<<

Nabokov’s Satan:

Defining and Implementing John Milton’s Arch Fiend as a Contemporary

Trope

A Thesis Presented to the Honors Tutorial College, Ohio University.

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial

College with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English.

By Corbin Curtis

To Mom

Acknowledgments

There are many people I would like to thank for their assistance with this project, without whom it would have been impossible. First and foremost, I would like to thank my thesis advisor Matthew Stallard, whose support, encouragement, guidance, criticism, and inspiration both throughout the course of this project and in the years I have known him during my undergraduate career cannot be overstated. I wish also to thank Joseph

McLaughlin, whose diligent and committed work as my professor, academic advisor, and director of studies was instrumental in shaping the trajectory of my academic career and myself as a . I also owe thanks to Jill Ingram for her influence on me as a writer and researcher, and more specifically for our discussions of Paradise Lost which I consulted throughout this project. The following list of very generous people were instrumental in this project, each in their own ways, and to them I am grateful: Robert DeMott, Marilyn

Atlas, Michael Apwisch, Kelly McIntosh, Shelby Jordan, Carey Snyder, Mary Kate

Hurley, Beth Quitslund, Caitlin Lynch. Special thanks to the Alden Library staff for their kindness, assistance, and for always making sure I was awake in for class. Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Part I: The Con-Man 7

Part II: The Abject 20

Part III: The Debauched 37

Part IV: The Rapacious 48

Conclusion 59

Bibliography 62

Curtis 1

Introduction

In 1667, John Milton (1608-1674) published the first version of Paradise Lost, which brought arguably the most detailed and influential portrayal of the biblical Arch

Fiend, Satan, into the literary world.1 Because of how much attention Satan is given in the poem, and how the more or less centers him as the main character, the centuries following the publication of the poem saw a distinct rift form between two camps of criticism. On the one hand, critics such as William Empson and his work, Milton’s God,2 see Satan’s actions as not necessarily justified, but suggest that a sympathetic position is nevertheless logical given how those actions are presented in the poem. On the other hand, there are some, such as in C.S. Lewis in A Preface to Paradise Lost,3 who see

Milton’s work as one which puts Satan’s evil on full display, and condemns both his actions and the actions of those who follow him. In Lewis’ view, even Satan’s most poignant moments or traits are symptoms of Milton’s attempt to emphasize Satan’s absurdity and condemnable nature.

In 1955, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899-1977) reluctantly agreed to publish through the controversial Olympia Press, after exhausting his other options due to the taboo themes of the . Soon after its release, Lolita became an international hit and is widely held as the achievement which made Nabokov’s career.

However, along with wide-reaching success, the novel and its themes also brought much controversy. One such controversy centered around the strangely sympathetic character that the pedophile and serial rapist, Humbert Humbert, becomes in the course of the

1 While the first edition was published in 1667, the second edition published in 1674 is the edition that is most widely read and criticized and also the edition this thesis is concerned with. 2 Empson, William. Milton’s God. 1961. Greenwood Press, Inc., Westport CT, 1978. 3 Lewis, C. S. A Preface to Paradise Lost. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. Curtis 2 novel, due in part if not mostly from the fact that the novel is told from his perspective and in his voice. Because of the sympathetic parallel between Satan and Humbert, and the many biblical throughout the novel, I consider Lolita to be related, at least in part, to Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, which take direct inspiration from Paradise

Lost and that sympathetic/apologetic camp of criticism concerning Satan. However, after reading further into how Humbert and Satan (and similar characters such as

Frankenstein’s ) are constructed, I noticed that the sympathetic nature of these evil characters is merely a symptom of being a part of a character trope established by

Milton in his seminal epic.4

Exploring and defining how biblical themes resonate in Lolita is not a new or baseless endeavor. For instance, in his article, “Recourse to Eden,” Christopher Link discusses “the deep resonances of biblical allusions in [Nabokov’s] work” in length and argues that “Once thoughtfully glimpsed, Nabokov’s pervasive ‘Edenic’ and ‘Adamic’ themes and motifs, drawn from both the original biblical source text and its many apocryphal and literary recastings, cannot be unseen; rather, these motifs emerge as forming a strong, central, recurring pattern in the intricate grand design of Nabokov’s lifelong work” (Link 63). However, Link’s primary concerns in his discussion of Lolita are the recurring biblical , allusions, , and themes in the novel and how they shape and define the of different characters and the expression of underlying themes. My thesis is definitely concerned with these issues as well, but more

4 While Frankenstein could easily work in the place of Lolita in this thesis, Mary Shelley’s novel has too much of a direct, intentional, and thoroughly examined connection with Paradise Lost. Because of that direct connection, a thesis comparing the two would merely reaffirm or restate many fairly commonly known similarities between Frankenstein and Paradise Lost. Using a less commonly associated novel such as Lolita is a more fruitful academic exercise because the comparison is less well-tread, and therefore can say more about both works and their respective characters that has not been said before. Curtis 3 so with the relationship between Lolita and Paradise Lost (as opposed to the Bible itself), through which I intend to take Link’s associations one step further and argue that

Humbert himself is biblical (specifically: Satanic) in character, not merely in a particular scene or in a singular where a thematic or aesthetic relationship is evoked, but in how

Humbert is fundamentally constructed and how he functions within the as a whole.

To argue for this foundational relationship between Milton’s Satan and

Nobokov’s Humbert Humbert, I rely primarily on comparative analysis, supported by textual, historical, and thematic analyses, to define vital, complex parallels between these two characters. These parallels can be organized into four main aspects of each character, which in turn define a broader, more generalized dichotomy between destruction and self- destruction inherent to both Milton’s Satan and Humbert. By describing how these fundamental traits link Satan and Humbert together in regards to how they are constructed and how they function in their respective , I ultimately argue that

John Milton’s Paradise Lost establishes a satanic character trope which is survived almost perfectly in contemporary by Nabokov’s Lolita.

Organizationally, this thesis is divided into four main parts, “The Con-Man,” “The

Abject,” “The Debauched,” and “The Rapacious,” each focusing on and titled after a separate fundamental aspect of both Satan and Humbert. The first two of these parts are concerned with the destructive nature of Satan and Humbert, through which they manipulate, molest, and otherwise spread discord through their respective settings and fellow characters. The second two parts are concerned with the self-destructive nature through which each character suffers greatly, primarily due to unshakable narcissism and Curtis 4 short-sightedness. Each of the four parts follows a similar organizational pattern consisting of two main sections, with the first focusing on defining the given aspect through exploration of how it appears in Satan, and the second drawing parallels from that definition to Humbert.

“The Con-Man” can be defined as a Machiavellian affinity for manipulation, often adhering to observable usages of pathos, ethos, logos, as well as an important reliance upon forcing perspectives and capitalizing on doubt. In this section, I will explore how Milton’s Satan and Humbert Humbert use their capabilities as orators in order to manipulate those around them, both in the ways in which their strategies parallel each other in their fundamental argumentative structures (as defined above), as well as the ways in which certain aspects of their rhetorical approach do in fact differ (e.g.

Humbert’s story-telling versus Satan’s redefinition of certain terminology). In short, this section will explain how these characters use their abilities as powerful rhetoricians in their respective narratives, as well as establish their as perhaps their most powerful influential tool as destructive forces and their most obvious connection to each other.

The second section, “The Abject,” uses Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror and the definition of abject established therein as a lens through which to characterize Satan and

Humbert. These characters, I argue, are defined by a state of abjection wherein their destructive behavior intentionally results in the disruption of structural norms such as societal laws, laws of nature, traditional notions of power, etc. Further, this destructive behavior is also represented physically in each character’s appearance (e.g. Satan’s shapeshifting and Humbert’s conflicting personas as a pedophile, father, husband, Curtis 5 foreigner, etc.) and relationship with spatial boundaries (e.g. Satan’s journeys between

Hell, Earth, Heaven, etc. and Humbert’s trips to and around America) in their respective narratives.

The third section, “The Debauched,” explores the aspect of these characters defined by an adherence to empiricism, markedly associated with an appreciation for aestheticism and sexuality, but ultimately expressed alongside acute narcissism. In both narratives, the characters hold worldviews which focus mostly, if not exclusively, in the realm of what can be observed physically. Because of this worldview, both characters express, in often poetic terms, their appreciation for the aesthetic beauty of the world (and often the women in it), making them, at least on the surface, seem romantic. However, their empirical worldview is also one rooted deeply in narcissism, perverting their into voyeuristic and sociopathic tendencies which come to a head in their respective sexual encounters in each narrative (i.e. Satan and Sin; Humbert and Lolita).

These encounters, ultimately, represent the pinnacle of narcissism as both Satan and

Humbert physically express their self-obsession by having sex with women (or girls) who are not only their daughters but also projections of themselves.

The fourth and final section, “The Rapacious” explores Satan and Humbert’s experiences of loss, namely how those experiences are largely the fault of either Satan or

Humbert themselves, but nevertheless blamed on others. Further, it explores how that initial injurious experience leads to more failed plots for vengeance or reparation. Finally, it explores how those vengeful and/or reparative plots ultimately bring each character even lower than they began. Both Satan and Humbert express feelings that they have been wronged by the worlds they live in: Satan feels deserving of a throne, and is cast out Curtis 6 of heaven for trying to obtain it. Humbert believes his to be less horrible than society perceives it to be, and projects the loss of a childhood love on his middle-aged infatuation with the young Dolores. Ultimately, neither of these characters are able to successfully find reparation in their narratives. Satan, while successful in corrupting humanity, is left even more debased after his ruse and is no less damned afterward than he was before. Similarly, Humbert, even if he does have Lolita for a time, nevertheless loses her to another man and dies alone in a prison cell with nothing but memories of that brief period of success before succumbing to illness.

For the primary texts in this thesis, I use The Annotated Lolita: Revised and

Updated edited by Alfred Appel (1991), and Paradise Lost: The Biblically Annotated

Edition edited by Matthew Stallard (2011). All references to Paradise Lost and Lolita in this thesis, unless referenced indirectly by a secondary source, are to these editions. I chose to use The Annotated Lolita in favor of other editions primarily because of the gained from its extensive annotations, , and additional critical writings, which even when not directly concerned with the subject matter of this thesis were often insightful and at inspirational. Likewise, the biblical annotations in Stallard’s edition of Paradise Lost were extremely helpful in interpreting the text, as well as in keeping biblical themes and of Satan in mind throughout the research and .

Curtis 7

Part I: The Con-Man

One of the most defining characteristics of Satan, whether it be Milton’s, the

Bible’s, or any of the countless references to the character in any medium is his masterful and almost always destructive ability to deceive, to tempt, and to argue. In Paradise Lost,

Satan, through his keen rhetoric, incites rebellion in heaven, then a renewed rebellion after rallying his defeated troops from the lake of fire, even while they are fully perceptive of “the evil plight / in which they were […] the fierce pains [they felt] their

General’s voice they soon obey’d” (1.335-37), and then tempts Eve into committing humanity’s first disobedient act. These three acts of rhetorical manipulation largely define the narrative of the poem, especially considering that the rebellion in heaven and the temptation of Eve are what inspire the poem’s title. Thus, Paradise Lost is deeply concerned with the destructive machinations of Satan, and those machinations are executed largely through Satan’s ability as a rhetorician.

While Humbert Humbert does not become the titular King of Hell and General of its armies, or the tempter responsible for humanity’s original sin through skillful use of rhetoric, he does nevertheless share a proportional level of skill in his use of language to obtain the evil ends he desires. This skill is both introduced and emphasized in John Ray

Jr’s forward to the novel in which he says that there is “a desperate honesty that throbs through his confession [that] does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning […] his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse […] that makes us entranced with the book”

(Nabokov 5). The phrase “sins of diabolical cunning,” twice evokes biblical parallels to

Humbert: first with “sins” and second and more importantly with “diabolical cunning” making Humbert’s deceptive ability (at least in Ray’s eyes) so evil as to recall the Devil. Curtis 8

While these linguistic connections may appear to be exaggeration, or merely opinion on

Ray’s part, the greatest rhetorical moments in each of these characters respective narratives, and the similarities in approach between the two, show that there are in fact many parallels in how both of these “diabolically cunning” characters orate, especially in regards to their fundamental argumentative structure—most notably their use of logos

(appeal to logic), pathos (appeal to emotion), and ethos (appeal to ethics)—and their reliance on perspective control, which they employ to their evil ends.

