Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: The Art of Simulation and the Parody of Dialogic Language

Abstract

There are two major motives in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: one is to record an emotional apotheosis of the narrator Humbert Humbert’s invincible passion for a nymphet and the other, to transform his story into a work of art immortalizing his intriguing but very controversial passion. However, Humbert’s confession does not always correspond to the reality. Rather, he endeavors to sublimate his pathetic and illusory life of the passion up to the realm of art, which brings up, implicitly and explicitly, a question concerning the nature of artistic creation. In this sense, Lolita can be seen as a novel about the creation of the novel as a literary genre, which is constantly self-conscious to its status as an artifact. This unique character of Lolita has a very close resemblance to the concept of “simulation” proposed by Jean Baudrillard. Indeed, Baudrillad’s simulation is made up of the self-referential and self-sufficient signs free from any facts and substances of the real world. As a novel on the creation of the novel, Lolita also has a creative concern in the parody of the structural conventions and motifs of diverse literary genres. According to Bakhtin, by means of the parody, the novel realizes, in its text, diverse “images of language,” which formulate the core of the novel. In this sense, Nabokov’s Lolita could be seen as a typical example of realizing Bakhtin’s theory of the novel since, in the novel, there are multiple parodies of literary language together with heteroglot images of commercial language from modern American society. Both Baudrillard’s concept of the simulation and Bakhtin’s definition of the parody could be suitably used in illuminating very meaningful aspects of Lolita: the former can be applied to its status as an artifact, while the latter sheds light on its parody of heterogenous but dialogic images of language.