimples or wear spectacles - those kinds interest me as little, in the amorous sense, as a lumpy female acquaintance might interest someone else."

This admission suggests that his taste is determined by an aesthetic ideal: other girls or women don't necessarily comply with this ideal. For example, he describes his wife as if he finds her repulsive. She is described as his "monstrous bride", a giantess, a "cumbersome behemoth"... she is -

"a tall, pale, broad-hipped lady, with a hairless wart near a nostril of her bulbous nose: one of those faces you describe without being able to say anything about the lips or the eyes because any mention of them - even this - would be an involuntary contradiction of their utter inconspicuousness..."

He doubts his ability to -

"tackle those broad bones, those multiple caverns, the bulky velvet, the formless anklebones, the repulsively listing conformation of her ponderous pelvis, not to mention the rancid emanations of her wilted skin and the as yet undisclosed miracles of surgery..."

He regards their relationship as "a joke", which he hopes to share with the girl - it's a vehicle within which he plans "to meld the wave of fatherhood with the wave of sexual love".

Unlike Humbert Humbert, there's no suggestion that there is any genuine emotional love. The protagonist's yearning is wholly physical. For him, she is just "that absolutely unique and irreplaceable being". Until now, he has felt "the perpetual ripple of unsatisfied desires, the painful burden of his rolled-up, tucked-away passion - the entire savage, stifling existence that he, and only he, had brought upon himself." He has enchanted nobody but himself. He's a victim of his own fantasy.

At the mother's funeral, a distant relative cautions him:

"...What a pretty girl she is! You'll have to watch her like a hawk - she's already biggish for her age, just wait another three years and the boys will be sticking to her like flies, you'll have no end of worries..."

Meanwhile, he was guffawing to himself, as if he knew he would beat these boys to the prize.


Photo of Vera Nabokov (Credit: Jean Vong)

The Metamorphosis of an Adolescent Girl

Sometimes, the protagonist's revulsion toward the mother, and preference for the daughter, seem to be an aversion for the natural process of aging.

In contrast, he seems to want to preserve an image of the daughter as the girl she was when they first met:

"As he imagined the coming years, he continued to envisage her as an adolescent - such was the carnal postulate. However, catching himself on this premise, he realised without difficulty that, even if the putative passage of time contradicted, for the moment, a permanent foundation for his feelings, the gradual progression of successive delights would assure natural renewals of his pact with happiness, which took into account, as well, the adaptability of living love...

"Against the light of that happiness, no matter what age she attained... her present image would always transpire through her metamorphoses, nourishing their translucent strata from its internal fountainhead. And this very process would allow him, with no loss of diminishment, to savour each unblemished stage of her transformations.

"Besides, she herself, delineated and elongated into womanhood, would never again be free to dissociate, in her consciousness and her memory, her own development from that of their love, her childhood recollections from her recollections of male tenderness.

"Consequently, past, present, and future would appear to her as a single radiance whose source had emanated, as she had herself, from him, from her lover."

If the daughter can't be preserved as an adolescent girl, then the protagonist believes he can at least witness (and imprint himself on) her metamorphosis, as if she were transforming from an egg to a caterpillar, and then from a chrysalis to a butterfly.

Butterflies and Beauty

You have to wonder whether Nabokov's interest in butterflies reflects his fascination with metamorphosis or their aesthetic beauty.

While the portrait of the protagonist is more obviously hostile than that of Humbert in "Lolita", this novella is as perfectly written and satisfying as the later novel. I highly recommend it, although some readers might take offence at some of the content, if not the fate of the protagonist.