The temptation of Eve by the Serpent, the catalytic moment of the Bible, and the central scene of Paradise Lost, is not only foundational to the establishment of Satan as he exists as a concept in society, but also the prime example for Satan’s capabilities as humanity’s first, and greatest, con-man. The Serpent, after hearing Eve’s paraphrasing of

God’s command “Ye shall not eat/Thereof, nor shall ye touch it, lest ye die” (9.662-63), proceeds to break down the command by contextualizing its interpretation away from the literal and into different hypothetical angles as to why God would give such a command.

First, Satan calls the threat of death into question, wondering if God would truly punish

“such a petty trespass” (9.693), and what justice could exist in punishing her for bravely pursuing higher knowledge in spite of the threat of death, ending in a syllogism: “God therefore cannot hurt ye, and be just; / Not just, not God; not fear then, nor obeyed”

(9.700-01). A picture of a benevolent God thus painted, Satan pushes further by altering this picture into another hypothetical angle of a jealous, malevolent God who wishes to keep his worshipers “low and ignorant” (9.704). That done, Satan quickly moves on to attempt to redefine death into a less literal interpretation of “putting off /

Human, to put on Gods” (9.713-14). Finally, the Serpent concludes that Eve needs the Curtis 9 fruit to make sense of all of these “persuasive words, impregned with reason, / to her seeming, and with truth” (9.737-38).

It is important to note that all of the different rhetorical angles of attack Satan makes in his argument to Eve are presented in the form of questions. Satan bombards Eve not with assertions but with inquiries, beginning with his very first “indeed?” (9.656), and thereby entering a sort of Platonic dialogue with himself. Ultimately, this questioning approach simultaneously overwhelms and empowers Eve, as she is both given an insurmountable amount of information from Satan, while at the same time presented with a simple, and conclusive end to this cognitive mess: “these, these and many more /

Causes import your need of this fair fruit.” (9.730-31). In his book, Winning Arguments,

Stanley Fish calls Satan a “merchant of doubt” (Fish 26) in this scene because, in Fish’s view, “Satan doesn’t have to sell a particular position, all he has to do is sell doubt” (Fish

26). In many ways Fish is correct in observing that Satan is not selling a particular position in his argument; Satan puts forth several contradictory or seemingly unrelated positions all at once, going from each one without elaborating beyond their hypothetical or rhetorical nature, capitalizing on his own vagueness to create that aforementioned sense of confusion. But what Fish omits noting in this “merchant of doubt” sentiment is the fact that Satan is taking a position, and is not in fact selling doubt: Satan is freely giving doubt away in this dialogue. In fact, he is giving away so much doubt that he is purposefully inflating a demand for answers which a devout person may turn to God for.

However, by making God’s role and commands the apparent source of her confusion,

Satan pushes her to instead seek the “sacred, wise, and wisdom-giving Plant, / Mother of science […] thy power / […] not only to discern things in their causes, but to trace the Curtis 10 ways of highest agents” (9.679-83). Thus, Satan, through his rhetoric becomes not a merchant of doubt, but a provider of doubt and a merchant of false solutions, and successfully sells the fruit to Eve.

However, before Satan can make his “sales pitch” to Eve, he must first grab her attention, bring her guard down, and get her to the tree by using pathos and ethos, playing on Eve’s emotions and establishing a false sense of authority through disguise and flattery, instead of simply relying on clever wordplay alone. Before interacting with Eve,

Satan takes the form of a talking serpent, the sight of which catches Eve off guard, making her first words to Satan:

What may this mean? Language of man pronounc’t

By tongue of brute and human sense expressed?

How cam’st thou speakable of mute, and how

To me so friendly grown above the rest

Of brutal kind, that daily are in sight?

Say, for such wonder claims attention due. (9.553-54, 563-66)

So, even before the fruit is mentioned, or any clever wordplay is used, Satan is given

Eve’s full attention by his presentation as a serpent, which in Eve’s eyes is evidently a

“miracle” (9.562). Satan capitalizes on this attention by doubling down on his perceived position of authority and introducing a “goodly tree […] loaden with fruit of fairest colors

[…] a savory odor” (9.576-77,79), thereby complimenting both the tree and the fruit, before revealing to Eve the true nature of the plant, while simultaneously increasing his sense of authority by expressing the “longing and envying” (9.593) of the other beasts who witness his partaking in the fruit. Thus, before Satan truly engages in any complex Curtis 11 wordplay, Eve gives him her full attention, sees him as a work of divine agency, understands him to be envied by all others of his kind, and comes to those conclusions by virtue of his appearance. Most importantly, however, Eve places all of the serpent’s success in a mysterious, but wonderful fruit, and because of that sentiment she places all of the rhetorical power in the hands of Satan.

In addition to this already quite effective use of his appearance, Satan also capitalizes on one of Eve’s greatest strengths against him: her appearance. While calling

Eve’s appearance a “strength” may seem shallow or demeaning, it alone creates one of the few moments of weakness that we see in Satan in Paradise Lost. Upon seeing Eve,

“the Evil-one abstracted stood/from his own evil […] disarmed / of guile of hate, of envy, of revenge” (9.463-66), making Eve’s beauty one of the most powerful forces against

Satan’s plans in the narrative, but nevertheless not powerful enough to quench “the hot

Hell that always in him burns” (9.467). After regaining his evil composure, Satan immediately works his adoration of Eve to his advantage. From his first words to Eve to his last, and placed frequently in between, Satan incessantly flatters Eve on her appearance and importance to three main purposes.

The first two purposes of Satan’s flattery are to further his ethos and pathos respectively. The first reason behind Satan's flattery of Eve is to create an apparent power structure in the discussion wherein Eve is a “Goddess among Gods” (9.547), and Satan a lowly serpent “displeased that [he] approach [Eve] thus” (9.535), which thereby disarms

Eve and places the Serpent in an apologetic position, allowing him to speak nonthreateningly upward towards her high seat. While this apparent power structure is established, the flattery begins traveling “into the heart of Eve” (9.550), which is where Curtis 12 the pathos of Satan’s temptation takes root, and as he continues to refer to her as

“universal dame” (9.612) and “empress” (9.625), her sense of herself as such grows, and strengthens his appeal to her own self-worth when he begins his final, Socratic speech. In that speech, he asks why a being of such status cannot eat of the fruit despite being

“Lords […] of all in earth or air” (9.658), capitalizing on that inflated sense of self and up his climactic plea and his final compliment: “Goddess humane, reach then, and freely taste!” (9.732). These two purposes are more than enough to justify Satan's use of flattery in his argument, as their combination leave Eve both disarmed and apparently empowered, creating a sense in her eyes that she is making a right decision to listen to the arguments of this serpent who brings “with joy/the good befallen him, author unsuspect, friendly to man, far from deceit or guile” (9.770-72).

However, the two aforementioned benefits of Satan's flattery are starkly overshadowed by the effect of the third: his flattering Eve, in combination with his own appearance, his of the way other creatures view him, and his descriptions of the fruit, all act to establish the discourse as one of empiricism before arguments of faith and obedience even come into . In her book Machiavellian Rhetoric, Victoria Kahn says that “the serpant appeals […] both to Eve's sight and to her desire to be seen” (Kahn

229) in order to lead Eve into “leav[ing] herself open to (the misconstruction of) a mere

Outside” by “assum[ing] with the serpent that she can accede to divine knowledge by reasoning analogically from appearances” (Kahn 231). In other words, the Serpent uses his predisposition to rely on and be affected heavily by his empirical view of the world, exemplified by Eve's effects on him, in order to bring Eve into that same perspective of interpretation and be therefore susceptible to the temptation to defy God in the same way Curtis 13 that Satan defies God because of his empiricism (i.e. acting upon evidence and analogy rather than faith and obedience). This push by Satan to shift Eve's perspective is vital, not only as a means to make his appeals to emotion (his flattering her) or authority (his being a miraculous talking serpent) more effective, but also as the foundation to his coming argument against God's command.

In order to bestow all the doubt he does upon Eve, Satan must first separate her from the simplicity of the command. Kahn points out this simplicity when she says

“although Adam does not understand the word 'death,' he does understand the prohibition as a test of obedience” (Kahn 227). Thus, by keeping this simple understanding that the concepts in and around the prohibition are inconsequential to the obedience which is actually being tested in mind, all the wordplay and analogy employed by the Serpent are useless as they cannot truly undermine simple obedience. However, by introducing his empirical perspective (by flattering Eve, flattering the fruit, flattering himself, etc.) and by manipulating Eve's own sense of perspective (by being a talking serpent), Satan is finally able to seduce Eve into disobedience by bombarding her with endless hypothetical interpretations of God’s command which bring all aspects of the command into question except for what God's command is truly testing: obedience. Unfortunately, with her sight on everything but simple obedience, she fails to adhere to it and falls.

While perhaps not as seminal as the original human act of disobedience against its creator, Lolita nevertheless has its fair share of moments where Humbert Humbert uses his own mastery of rhetoric to deceive those around him for his own personal gain. The most exemplary case in the novel comes mid-way through part one, when Humbert convinces John and Jean Farlow that he is in fact the true father of Dolores “Lolita” Haze Curtis 14 in order to convince them to leave her in his custody after the sudden, albeit for him fairly convenient, death of her mother.

Like his diabolical parallel, Humbert’s greatest tool is rhetoric and language but in a slightly different respect. Humbert Humbert is not foremost a twister of words

(although admittedly an adept user of euphemism), but a story teller: a man who finds

“robust enjoyment in leading [psychiatrists] on […] inventing for them elaborate dreams, pure classics in style” (Nabokov 34). Naturally, then, in his deceptions, just as in his meta-temptation (i.e. the novel itself) he uses his “fancy prose style” (Nabokov 9) to tell duplicitous, or at times outright false stories in order to create a reality which suits himself best. In the particular case of duping the Farlows, Humbert creates for them, or more so for Mrs. Farlow given that “A foe so proud will first the weaker seek” (9.383), a soap opera-esque story of a love affair between Humbert and the late Charlotte Haze which took place conveniently at the time which Dolores Haze might have been conceived. Understanding that Jean, who “whispered she had heard some rumors”

(Nabokov 100), was convinced enough by that story for the time being, Humbert proceeds to cover all of his bases first by telling a priest that Dolores would stay in New

York with his female cousin, and then by making Dolores unreachable by fabricating a 5- day hiking trip, thereby keeping her away from “the house with all those busybodies milling around and scheming to take her away from me” (Nabokov 101). All of this in place, all that remains is for Jean and John Farlow to leave Humbert to his means, which they do, but only after John almost ruins Humbert’s plans with his suspicious “One would like to know what you are going to do about the child anyway” (Nabokov 101) only to be foiled by his wife’s convinced plea “she is his child […] don’t you understand? Curtis 15

Humbert is Dolly’s real father” (Nabokov 101). And thus, “against his better knowledge; not deceived / but fondly overcome with female charm” (9.998-99), John gives into

Humbert’s tale, and they leave him. This story, cleverly constructed and defended, not only leaves Dolores in Humbert’s care, but gives him complete control over her, allowing him, unquestioned, to take his now step-daughter around the country for years.

A story such as this benefits greatly in its ability to deceive its listeners into believing it, if it can elicit an emotional response. In order to culture this emotional response, Humbert relies not only on the emotion inherent in the situation at hand, but also his ability to act, and Jean Farlow's long-standing fondness of him. First and foremost, pathos is an easy tool to wield after an unexpected death, and since Humbert had just lost his wife to an unexpected car accident, his situation naturally makes emotional stories such as his supposed love affair more believable by virtue of his listeners’ inherently sympathetic ears. Further, these circumstances also make breaks in

Humbert’s normally difficult-to-excite manner seem more appropriate. For example, when Humbert “[breaks] down […] plead[ing] with John” (Nabokov 100), his behavior would arguably lead one to become more, not less, suspicious of his actions because of how out of character such an act would be for him. However, given the circumstances of having just lost his wife to a car accident and having to identify her body, this response is more defensible.

Further complicating the emotional dynamic of this situation is Jean Farlow's pre- existing infatuation with Humbert. Established by several previous encounters between the two and Humbert's timely reminder that “Jean supported [John's] offer [to leave her and Humbert alone] so passionately that might be implied [that he may sleep with Jean]” Curtis 16

(Nabokov 100), it is obvious that Jean is thoroughly attracted to Humbert. This attraction acts in much the same way that the Serpent's flattery works with Eve, in that Jean’s ability (or more likely her desire) to mistrust Humbert is clouded by her romantic feelings toward him. Lastly, Humbert must rely on his ability to act, and does so by utilizing his weaknesses for beauty just as Satan utilizes his. However, instead of using his crippling appreciation for Jean's beauty to make his flattery more convincing, Humbert instead uses his crippling appreciation for Dolores to make his concern more convincing. Given that the situation of an untimely death makes Humbert's passion understandable, what truly makes that passion convincing comes first from his ability to feign love for

Charlotte, which he is able to do sufficiently so that she marries him, and second from his wanting his “magic prize” (Nabokov 102) so urgently that his “break down” does not simply feel real to John: it is real. However, it is not real in the sense that he wants to protect Dolores from this emotional scene and how it, as he says, “might react on her future” (Nabokov 101), but in the sense of how close Humbert is to winning his prize and how badly he needs his con to work. Therefore, because his yearning for Lolita is so strong, he can convincingly produce what appears to be real concern for Dolores’ well- being but is actually concern for his opportunity to seize Lolita.

With a convincing narrative, and a heavy emotional response to support it,

Humbert goes further to support his con by falsely establishing himself as an authority to be trusted. To establish the ethos for his argument, Humbert relies on his position as

Charlotte Haze’s widower, given that she can no longer testify to his motives for marrying her, as well as his literal and metaphorical foreignness to the Farlows. While in most cases being a stranger is a disadvantage, in Humbert's case being an alien actually Curtis 17 helps him, first by hiding his proclivity for young girls, and second and more applicably by making his past a blank page on which to write any story he so chooses. Like Satan using his position as a talking snake to fabricate a story about the abilities of the fruit of knowledge, Humbert uses his position as Charlotte's mysterious foreign widower to fabricate a story about his love affair, both making his sudden, possibly “miraculous,” arrival into Dolores and Charlotte's life make more sense and provide an explanation for his desire to keep his now step-daughter after his new wife's untimely death.

While all of these pieces are necessary for Humbert to successfully obtain his prize, there is one piece missing which is essential to perhaps all story-tellers and on which all of Humbert's pathos, logos, and ethos relies: creative control. While Humbert differs from his diabolical counter-part in that he prefers to tell stories rather than make formal philosophical arguments, he does similarly rely on both narrowing his listeners' perspectives as well as becoming his own “merchant of doubt.” In order to accomplish these two tasks, Humbert must control where his listeners receive their information to assure that information comes exclusively from him. First, the catalyst for his deception,

Charlotte’s untimely death, conveniently disposes of the one person who could most easily betray him. Second, Humbert makes certain that Dolores is apparently inaccessible so that (according to Humbert) she cannot be reached by “all those busybodies milling around and scheming to take her away” (Nabokov 101), but more so she cannot contradict Humbert's stories and desires with her own accounts of her mother and her own opinions regarding with whom she would like to live. Lastly, Humbert controls information through small acts, such as lying to the cleric enough to get rid of him without “hurting his feelings [or] arousing his doubts” (Nabokov 100) and having fake Curtis 18 phone conversations loud enough to be heard by others “for the benefit of Leslie and

Louise who might (and did) report it to John and Jean” (Nabokov 100). All of these steps give Humbert complete creative control of what information reaches its intended , and with that control he naturally achieves his secondary goal of regulating how much information is reaching that audience. Similar to how Satan encumbers Eve with doubt in order to sell her a certain answer, Humbert does not give the Farlows any concrete evidence in his story that would prove his relationship to Dolores in an objective sense such as a DNA test or a photo of Humbert and Charlotte taken before Dolores’ birth. Instead, Humbert merely seeds doubt into the nature of Charlotte's past and

Dolores' upbringing by creating a vague story of an affair with just enough information for Jean to come to the conclusion that Humbert is Dolores' father on her own accord.

Therefore, Humbert becomes a “merchant of doubt,” not by selling doubt to the Farlows, but by openly providing doubt to them in hopes that they will purchase an answer that is advantageous to him. Without anyone but himself to add any information, conflicting or otherwise, and with the benefit of his foreignness, Humbert is able to remain persuasively vague, and consequently receive Lolita.

Thus, both John Milton's Satan and 's Humbert Humbert succeed in achieving their diabolical ends through use of their abilities in rhetoric, deception, and persuasion. While Satan relies on manipulating words and twisting concepts to form his argument, and Humbert relies on crafting stories to suit his desires, they both find common ground in the fundamental pieces of their arguments and the evil in what they hope to achieve. Both of these characters use the basic, ancient modes of persuasion: pathos, logos, and ethos in conjunction with an approach aimed more at Curtis 19 providing doubt rather than actual answers, both of which are supported by an initial and vital manipulation of perspective to one which is toxic to inquiry beyond that which these deceivers wish to give. After all of these strategies are employed, both of these con-men are given the payout for their cons: the corruption and suffering of innocent people, as well as the pleasure which follows such an accomplishment.

Curtis 20

Part II: The Abject

Satan, both today and historically, is synonymous with opposition. In her book

The Origin of Satan, Elaine Pagels explains that in the Old Testament, the term satan was largely used to refer to “any one of the angels sent by God for the specific purpose of blocking or obstructing” (Pagels 39),5 and one of Milton’s first references to the character in Paradise Lost introduces him as “th’ Arch-Enemy” (1.81). However, what makes

Satan, and in particular Milton’s Satan, interesting is not the ways in which he embodies an oppositional force —an object diametrically opposed to God, humanity, etc.—but in the ways in which he embodies a corrupting force, one which exists straddling, confusing, debasing, or otherwise bringing into question the firmness and even the validity of that which demarcates the boundaries between good and evil, order and disorder: the abject. Similarly, Humbert Humbert is not an interesting character by simple nature of his pedophilia being morally and ethically repulsive. On the contrary, much of what is interesting about Humbert is how his being a pedophile exists underneath so many qualities that the average person would find normal, even attractive. Therefore,

Humbert, like Satan, is not merely something starkly opposed to normative ethical and values, but a corruption of normative society representing not only the reprehensible, but also something which calls into question the border between normativity and otherness. In her book, Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva defines the concept of the abject through exploration of various themes and the ways that the abject influences or is produced within those themes. In one illustrative example of what she

5 The satan was not used as a specific name for any angel in particular, but rather was a title signifying a specific task (i.e. obstruction) that an angel was given, by God, to perform. These obstructions by the satan were not necessarily evil or even malevolent, either, and could constitute any sort of blockage, such as “unexpected obstacles or changes in fortune” (Pagels 39-40) Curtis 21 defines as abject, Kristeva describes a corpse as “the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part” (Kristeva 5).

Likewise, Humbert and Satan are both corpses in their own ways; embodiments of moral/ethical, physical, and emotional concepts which are simultaneously separate and inseparable (or rejected and homogenized, foreign and familiar, etc.) and therefore serve to disrupt the borders of those dichotomies rather than simply represent an opposition to the other.

Satan’s desire to be a saboteur and corrupter of creation, not just pure evil, separates him from mere sadism and moves him towards being an evil-doer grounded in debasing structure and order: abject. Kristeva describes this distinction when she states that

It is not a lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what

disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions,

rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar,

the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who

claims he is a savior. […] Any crime, because it draws attention to the

fragility of the law, is abject. (Kristeva 4; emphasis mine)

Satan’s first and foremost sin which makes him the embodiment of evil is treachery against God, and by extension God’s supremacy in the universe; the foundational hierarchy of all of creation, and Satan’s deceitfulness gives power to this initial sin against order. In the introduction to the epic, the narrator says that the woes of the world can be traced back to “Th’ infernal Serpent […] whose guile, […] deceived / The mother of mankind, what time his pride / Had cast him out from Heaven, with all his host / Of Curtis 22 rebel Angels” (1.34-38) These lines quickly summarizes Satan’s three primary acts of deception (himself, his fellow angels, and Eve) the consequences of which make up the primary of the entire epic. Thus, Satan is a traitor and a liar at his core, but how he affects his world through that role is what makes him abject.

Satan’s motivation behind these acts of deception displays his abject disrespect for laws and order and the perception that these concepts are tenuous and malleable. For instance, Beelzebub, in relating what is later revealed to be Satan’s plan explains that the goal in seducing Eve is to “surpass / Common revenge, and interrupt [God’s] joy / In

[their] confusion, and [their] joy upraise / In his disturbance; when his darling sons, / […] shall curse / their frail original, and faded bliss” (2.370-75, emphasis mine). Here, it is apparent that Satan’s plan is not meant to be done out of simple sadistic love of destruction, or even “simple vengeance,” (both of which being reasonably sufficient motivations) but instead out of desire to “disturb” God’s perception of his creations, calling into question the value of his work, which is said to show that those “who seeks / to lesson [God], against his purpose serves / To manifest the more [his] might: [Satan’s] evil/ [he] usest, and from thence creatst more good. (7.613-16). Further, the secondary purpose of Satan’s plan is to instill a similar sense of doubt and cynicism into man himself, emphasizing how “frail” mankind will perceive their now faded bliss. Therefore,

Satan’s plan acts to not only spread deceit, which in and of itself is an act of the abject, but to spread that deceit in the name of spreading doubtfulness of the world-order. In other words, the purpose for seducing mankind is to bring them closer to Satan’s ruined state and further from godliness, and to bring God’s joy closer to Satan’s dissatisfaction.

Thus, Satan’s plan is not to completely destroy creation, but to muddy the dichotomy that Curtis 23 exists between his fallen state and humanity’s righteous state.

While Satan’s moral and ethical grounding establishes him as abject, his physical appearance also serves to represent how he comes to blur or challenge organization and otherness in the world. While not literally speaking of physical appearance in this particular context, Kristeva nonetheless states that corruption is one of the defining characteristics of abjection when she says that “Corruption is its most common, most obvious appearance. That is the socialized appearance of the abject” (Kristeva 16).

Interestingly, while many representations of Satan’s physical appearance outside of

Milton’s poem commonly feature grotesque, frightening, bestial forms with extra heads and orifices, Milton’s Satan is described as “above the rest / In shape and gesture proudly eminent / Stood like a tower; his form had yet not lost / All her original brightness, nor appear’d / Less than Archangel ruin’d” (1.589-93), emphasizing that Milton’s Satan, even after his fall, does not simply become some monstrosity but takes on an aesthetic representing both what he once was (“archangel”) and what he is now (“ruin’d”). This mixed state serves to reinforce Satan’s place as abject in that it shows visually that his fall does not create a new enemy, but corrupts what was once a great ally.

As corrupt as Satan’s fallen appearance is just after his fall, he corrupts his appearance further by shapeshifting throughout the epic into progressively lesser creatures. Satan’s first disguise is that of “a stripling Cherub” (3.636), which, as useful of a disguise it turns out to be, is an immediate, large demotion from “archangel,” as it sheds both the towering and authoritative might that even his ruined visage commanded, leaving him still apparently angelic, but on the lowest rung of the angelic hierarchy. Next,

Satan sheds even his angelic appearance in favor of perching “on the tree of life […] Sat Curtis 24 like a cormorant” (4.194, 96), which is another step down for Satan, from angelic to bestial, but still winged and physically above all the other creatures in the garden.

Further, his particular choice in bird represents Satan’s influence as a corrupting force; he takes the shape of a cormorant, an omen of death, upon the Tree of Life. Next, moving from his high, winged stature to the ground, Satan appears as “A lion now […] then as a tiger” (4.402-03), which are both majestic beasts and predators, emphasizing the retention of his pride as well as his place as contradiction: a beautiful, proud creature and harbinger of death. Finally, before he is captured by angelic guards, Satan is described as “a toad”

(4.800), squatting and whispering into Eve’s ear, showing his final step in debasement: no longer even harmful (a testament to the harmlessness of Eve being tempted only in a dream), and certainly not retaining any sort of pride or beauty.

While all of these disguises show Satan’s appearance as an embodiment of corruption toward himself, it is also an act of corruption to the image of these beasts.

Satan’s disguised appearance is said by the narrator to be “counterfeit” (4.117), which functions similarly to his faded appearance in regards to his abjectness in that even

Satan’s actions within this new form disrupt and act counter to the established order of things. He appears similar on the surface, but is not a perfect representation of these creatures as he retains the aura of hate and malice that he carries with him. Because of that retention he remains abject in appearance, simultaneously a bird and an omen of death, a small cherub and a fiend, etc. Thus, Satan is abject in his actions and appearance, and uses his corrupt appearance to help facilitate his corrupt machinations, further debasing himself and everything he interacts with.

Satan is not only abject in his actions and his appearance, but also in his respect Curtis 25 for physical and geographical space. If his immorality and his appearances serve to either represent or further the disruption of organization, order, and structure, then it follows that to literally forgo established spatial boundaries would also be representative of his abjection. On the topic of how space influences those who are abject or experience abjection, Kristeva says:

The one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places (himself),

separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays instead of

getting his bearings […] He is on a journey, during the night, the end of

which keeps receding. (Kristeva 8)

Satan is one of if not the only characters in Paradise Lost who moves between the four different settings in the poem: Heaven, Hell, Chaos, and Earth. Satan’s first experience forgoing spatial boundaries occurs when he and his rebel army are forced out of Heaven

“with terrors, and with furies, to the bounds / And crystal wall of Heaven; which opening wide, / Rolled inward” (6.859-61). This breach of Heaven’s walls makes Satan’s fall from grace into a literal one as he descends with his army into the “yawning” (6.875) embrace of Hell. However, being abject, Satan does everything in his power to resist restraint in his new prison.

After coming to consciousness, floating chained in a lake of fire, Satan wastes no time in escaping not only the lake, but the pit itself in order to embark on his diabolical journey. One of Satan’s and his comrade Beelzebub’s first actions in Book I is to escape

“the Stygian Flood” (1.240), rally their troops in the fittingly liminal space of the lake’s beach head, and finally establish a capital “at Pandemonium” (1.756). Soon after

Pandemonium’s construction, Satan volunteers to be the sole demon to leave Hell in Curtis 26 search of Earth. In this quest, Satan encounters three physical obstructions: the gates of hell, the abyss of Chaos, and the walls of Eden. At the gates of Hell, Satan encounters his self-begotten, incestuous children of pride, lust, and rape: Death and Sin. These two beings, existing as both separate offspring and inseparable projections of Satan are abject in and of themselves and personified aspects of Satan’s abjection. Fittingly, Satan confronts these projections in order to physically breech the constraints of his prison.

Ultimately, it is an act of disobedience which allows him to pass, as Death rhetorically asks in reference to his duty to God to prevent Satan’s escape: “But what owe I to his commands above, / Who hates me, and hath hither thrust me down / Into this gloom of

Taraus” (2.856-58). Through that act of disobedience, abject in its own right, Death then opens the gates of Hell, physically incarnating his rebellion, making it both metaphorical and physical, paralleling Satan’s fall from grace.

Once outside of the walls of his prison, Satan’s dejected journey brings him to the ultimate liminal space: Chaos. Not long into his trek through Chaos, Satan finds himself falling endlessly: “fluttering his pennons vain, plumb-down he drops / Ten-thousand fathom deep […] through the hollow dark” (2.933-34,53). Thus, Satan in the most literal sense possible, “strays instead of getting his bearings […] He is on a journey, during the night, the end of which keeps receding” (Kristeva 8), until The Anarch, Chaos, stops his descent, speaks to him, and allows him to pass through his realm on condition that Satan spread “havoc, and spoilt and ruin” (2.1009). Through The Anarch’s mercy, Satan is once again allowed to pass through these barriers by relying on an incarnation of abjection. In this case, the incarnation is not a projection of himself, but a projection of disorder in its purest form. Chaos as a character is only opposed to anything insofar as he is opposed to Curtis 27 any sense or projection of order, and therefore while perhaps not necessarily abject himself, is the embodiment of the forces which abject or promote abjection; without the concept of disorder nothing with order would be able to question its own state and therefore there would be no abjection.

Satan’s last obstacles in his pursuit to corrupt mankind are the metaphorical boundaries of the mind of man and the physical walls of Eden. For Satan, these obstacles necessitate the use of his shapeshifting abilities and thus again the use of a separate aspects of abjection to manipulate the spatial. He becomes a cherub to hide from the angels as he searches for the garden, then a bird perched on top of the tallest tree in the garden to find man, then as predators to stalk man and better understand his prey, and finally a toad and a snake in his two penetrations into the mind of Eve (the former in the dream, the latter in reality). All this being done, Satan’s task is complete and he again leaves each of these realms scarred in his wake: Earth in a fallen state, Chaos with a paved path, Hell with breeched gates, Pandemonium constructed from the mining of a nearby infernal mountain, etc., and himself firmly established as not only a corruptor of moral and ethical boundaries, or one who blurs ideas of how to demarcate the physical distinctions of who is and is not other, but also as one who challenges actual spatial boundaries and means of separation. By this end, Satan further cements himself as a being not simply resident in Hell and therefore separate or opposite from the realms of

Heaven and Earth and their respective norms and ideals, but one who exists to show that these boundaries can be broken.

Humbert Humbert, a confessed and largely shameless pedophile, kidnapper, rapist, and murderer, is all but founded on his abject ability to disrupt systematic and Curtis 28 legal order. Humbert’s role as Kristeva’s “criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior” (Kristeva 4) is put best by John Ray Jr. in his preface to the novel when he describes Humbert as doubtlessly “horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious” (Nabokov 5). In the way that Ray describes him, Humbert is comparatively, if not just as, reprehensible, as his Satanic counterpart. However, there is “no doubt”

(Nabokov 5) as to his horribleness, and therefore, too much lingering on the subject of whether or not he is horrible would be redundant, and by that measure much less important to study than the “jocularity that betrays [his] supreme misery” which remains less certain (i.e. “perhaps”), or even the ponderousness of his capriciousness. These muddier aspects of his horrible acts are simultaneously what make Humbert a character worth exploring, as well as what make his criminal acts abject instead of simply sadistic.

His crimes do more than illicit dread or disgust; they bring about confusion because of the duplicitous and often confusing way he presents his defense for his crimes.

The first strategy Humbert deploys in his defense argues for an arbitrary foundation in established pedophilia laws. In introducing the nuances of his development and experiences as a pedophile, Humbert complains that he “found [himself] maturing amid a civilization which allows a man of twenty-five to court a girl of sixteen but not a girl of twelve.” (Nabokov 18), which serves as an introductory paradox concerning a large string of cases that serve to allow Humbert to take a position on a possible solution.

The paradox presented here is that many people would find both relationships morally wrong, or at the very least socially strange, but only one to be legally prosecutable, hence Curtis 29 the implied question: why allow one and not the other? Humbert proceeds to argue toward solving the paradox by allowing both relationships, citing many historical and literary cases in which a man courts a girl of questionable age and it is tolerated. For instance, he mentions (all in one passage) that “Rahab was a harlot at ten years of age,” implying debauchery of that sort existing in the Bible; then further “Here is Virgil who could the nymphet sing in single , but probably preferred a lad’s perineum,” thus bringing into conversation the loosely regulated sexuality of the ancient Greeks (both in their pedophilia, and their homosexuality); then “Here are two of King Akhaten’s and

Queen Nefertiti’s pre-nubile Nile daughters […] wearing nothing but many necklaces of bright beads,” thus showing even the Egyptians as culprits of this taboo (Nabokov 19).

Moving on from historical reference, Humbert mentions that “Marriage and cohabitation before the age of puberty are still not uncommon in certain East Indian provinces. Lepcha old men of eighty copulate with girls of eight, and nobody minds.” (Nabokov 19). Here, he makes a more geo-political argument that there are civilizations around the world, even in modern times, where such behavior is considered not taboo, but the norm.

Finally, Humbert makes a literary/classical argument by mentioning (somewhat inaccurately) how “Dante fell madly in love with his Beatrice when she was nine […] and when Petrarch fell madly in love with his Laureen she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve” (Nabokov 19). Thus, Humbert makes a logical-based, diachronic, geo-political, and classical argument for the arbitrary foundation of modern civilization’s view of what relationships are “prim and civilized” (Nabokov 19).

The second attempt Humbert makes to disturb the legal and moral perception of the pedophile is by showing the duality of a man with his sexual desires. To makes his Curtis 30 point on this subject, Humbert looks back on the damage he receives from his childhood infatuation with Annabel and her sudden, unexpected death. On the subject he says:

We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so

often destroys adult lives. I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison

was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open, […] Overtly, I had

so-called normal relationships with a number of terrestrial women […]

inly, I was consumed by […] localized lust for every nymphet.

(Nabokov 18)

In these passages, Humbert first founds his disease in a wound made by love, on which

“often destroys adult lives,” which simultaneously makes his condition sympathetic, as he is not debauched in hedonistic desire, but wounded by a commonly praised emotion, as well as implicitly common and almost even praise-worthy given that he survives this condition which so often destroys people. Next, he establishes a dichotomy between act and thought, bringing attention to the fact that “Humbert tried to be Good. Really and truly, he did” (Nabokov 19) by having “normal relationships” and therefore adding to his previous claims for sympathy and perceived strength, as he resisted for all these years something which was “a thousand times more dazzling” in even “the dimmest of [his] polluting dreams” (Nabokov 18). Thus, Humbert argues that within this arbitrary legal set, he (and the many others similarly wounded), was willing to endure his inability to indulge in what is considered “normal” despite the fact that what he is giving up for normality has far greater rewards. In other words, Humbert lives as a sympathetic, pedophilic martyr.

Humbert’s third disruptive defense, that the temptations of a pedophile are largely Curtis 31 external, introduces an abject creation of Humbert’s own—a nymphet—which lives among otherwise wholesome children and preys on men of his persuasion. Humbert says that, by and large, pedophiles going about their everyday lives are not constantly objectifying children. On the contrary, “He had the utmost respect for ordinary children, with their purity and vulnerability […] but how his heart beat when, among the innocent throng, he espied a demon child” (Nabokov 19-20). These “demon children,” or nymphets, are in Humbert’s eyes temptresses in their own right (Lolita being the crown jewel of them), and embody both “tender dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity […] the blurry pinkness of adolescent maidservents in the Old Country

(smelling of crushed daisies and sweat); […] mixed up with the exquisite stainless tenderness seeping through the musk and the mud, through the dirt and the death”

(Nabokov 44-45). In this way, Humbert sees nymphets, and by extension Lolita, as something entirely separate and less innocent and wholesome than normal children; something far more sexual in nature beneath their nearly indistinguishably child-like exterior. Given this paranormal distinction, Humbert attempts to justify his attraction to these young girls by dehumanizing them into demons, and then through that dehumanization makes them not simply passive demons, but “little deadly demon[s] among the wholesome children […] unrecognized by [the children] and unconscious

[themselves] of [their own fantastic power]” (Nabokov 17), thereby removing the children from the seat of victimhood into the position of aggressor or at least to the level of peers to their rapists. Concluding the third and final defense of his pedophilia,

Humbert has thus far called into question the legitimacy of the laws against pedophilia, the mental state of pedophiles, and even the role (as well as personhood) of their victims, Curtis 32 most to none of which perhaps actually work to exonerate or even alleviate the heinousness his actions or thoughts, but at least some if not all of which paint Humbert’s worldview and motivations as something abject— wholly immoral, anti-normative, and destructive to systems as we understand them.

Humbert’s abject actions and motivations, like Satan’s, are coupled with a corrupt, abject aesthetic. Unlike Satan, Humbert is unable to shapeshift. However, he does similarly assume and present himself in certain outward “disguises” which serve to hide is inward thoughts, motives, and desires. For instance, Humbert expresses on several occasions that “[his] gloomy good looks should be kept in the mind’s eye if [his] story is to be properly understood.” (Nabokov 104), but he also (albeit more rarely) describes his physical appearance rather negatively: “I am lanky, big-boned, wolly-chested Humbert

Humbert, with thick black eyebrows and a queer accent, and a cesspool of rotting behind his slow boyish smile” (Nabokov 44). Thus, the reader is presented with two conflicting accounts of Humbert’s outward appearance from the same source; a conflict which remains unresolved, except that perhaps the negative descriptions

Humbert makes of himself only come when stated relative to descriptions of Lolita’s appearance. Given that he cannot significantly change his appearance beyond these basic traits, these physical descriptions become less important to the more metaphorical ones, such as the “cesspool of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile.” Humbert presents neatly his relationship with the dichotomy shared by Satan in his many disguises: the conflict of the external smile and the internal monster.

Humbert’s corrupted appearance comes from the conflict between his otherwise normal façade and his debased feelings and actions. Humbert definitely want to be seen Curtis 33 or understood positively. When addressing his audience, Humbert makes pleas such as

“Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill.” (Nabokov 88), or “Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let’s even smile a little” (Nabokov 129), which shows Humbert aiming for a sensitive, non-aggressive appearance toward readers of his confession. To those he interacts with in the story, he certainly capitalizes on his evidently handsome looks:

“Pubescent Lo swooned to Humbert’s charm as she did hiccuppy music; adult Lotte loved me with a mature, possessive passion […] Jean Farlow […] had also apparently developed a strong liking for me” (Nabokov 104). Conveniently for him, Humbert’s outward appearances are both useful and largely affective, given that so many both within and outside of his narrative are persuaded by his aesthetic claims.6 However, just as

Satan’s disguise as “a stripling Cherub” (3.636), is only “counterfeit” (4.117), so is

Humbert’s role as a poet, or a doe, or a handsome bachelor. This conflict of internal and external within Humbert is best approached through his self- of “tumescent devil” (Nabokov 116). The adjective “tumescent,” or swollen, can be used to refer to both sexual and linguistic swollenness (i.e. both arousal and bombastic style), both of which are applicable to Humbert, whose prose tends to meander poetically, and whose sexual passions are often nothing short of destructive. Further, the affected “devil” functions interestingly in this descriptor as it is fitting within both the linguistic and the sexual context of its adjective. Doubtlessly, Humbert’s sexual desires evoke the diabolical, mostly from their pervasiveness in conjunction with their targets. However, the way in which Humbert uses his poetic prose to mask or euphemize his sexual acts and intentions

6 “Part I: The Con-Man” explores how exactly he uses his appearances as persuasive tools in more depth. Curtis 34 is in many ways just as diabolical. The linguistic relationships within this descriptor lie at the heart of Humbert’s corrupt façade. He is apparently a normal-looking, kind man, with a horrible “cesspool” machinating below the surface, and both the internal cesspool and the external normality work in conjunction with each other to diabolical ends.

Although his movements are not as drastic as travelling from Heaven to Hell, then through Chaos to Earth and back to Hell again, Humbert does often “stray;” escaping from Europe to suburban America, then all around the country only to return briefly to suburbia again before a final cross-country journey ending in his arrest. Similar to Satan’s fall from Heaven, Humbert is forced to leave Europe after being caught by authorities trying to solicit underage prostitution (interestingly he was delayed in his escape by the

Second World War). Once established in suburban America, Humbert finds his own motivations to escape his new found Hell in Americana through Lolita. After Mrs. Haze’s unexpected death, Humbert and Lolita travel all around the country for an entire year, having sex any chance Humbert can find until they are eventually forced to settle down for a while due to financial and emotional constraints. After Lolita’s “escape,” Humbert again strays off to find her and murder her new love, Mr. Quilty. The significance of both of these trips can be summarized and explored through Humbert’s reflections on how they each end. At the end of his first journey with Lolita, Humbert says:

We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself

thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail

of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in

retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined

tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night—every night, every night— Curtis 35

the moment I feigned sleep. (Nabokov 175-176)

This poignant passage first and foremost shows the feelings of pointlessness and pain that this “well-intended” trip left upon both parties, kidnapper and kidnapped, which echoes the ever-receding end mentioned by Kristeva in that an endless journey—the act of straying for the only purpose to be straying—is in and of itself pointless and hallow.

Further, like Satan’s journey through the various realms of Paradise Lost, this journey leaves everything in the journey’s wake worse off that it was before, but instead of paving a highway through Chaos, like Satan, Sin, and Death, Humbert and Lolita leave a

“sinuous trail of slime;” and instead of Adam and Eve crying together over the loss of paradise, Lolita cries on the loss of her innocence and independence, and Humbert suffers from his feelings of regret for the pain that he has caused this girl he loved. At the end of

Humbert’s Second journey, consisting of his discovering a pregnant Lolita and his murdering Quilty, there is a similarly poignant passage:

Since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the

rules of traffic […] It was a pleasant diaphragmal melting, with elements

of diffused tactility, all this enhanced by the thought that nothing could be

nearer to the elimination of basic physical laws than deliberately driving

on the wrong side of the road. In a way, it was a very spiritual itch [...] like

a sip of forbidden Burgundy when I was a child.” (Nabokov 306)

In the most literal sense, Humbert forgoes both spatial boundaries and the laws explicitly attached to those boundaries as a final cathartic act of lawlessness. By forgoing the laws of the road, he is able to feel a “diaphragmal” sense of release, and a return to a sort of childishness in his catharsis for the plethora of sins he has committed in his other Curtis 36 journeys through the night, and thereby create a sense (temporary or not) of closure with the sinuous trail of slime he has laid. Interestingly, this final, and comparatively mild, act of disobedience is actually what finally results in his apprehension and imprisonment, again bringing spatial closure to Humbert’s spread of discord.

In conclusion, both Satan and Humbert are abject in that both act to disrupt, destroy, or otherwise call into question the sanctity of established systems, laws, and general order, with the former sabotaging God’s creation, and the latter stealing the innocence of a young girl. Further, both of these characters pursue their respective goals to corrupt and destroy while maintaining appearances and roles which are both simultaneously innocent and corrupted in appearance (visually and metaphorically).

Finally, Satan and Humbert travel endlessly in their respective narratives, constantly forgoing establish spatial boundaries and leaving trails of destruction in their wakes. In sum, both characters embody many of the primary tenets of Julia Kristeva’s definition of abjection, and viewing them as such shows them to be more than simply amoral, destructive, or solely oppositional beings, and instead to be disruptive forces which show the fragility of the systems they corrupt and the blurriness of the lines which separate their worldview from the norm.

Curtis 37

Part III: The Debauched

Both Milton’s Satan and Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert share a fixation on the world as it relates to them, which in many ways acts as a virtue for these characters, granting them a level of critical distance which empowers much of their manipulative and opportunistic abilities. However, this adherence to the world only as they can perceive it is far more often a blight than a blessing. For instance, one of Satan’s core misconceptions about God which inform his reasoning to rebel against him is empirical in nature: “who saw / when this creation was? Rememberest thou / Thy making, while the

Maker gave thee being?” (5.856-58). To Satan, if his own creation was not witnessed by anyone, especially himself, then it must be called into question in favor of a different process, one conveniently more in line with a reality where he could possibly lead a successful coup. For Humbert, his self-centeredness disconnects him emotionally with much of the world around him. For instance, Humbert, in his first and only description of his late mother, describes her as his “very photogenic mother died in a freak accident

(picnic, lightening) when [he] was three” (Nabokov 10). Here he describes the death of his mother solely in so far as she is experienced by him and no further. Humbert has only interacted with her through photographs, hence the brief description, and any story of his mother would simply tangent away from his narrative, which he privileges. Therefore, both Humbert and Satan share an innate obsession with the world as it exists before them but lack a certain awareness or respect for ideas which exist beyond them. This adherence to a solipsistic worldview manifests in their abilities to appreciate the beauty in the world

(whether it be physical, linguistic, ironic, sexual, etc.), but only so far as it affects them and their desires, ultimately leading them to reduce everything beyond their own sense of Curtis 38 self to objects which exist to either promote or impede their respective agendas.

Acting as a base moral dichotomy in the poem, Milton’s angels’ and their fallen counter-parts’ experiences in their respective worlds exemplify each party’s position on the polar ends of an emotional spectrum, with the angels in heaven experiencing unimaginable bliss, and the fallen angels experiencing unimaginable melancholy. First,

Heaven’s angels appear extremely happy, almost intentionally un-relatable in their joy.

For example, when the Son’s role as humanity’s eventual savior is announced, the angels throw a massive festival during which “the bright/Pavement […] Impurpled with celestial roses smiled […] their golden harps they took,/Harps ever tuned, that glitter by their side

[…] no voice exempt, no voice by well could join/ Melodious part, such concord is in heaven” (3.362-71). Thus, with always in-tune harps and voices, as well as purple roses coloring a street which even in its inanimate state is not exempt from expressing joy, the sheer perfection in heaven creates perhaps the most sterile block party ever attended by tens of millions of party-goers. Adding to their perfect enjoyment of existence, Rafael blushingly reveals later in the epic that even sex among angels is a perfectly clean ordeal described as finding no “obstacle […] of membrane, joint or limb […] Easier than air with air […] Total they mix, union of pure with pure” (8.624-27). This description again reinforces the shear unsoiled bliss that defines angelic existence. Even sex, understood by fallen readers to be an often uncomfortable or at the very least an indisputably messy ordeal is a body-less “union of pure with pure” solidifying that every nook and cranny of angelic life is as spotless as it is wonderful.

Milton’s fallen angels’ experience stands in stark to their heavenly counter-parts’ pure bliss, but not in such a way that reinforces the out-for-blood image Curtis 39 implied by the rousing, vengeful military imagery in the beginning of the epic. Instead, it contrasts that bliss in such a way which makes these demons more akin to depressed escapists whose experience mirrors the previous description in almost every way. Instead of a festival, many demons pass the time by fighting each other, while others sing inharmoniously of their personal exploits in a sort of pseudo-Valhalla scene which not only provides a violent contrast to celebration, but also a selfish counterpart to angelic song. Further, in Hell there are no smiling streets, but instead “four infernal rivers, that disgorge/ Into the burning lake their baleful streams” (2.575-76), as well as a fifth river,

Lethe, which is actually (fruitlessly) sought after by many demons for its waters’ ability to make whoever drinks from it “[forget] both joy and grief, pleasure and pain” (2.586).

Thus, everything in hell is unbelievably sad, not necessarily frightening, with its residents spending their time fighting for no purpose other than to narcissistically singing about it, or wandering among the drab landscape only to find the sole remotely desirable landmark is a river which more or less makes them brain dead. To make matters worse, Satan later briefly describes that even sex is lost on (most) demons, as he laments his jealousy of

Adam and Eve’s “bliss on bliss, while [he] to Hell [is] thrust/ Where neither joy nor love, but fierce desire […] Still unfulfilled with pain of longing pines” (4.508-11). The “bliss on bliss” in this sense purposefully parallels the “pure with pure” (8.624-27) sentiment later expressed by Rafael in his reference to angelic sex, but Satan, and presumably his fellow fallen angels, is left excluded from sexual acts in their fallen state.

However, Satan appears to be the exception to many of the aforementioned experiences of those who suffer in Hell in regards to the extent of what he is allowed to experience, but these exceptions only further the aforementioned dichotomy. First, Satan Curtis 40 leaves hell (at least physically), which allows him to observe spaces outside of the bounds of his prison and a new contrast between the angelic and the demonic that exists within the Satanic mind: selfless versus selfish appreciation for beauty. When Satan surveys Earth for the first time, the narrator gives Satan perhaps the most tonally innocent and positive, or at least value-neutral, epic simile he receives in the entire poem:

[Satan] Looks down with wonder at the sudden view

Of all this world at once. As when a scout,

Through dark and desert ways with peril gone

All night; at last by break of cheerful dawn

Obtains the brow of some high-climbing hill,

Which to his eye discovers unaware

The goodly prospect of some foreign land

Which now the rising sun gilds with his beams. (3.542-48, 51)

This simile attributes an almost whimsical sense of wonderment and relief to Satan happening upon this vista, which is the sort of joyful appreciation one might wrongly attribute to a lapse in Satan’s fallen cynicism, likening this experience to what an angel would experience. However, even without the immediate explanation that Satan’s wonder was overshadowed with envy (3.553), understanding that the angelic experience is completely (almost annoyingly) pure, subtly allows the observant reader to understand that Satan actually benefits in some ways from his fallen state in this scene. The scout’s bliss in coming to this vista occurs because of the contrast with his perilous, night-time journey through a desert, just as Satan’s painful journey through Hell and chaos makes this view that much more satisfying and that satisfaction is something not to be had by Curtis 41 unfallen angels. However, as much as it may apparently benefit Satan, his fallen perspective is nevertheless ultimately a detriment to his experience as he can never understand what he appreciates as something separate from himself, and that obsession with the self causes Satan to only feel envy instead of any potential joy. The caveat of an overwhelming sense of envy recurs in Satan’s various bouts of artistic appreciation, in that everything he observes must inevitably, and immediately, return to how that observation affects him, whether it be how upset it makes him as in this case, or how useful that experience may be in the case of his appreciating Eve’s beauty.

In addition to his ability to leave hell, Satan also has a sexual experience with Sin, which is not only an exceptional case for a fallen angel, but also the moment when the blight of his self-centeredness comes to a head. Sin’s existence originates from Satan’s original sin; she is the physical manifestation of Satan’s own self-obsession and the rebellion which results from it, and by having sex with her, Satan is simultaneously having sex with his daughter and himself, in an act of incest as grotesque as it is odd. In her book, Sex and Sensibility, Jean H. Hagstrum calls this act the first “narcissistic sin”

(Hagstrum 43), which she credits to Satan’s irredeemable nature: “Satan’s primary sin is to beget a daughter upon himself; […] [he falls] into the class of the irredeemable because of [his] narcissism, a condition from which man is exempt because he was tempted from the outside” (Hangstrum 44). Here, Satan’s sexual experience parallels

Rafael’s “pure with pure,” but in actuality is one which is so deeply rooted in his selfishness that it actually becomes the ultimate act of sin; instead of two separate beings coming together for mutual pleasure, Satan copulates with what is essentially, if not literally, himself to the detriment of them both, as the act results in the birth of Death and Curtis 42 the almost immediate rape of Sin, further degrading the act into a destructive spiral of narcissistic sin.

Like Satan, Humbert has an awareness and appreciation for love, beauty, and sexuality but he too warps it with his own sense of narcissism. With the entire narrative save for the preface written from Humbert’s perspective and in his voice, his recognition and appreciation for many types of beauty are unavoidable. For instance, before giving a , some sort of greeting, or even his own name, Humbert Humbert chooses to begin his story with: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-Lee-

Ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” (Nabokov 9). On its face, this introduction and its proceeding lines inform the reader of Humbert’s obsession with this girl which runs so deeply that it brings him to wax poetic on her name alone, but it subtly, almost imperceptivity, reveals to the reader the main internal dichotomies which plague Humbert’s mind. First, “light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul” introduces an internal conflict wherein a sense of true affection, love, and happiness within Humbert is simultaneously subverted by his sexual desires and the taboo nature of their “relationship.” On the one hand, Humbert feels true, lasting, even haunting and self-destructive levels of love for Lolita, evidenced by him ending his narrative with a statement of purpose: “to […] make you live in the minds of later generations […] the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and

I may share, my Lolita” (Nabokov 309). This concluding sentiment paints his narrative as a celebration of her (and “them”) and shows that he truly saw this relationship as being rooted in more than simple lust.

On the other hand, the “fire of my loins” and the “my sin” clauses of these lines, Curtis 43 which represent the side of the relationship defined by Humbert’s pedophilia and lust for this young girl, subvert the poetic notion of Humbert seeing Lolita as more than merely a sexual object and remind the reader that despite the lovely things Humbert is saying, he is ultimately debauched and deranged. The lines following these contradictory pairs, are a linguistic breakdown of Humbert saying her name which again highlights these aforementioned dichotomies. On the surface, these lines represent the love, understanding, and command of language; they make out of the very act of saying a word. However, below the surface, these lines sexualize the spoken word, emphasizing the gradual movements of the tongue as it pronounces the name which is the “fire of [his] loins,” thereby reinforcing the idea that below the poetics of Humbert’s prose, there is that constant, unrelenting sexuality and perverseness.

Humbert’s debauched state falls even closer in parallel with Satan when the subject of this word play, Lolita, is understood for what she is: fictitious. Obviously,

Dolores Haze is a real girl otherwise the entire reality of the narrative would come into question, but “Lolita” as a concept is one which is mostly if not solely a production of

Humbert’s mind; just as Sin sprang from Satan’s mind, so did this nymphet spring from

Humbert’s. The first implication of this fanciful creation is implied just after the previous poet-linguistic exercise where Humbert waxes on the different ways in which Dolores is referred to:

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock.

She was Lola in slacks, she was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the

dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. (Nabokov 9)

Similar to his linguistic exercise, this second section serves both a facile and sub-textual Curtis 44 thematic purpose. On its face, this passage serves to further emphasize Humbert’s obsessive love for Dolores, showing the reader that while many people may call her many things and while she exists in many contexts, the name and context which punctuates all of these is “Lolita:” the name given to her when she is in Humbert’s arms.

Apparently romantic intentions aside, Humbert establishing this personal diminutive is the first hint to the reader that Lolita exists only to Humbert. In every other context,

Dolores, Lo, Lola, Dolly, are autonomic entities which can realistically be referred to by these titles by any observer (e.g. Charlotte Haze would know Lo), but the only context which contains the possessive tense, “my arms” is the final one, and in that way “Lolita” only exists so far as she belongs to Humbert, reaffirmed by the fact that only he refers to her by this name, and he dedicates the novel, or “the only immortality [they] may share,” to this version of her.

Further, the first-person narrative voice itself perpetuates the fictitious nature of

Lolita by giving her actions and words an unsettlingly adult and self-reflective tone which reads more as the embodiment of Humbert’s lust and conscience, exemplified by lines such as the one delivered by Lolita the day after the first time Humbert rapes her when she says, smiling: “You chump […] [y]ou revolting creature. I was a daisy-fresh girl, and look what you’ve done to me. I ought to call the police and tell them you raped me. Oh, you dirty, dirty, old man.” (Nabokov 141). While not completely out of the realm of possibility, it is extremely unlikely that a twelve-year-old girl who was just kidnapped and raped by a man she met mere months ago would say something so brash. However, it is much more likely that Humbert would project his own voice onto Lo in this moment, and through that voice express his own fears and feeling of self-loathing for what he has Curtis 45 done. Thus, Humbert does not simply give Dolores Haze an affectionate diminutive, he christens a separate and unique being that only he sees in this young girl, a “Lolita” who exists only in his arms and in his perverted mind.

Humbert raping Lolita is in many ways an act of narcissistic sin paralleling

Satan’s sexual encounter with Sin, and Humbert’s inescapable ignorance to this concept is the core and cause of his, and his parallel’s, disease. Soon after Humbert rapes Lolita for the first time, he says of his sexual experience: “The beastly and beautiful merged at one point, and it is that borderline I would like to fix, and I feel I fail to do so utterly.

Why?” (Nabokov 135). Within Humbert’s warped perception of the world, the answer to this question lies either in external blame or in more questions. However, if viewed through the lens of his diabolical counterpart, the answer lies mere lines previous to these. Just before this rhetorical question, Humbert states—referring to his descriptions of sex with Lolita as “animality” which he is “not concerned with […] at all” (Nabokov

134) and afterward as a mural drawn by him (Nabokov 134-35)—that he is “trying to describe these things not to relive them in [his] present boundless misery, but to sort out the portion of hell and the portion of heaven in that strange, awful, maddening world— nymphet love” (Nabokov 135). The issue that Humbert faces, but fails to see in his attempt to sort out these two portions of his experience is that only the “portion of hell” or “the beastly,” exists outside of his own mind. The other half, “the portion of heaven” or “the beautiful,” only exists insofar as what is idealized, rationalized, or simply physically pleasurable to Humbert in this experience, and at most can only exist beyond him in those as deranged as him or those who are temporarily fooled or swooned by his artistic euphemisms of a “fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a Curtis 46 last dab of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child” (Nabokov 135).

Beyond that, these images are simply facile attempts to literally paint over what is truly happening here, which is the premeditated rape of a young girl by an older man. This type of sexual perversion and the attempt to equate it with a purer counter-part runs in direct parallel with what occurs in Paradise Lost, but instead of Satan begetting Sin and having sex with both himself and his daughter, a corruption of Rafael’s “pure with pure” to “self with self,” Humbert begets Lolita and rapes himself, his (metaphorical and by marriage step-) daughter, and the real little girl, Dolores. Thus, this act leaves Humbert confused as to why he cannot find how the beauty of this scene mixes with the bestial nature of sex but that is simply because any beauty derived from such a grotesque act exists and can only exist in his mind.

Oblivious to the level of ignorance which results from his disease, Humbert continues in his confusion, further solidifying his position as a sexual parallel to Satan.

Humbert says after attempting to justify his raping Lolita with historical accounts and pseudo-science he finds in a prison magazine that he is “nature’s faithful hound. Why then this horror that I cannot shake off?” (Nabokov 135) Again, Humbert’s confusion is easily solved after understanding his Satanic roots. Returning to Hagstrum, Satan’s irredeemable nature comes from “beget[ting] a daughter upon himself; […] [he falls] into the class of the irredeemable because of [his] narcissism, a condition from which man is exempt because he was tempted from the outside” (Hangstrum 44). Likewise, Humbert’s irredeemable nature comes from begetting Lolita and raping her, an act which by most moral social frameworks is irredeemable on its face, but the rape itself would not occur were it not for Humbert creating “Lolita” to begin with. Further, Humbert’s inability to Curtis 47 see that what he is doing is wrong without attempting to rationalize it stems from the fact that he cannot see beyond himself. His nymphet, Lolita, is a projection of his own issues which he tries to justify as external: “it was she who seduced me” (Nabokov 132).

However, this act is an internal, self-made sin, and that is why he cannot find that borderline and why he cannot shake off this horror; there is no good in what he has done and every bit of evil in it was done by him and him alone.

In conclusion, both Milton’s Satan and Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert share a proclivity for the beauty around them, but ultimately cannot seem to recognize or respect the existence or importance of things as they exist outside of or unrelated to themselves.

With both of these characters, there is always an underlying, warped reality of their interactions with the world such as with Humbert’s beautiful prose which he uses to mask his perversion, or demonic songs which sound like their angelic counterparts, but exist in an inharmonious choir of self-aggrandizement. This pattern of corruption hidden under a pure façade finds its pinnacle in the central sexual acts of each character’s respective narrative, wherein both participate in an act of incest with their self-begotten daughters, consummating their debauched state, solidifying their marriage to their own narcissism, and finally and irredeemably damning them both to emotional prisons that complement their physical ones. Curtis 48

Part IV: The Rapacious

Both Paradise Lost and Lolita establish a fatalist trajectory for their respective main characters by beginning each narrative with an initial traumatic experience for their main characters as well as a future, final defeat for them. The deceptive, lustful, and destructive qualities of both Milton’s Satan and Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert originate, in general terms, from a desire for reparations for these traumatic events. Satan feels deeply betrayed and hopeless after his defeat at the hands of God and lashes out in vengeful rage both in an attempt to satisfy the agonizing pains of his internal hell, as well as in an attempt to make God somehow feel, even in the slightest way, a loss similar to that which Satan suffers. Similarly, Humbert pursues Lolita in an attempt to fill the sexual and romantic void left by the loss of his childhood love, Annabel, and defensively and deceptively attempts to relate this love to the reader by the careful construction of his narrative. Paradise Lost’s foreshadowing is established by the Narrator who mentions

“man’s first disobedience, and the fruit / of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all our woe, / with loss of Eden, till one greater Man /

Restore us, and regain the blissful seat” (1.1-5). This “one greater man” is The Son, or

Christ, who, in Christian doctrine, comes to earth and “restore[s]” man through crucifixion and then a second and final time during the events of Revelation. Similarly,

Lolita’s foreshadowing is found in the forward from John Ray Jr. wherein he reveals that

“Humbert Humbert, [the] author, has died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on

November 16, 1952” (Nabokov 3). Beginning and ending each narrative with failure both founds and punctuates the character arcs of both Humbert and Satan with defeat, thereby raising the question: why is this fatal and pain-ridden life reserved for them? In short, it is Curtis 49 both characters’ unshakable ego-centrism that not only causes their initial trauma but also plagues their future attempts at reparations to the point where they are ultimately doomed to only bury themselves deeper.

Satan’s initial traumatic experience is the sudden, painful realization that God is, in fact, omnipotent and the subsequent introduction of pain followed by his and his army’s defeat and damnation to Hell. Satan initially begins his rebellion under the pride- fueled suspicion of God’s true omnipotence, leading him and his army to believe that their “own right hand / Shall teach [them] highest deeds, by proof to try / who is our equal” (5.864-66), with the tacit assumption that they are more powerful than the forces loyal to God. The first of two key flaws in this reasoning is that it paradoxically assumes that the lack of empirical evidence to God’s omnipotence is enough to bolster their faith in him not being omnipotent, but not enough to bolster their faith in the factualness of his omnipotence. In other words: why assume from lack of evidence that God is not all powerful when it is just as likely that he is, and then wager one’s stake in paradise based off of that assumption? The second flaw is that the aforementioned assumption comes from a group ignorant to ideas of loss or pain, and by not acknowledging that ignorance, they fail to see the true extent of the risk they are taking in their rebellion. This second flaw is soon brought to light when God curses the rebels with pain and Satan finds himself “Gnashing for anguish, and despite, and shame, / To find himself not matchless

[…] so far beneath / His confidence equal to God in power” (6.340-43). Thus, with the introduction of pain, Satan and his armies find themselves humbled not only in the realization that they are lesser than God, but also in the recognition of the privilege in which they lived for so long and its role in their fatal arrogance. Further, after introducing Curtis 50 them to pain and thereby removing their privileged state of being, God fittingly removes them from their privileged environment by permanently condemning Satan and his crew to a realm defined by pain.

Satan, feeling wounded (both physically and emotionally), betrayed, and hopeless in his new, fallen state, seeks reparation through vengeance in the hope to wound God vicariously by wounding man. The irredeemable nature of Satan’s damnation places him and his crew in a unique and slightly paradoxical position ideologically, as he finds himself burning in a lake of fire “confounded though immortal. But his doom / Reserved him to more wrath; for now the thought / Both of lost happiness and lasting pain /

Torments him” (1.53-56). Being imprisoned and tortured (confounded), but with no real threat of death (immortal) or redemption (doom), strips any penitent nature of his punishment and therefore justifies, in his own mind, the wrath Satan feels after his fall.

Mammon brings up this exact dilemma in the infernal council’s discussions on what the next step should be for the defeated rebels and then applies the paradox in conjunction with God’s now empirical omnipotence to settle upon the decision that “If then [God’s] providence / Out of our evil seek to bring forth good, / Our labor must be to pervert that end / And out of good still to find means of evil / Which oft times may succeed, so as perhaps / Shall grieve him (1.162-67). Thus, if God is all powerful, and if their torment is all-encompassing and eternal but never fatal, then it follows that penitence should be disregarded at futile and undesired. Instead, a strategy to harm God indirectly by destroying his less powerful creations and trying to find some pleasure in destruction is the ideal strategy “[f]or only in destroying [Satan finds] ease / To [his] relentless thoughts” (9.129-30). Curtis 51

Satan’s successful corruption of man is only a titular victory, as it not only fails to repair his wound, but also leaves him in an even worse state than before. On the surface,

Satan does do all that he seeks out to do. By seducing Eve to disobey God, he subverts

God’s creation and puts an end to humanity’s paradise on Earth after which he returns to

Hell feeling victorious: “What remains, ye Gods, / But up, and enter now into full bliss?”

(10.502-03). However, this victory is short-lived before being interrupted by God cursing all of Hell’s inhabitants to the form of starving, hissing, serpents who have full access to the once forbidden fruit that now mockingly turns to ash in their mouths “to dash their pride, and joy, for man seduced” (10. 577). This reminder of God’s strength is a new and more specific punishment for Satan and his armies and only the beginning of a much larger plan which intends to completely devalue Satan’s “success” in the poem. This plan is foreshadowed in Book One:

[T]he will

And high permission of all-ruling Heaven

Left [Satan] at large to his own dark designs,

That with reiterated crimes he might

Heap on himself damnation, while he sought

Evil to others, and enrag’d might see

How all his malice serv’d but to bring forth

Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shown

On Man by him seduc’d, but on himself

Treble confusion, wrath, and vengeance pour’d. (1.211-20)

Knowing, through this description, that all of Satan’s actions no matter their evil aims Curtis 52 ultimately contribute to an eventual much greater good as well as additional suffering upon himself makes every success from Satan’s escape from the lake of fire to the construction of Pandemonium, the journey through Chaos, and eventually the seduction of man, a complete farce in the larger schemes of the universe. Satan, in all of his pride and obstinacy, seeks reparation for his pain only to act unknowingly to the benefit of his enemy and to the detriment of himself. The futileness of his revenge is then reflected in the serpent curse: God mocks Satan’s false victory by forcing him to assume the lesser form of a serpent and then mocks Satan’s futility by paralleling Satan’s emotional hunger

(i.e. vengeance) with physical hunger and further paralleling his ultimately hopeless attempt to satisfy that hunger (i.e. “ruining” man) by providing inedible fruit.

Humbert’s initial traumatic experience is the sudden, painful loss of his childhood love, Annabel. As a child, Humbert enjoyed a relatively normal childhood and meeting

Annabel begins a childhood love affair containing most of the aspects of an average coming of age tale: a family vacation, parental obstacles, sexual awakening, etc.

However, Humbert’s experience within this narrative cliché is warped from a sexual awaking to a sexual stunting, since that summer is remembered by him as a series of unbearable frustrations and shortcomings capped by tragedy. This frustration and tragedy culminates on the “the shock of Annabel’s death [which] consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle” (14). Drawing parallels to

Satan’s experience, this “obstacle,” is similar to Satan’s introduction to pain in that instead of Humbert’s love bringing a sexual maturation into his life, it introduces to his otherwise innocent mind a sense of loss and regret which traps him in sexual immaturity.

Importantly, Humbert describes his loss of Annabel as leaving “poison […] in the Curtis 53 wound” (18), “consum[ption] by a hell furnace” (18), an “ache,” and a “spell” (15), which all point to feelings not simply loss, pain, and yearning, but also ideas of these feelings being something inflicted on him by some external force, which in his particular case are the social structures that prompted his initial childhood frustrations and the hard- to-grasp ideas of fate which led to Annabel’s untimely death. Viewing himself thus wounded, one logical path for him to take would be to attempt to repair this wound, and to do so by forgoing the social structure which he views as having caused it.

Feeling emotionally and sexually wounded by this childhood loss, Humbert seeks reparation through pedophilic pursuits that reach their peak in his discovery of Dolores

Haze. Humbert sees his wounds as something which happened to him via external forces and therefore as something which can be repaired by interaction with the external (i.e. looking outward for reparation instead of inward). Jacqueline Hamrit touches on this idea of Humbert’s insistence on externalizing his reparation in her “Trauma and Free

Will in Lolita,” where she claims that “he refuses to speak about the traumatic event, denying it, refraining from suffering and thereby transforming his trauma into perversion” (Hamrit 142). “Suffering” in the sense that she is using it here can be understood as seeking internal reparation through reflection, penitence, etc. Both Satan and Humbert share a refusal to tolerate internal reparation as a viable option for overcoming their wounds, and instead choose to lash out through external repartition.

Similar to Satan, Humbert works to relieve his pain by expressing that which pains him, and thereby fights his pedophilic desires by acting upon them in the manner that Satan does with his destructive and vengeful desires. Humbert admits this strategy somewhat directly when he says, “the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside Curtis 54 limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since —until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another” (15). Thus, Humbert does not seek to try to grow from his suffering as Hamrit would suggest. Instead, he seeks to act (instead of reflect) upon that suffering and project it onto someone else, namely Lolita.

Since Humbert’s narrative is a reflection on past events, he is able to lament on how the signs of his eventual downfall and the suffering that comes with it were apparent even while he still had Lolita with him. While Lolita apparently satisfies Humbert’s desires left in the wake of Annabel, she is ultimately inadequate as the Humbert constructs around her crumbles under the weight of reality (i.e. her humanity) and as that fantasy crumples, Humbert experiences his own version of Paradise Lost’s narrator foreshadowing the “treble confusion, wrath, and vengeance [to be] pour’d” (1.220) back upon Satan through his pursuit of reparation. Humbert’s version of this passage comes when he admits that he “should have known (by the signs made to [him] by something in

Lolita—the real child Lolita or some haggard angel behind her back) that nothing but pain and horror would result from the expected rapture. Oh winged gentlemen of the jury!” (125). In addition to foreshadowing, this sentiment also describes who Lolita is to

Humbert, who he sees himself as, and Humbert’s view of his story as one of failed vengeance likening to the diabolic. First and foremost, this passage expresses more concisely than perhaps any other moment in the novel the two-fold role that Lolita plays as both Eve and Sin. “The real child Lolita” points to the child which Humbert pursues, kidnaps, and corrupts, much like what Eve is to Satan: an innocent and pure object of his vengeance and/or projection of his pain. “Some haggard angel on [Lolita’s] back” refers to the nymphet which manifests itself in Humbert’s image of the girls he is attracted to. Curtis 55

As Humbert points out, these girls are demonic in nature, hence the imagery of a fallen,

“haggard,” angel, and these demons are not apparent until one experiences a trauma similar his, but once apparent, they draw in and coerce their traumatized victim into doing wrong. Lolita the nymphet thus functions similarly to how Sin does with Satan; she is a pseudo-demonic incarnation of Humbert’s own design and the catalyst for much of his suffering. Second, Humbert reiterates “Oh winged gentlemen of the jury!” which refers to his dual vision of himself as both on trial in the sense that Edgar Allan Poe’s own Annabel Lee and her lover are on trial in their titular poem (a jealous jury condemning the former to death), and his view of himself as a rapacious monster on trial for his crimes against a little girl (an angelic jury judging a demon’s crimes against man).

Unpacking these subtle references, which hint at the duality of Humbert’s perception of both Lolita and himself, sets the stage for the just deserts given to Humbert: the final and long-foreshadowed end which marks perhaps the most important part of his, and his diabolical counter-part’s narratives.

The “pain and horror” that Humbert experiences parallel those horrors that Satan and his crew witness after the successful temptation of Eve. First, Lolita does not reciprocate his love for her like Annabel once did, thus making their relationship constantly inharmonious and emotionally abrasive. Humbert expresses this inadequacy in the onset of his narrative, when he expounds in reference to Annabel’s love for him: “Oh,

Lolita, had you loved me thus!” (14), which parallels the lack of any true satisfaction felt by Satan’s similar endeavors to lash back at God; the hell furnace still burns regardless.

Second, Humbert, like Satan, is forced to witness the “Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shown / On Man by him seduc’d,” (1.218-19) when he sees not only Lolita pregnant with Curtis 56

Richard Schiller’s child, but also when, just before he turns himself into the police, he stops to hear a distant group of children playing and realizes “that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord” (308). Saying that the poignant realization is “the absence of her voice from that concord” is similar as saying that he, at least for a moment, realizes that what he has done is heinous, not necessarily in a repenting way, but in a way in which he is harmed by knowing what he has unrepentantly scarred someone he loves. Lastly, Humbert receives, in his own way, a curse similar to God’s snake curse put upon Satan “to dash their pride, and joy, for man seduced” (10. 577). Instead of becoming a snake and fruitlessly reliving the temptation of Eve, Humbert rots in a cell, fruitlessly and painfully reliving his time with Lolita. His true suffering in this sense in seen through one of the most jarring tonal breaks in the novel, where for a moment the reader witnesses

Humbert’s real state of mind: “The daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing […] Don’t think I can go on. Heart, Head—everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita,

Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat until the page is full, printer” (109).

He suffers physically and emotionally in his “tomb” where the only thing he can think of is all that he has lost and all the suffering he has spread in his selfish attempts to repair that loss, and hopelessly repeats those memories just as he hopelessly repeats the name

“Lolita.”

The initial trauma and eventual failure of both Satan and Humbert to repair the damage done to them, stems from the ego-centrism which pervades both the trauma itself and their strategy toward repairing it. In A Preface to Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis describes what defines Satan is at his core, and one of the more poignant conclusions he comes to is Curtis 57 that among Satan’s primary predicaments is his obnoxious and eventually simply boring self-centeredness:

Satan has been in the Heaven of Heavens and in the abyss of Hell, and

surveyed all that lies between them, and in that whole immensity has

found only one thing that interests Satan. […] Satan's monomaniac

concern with himself and his supposed rights and wrongs is a necessity of

the Satanic predicament. (Lewis 102)

The ingratitude, the ignorance, and lack of faith that Satan wields throughout all of his defeats in the poem can be traced back to his inescapable ego-centrism. However, this concern with only himself is also central to the vindictiveness Satan feels when he is punished by God. He is enraged when he is made second to Christ because it conflicts with his Satan-centric universe; he turns to wrath and rage when he is defeated by God; he absurdly gloats after his temptation of Eve as if he has really tricked God even though

God proved his omnipotence when he defeated Satan in the war for Heaven, and during all of these missteps and their consequences, Satan refuses to look at the scope of the universe in which he lives to see if perhaps it is more complex beyond simply his own importance in it. Similarly, Humbert’s obsession with young girls, even if his excuse of childhood trauma is to be believed, falls apart when people such as Jacqueline Hamrit in her essay “Trauma and Free Will in Lolita,” point out that “by preferring to make Lolita suffer instead of suffering himself, he has chosen evil” (Hamrit 143). Therefore, both

Satan and Humbert initially fail and continue to fail until their ultimate destruction at the end of fruitless and sad lives, because they live narcissistically obsessed with their own wounds and their own feelings of what is owed to them, which blinds them to both their Curtis 58 true places in the world and their responsibility therein. Whether that responsibility is to trust in God, to refrain from their sexual urges, or simply to understand when it is time to suffer for what they have done, they fail to fulfill those responsibilities and thus only bury themselves deeper.

Curtis 59

Conclusion

In Paradise Lost, Milton constructs Satan on the foundation of four main tenets:

The Con-Man, The Abject, The Debauched, and The Rapacious. The first two of these tenets define the range that Satan operates in as a destructive force in the poem. Briefly,

Satan as “The Con-Man,” spreads chaos and destruction through classical rhetorical and oratory skills. Further, Satan as “The Abject” complicates his destructive tendencies by contextualizing that destruction within more disruptive motives (e.g. his desire to corrupt man as an affront to God’s plans, as opposed to a mere sadistic desire to destroy man).

The latter two tenets define the range in which Satan operates as a self-destructive force, wherein Satan’s destructive machinations as a rhetorician and abject actor, in conjunction with corrupt affinities for empiricism, sexuality, and above all else the self, lead him to not only act in ways which are against the best interests of others in the poem but also against his own best interests, because his actions are both the catalyst for his initial hardship in the poem as well as the reasons for his eventual (and long-foreseen) downfall.

On its face, the characterization of Satan in this thesis may be merely a formal description of the character and his operation solely in the context of the poem. However, this four-point characterization, while being in itself a useful descriptive and organizational device, serves a broader purpose as a comparative device when contextualized by Satan’s influence in literature and other media following the publication of Paradise Lost. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita exemplifies this broader application through Humbert Humbert, who, I argue, is similarly founded in the same four tenets as Satan. Applying the same analysis as Satan to Humbert both reinforces the original characterization as something beyond that of mere contrivance, as well as Curtis 60 establishing a method by which one can replicate this analysis with any character in any media after Paradise Lost in order to determine similarity, dissimilarity, or even inspiration, whether intentional or not. In short, the characterization defined in this thesis provides a “Satanic lens” through which to criticize various media.

The application for such a lens has broad implications. For instance, in this thesis,

I use this lens first to defend my assertion of its existence, but second, and more importantly, as a unique approach to characterizing Humbert, his function in Lolita, and the at times idiosyncratic nature of his behavior in the novel and his reception by readers.

Naturally, applying any lens which is both unique and methodological has critical and organizational benefits as it classifies which characters and works do or do not fit into the subject matter defined by the lens, and by through that classification comparative and critical analyses such as those in this thesis can be made. In other words, reading contemporary and non-contemporary media through the lens defined in this thesis can organize characters which are blatantly signified as “satanic” into classifications of

Miltonic or Non-Miltonic. Further, approaching characters who most would not consider to be satanic on their face with this lens could show them to be perhaps more satanic than first thought. Lastly, those classifications can then be used as a vehicle through which to criticize a given character or work.

In conjunction with the knowledge gained about characters by reading them through a satanic lens, there is also much to be learned about Satan himself through these interpretations. For instance, in this thesis, the mere act of comparing Satan to Humbert evokes thought about the construction of these characters in both directions—not just how Humbert is like Satan, but how Satan is like Humbert. By defining Satan in these Curtis 61 broad categories and then seeking out and exploring the various constructions built upon this foundation, much is revealed about the implications of the foundation itself. For instance, if Satan’s foundational tenets can be used to construct a pedophile such as

Humbert, what does this say about Satan’s character and his basic motivations and desires? This type of questioning is essential to the applicability of a lens such as the one established above.

In conclusion, Paradise Lost establishes a complex, and intriguing character in

Satan. So intriguing, in fact, that this work largely redefines what Satan is in a literary context. Since its publication, there have been countless interpretations both critically and literarily, of who Satan is and what exactly his purpose is in Milton’s poem. However complicated, Satan can be defined; once defined, that definition can be applied to show how, exactly, his influence lives on in contemporary media. One such incarnation of this trope established by Milton is Humbert Humbert from Nabokov’s Lolita, who shares all of Satan’s core tenets, but utilizes them in a distinct way. However, the mere characterization of Milton’s Satan is not the purpose of this thesis, nor is the mere comparison of Satan to Humbert. The true importance of my characterization of Satan and the methodological use of that characterization to compare Satan and Humbert is to coin and exemplify a unique, and until now grossly underutilized, satanic lens through which to find, refute, confirm, or otherwise define the satanic nature of characters in a post-Miltonic world.

Curtis 62

Bibliography

Aristotle. Rhetoric. Dover Thrift Ed. Dover Publications, Inc., Mineola New York, 2004.

Belsey, Catherine. John Milton: Language, Gender, Power. Basil Blackwell, 1988.

Benson, Sean. "Augustinian Evil and Moral Good in Lolita." Renascence: Essays on Values

in Literature, no.4, 2012, p.353. EBSCOhost,

www.library.ohio.edu/ezpauth/redir/athens.php?http%3a%2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.

com%2flogin.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26db%3dedsglr%26AN%3dedsgcl.295171

086%26site%3deds-live%26scope%3dsite.

Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton University Press, 1993.

Cable, Lana. Carnal Rhetoric. Duke University Press, 1995.

Campbell, Gordon, and Thomas N Corns. John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought. Oxford

University Press, 2010.

Chia-Rousseau, Maud. "Lolita and Mimetic Desire." Contagion: Journal of Violence,

Mimesis & Culture, vol.23, Sept. 2016, pp.137-154. EBSCOhost,

www.library.ohio.edu/ezpauth/redir/athens.php?http%3a%2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.

com%2flogin.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26db%3dhlh%26AN%3d118423396%26si

te%3deds-live%26scope%3dsite

Empson, William. Milton’s God. 1961. Greenwood Press, Inc., Westport CT, 1978.

Fish, Stanley. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. 2nd Ed. Harvard University

Press, Cambridge MA, 1997

Fish, Stanley. Winning Arguments. HarperCollins, New York NY, 2016

Forsyth, Neil. John Milton: A Biography. Lion Hudson, 2009. Curtis 63

Frye, Roland Mushat. God, Man, and Satan. Pinceton University Press, Princeston NJ,

1960.

Gregerson, Linda. The Reformation of the Subject. Cambridge University Press, New York,

1995.

Hagstrum, Jean H. Sex and Sensibility. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980.

Hamrit, Jacqueline. "Trauma and Free Will in Lolita." Latch: A Journal for the Study of the

Literary Artifacts in Theory, Culture or History, vol. 2, Jan. 2009, pp. 136-145.

EBSCOhost,www.library.ohio.edu/ezpauth/redir/athens.php?http%3a%2f%2fsear

ch.ebscohost.com%2flogin.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26db%3dhlh%26AN%3d503

75726%26site%3deds-live%26scope%3dsite.

Kahn, Victoria. Machiavellian Rhetoric. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1994.

Knoppers, Laura L. “Death’s Grin, or Monstrous Satisfaction in Paradise Lost and

Frankenstein.”

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez,

Columbia University Press, 1982.

Lewis, C. S. A Preface To Paradise Lost. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961.

Link, Christopher A. “Recourse to Eden: Tracing the Roots of Nabokov’s Academic

Themes.” Nabokov Studies 12 (2009/2011), pp. 63-127.

Maggi, Armando. Satan’s Rhetoric. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2001.

Marcus, Amit. “The Self-Deceptive and the Other-Deceptive Narrating Character: The

Case of Lolita.” Style: Volume 39, No. 2, Summer 2005, pp. 187-205

Milton, John. Paradise Lost: The Biblically Annotated Edition. Stallard, Matthew, ed.

Macon: Mercer University Press, 2011. Curtis 64

Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. Vintage, 1989.

Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated. Ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. New

York: Vintage, 1991.

Pagels, Elaine. The Origin of Satan. Vintage Books, New York, NY, 1996.

Pallister, William. Between Worlds: The Rhetorical Universe of Paradise Lost. University

of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2008.

Schuman, Samuel. “’I have only words to play with:’ Taboo and Tradition in Nabokov’s

Lolita” Bloom’s Literary Themes: The Taboo, edited by Harold Bloom and Black

Hobby, Infobase Publishing, 2010.

Shoaf, R.A. Milton: Poet of Duality. Yale University Press, London, 1985.

Shore, Daniel. Milton and the Art of Rhetoric. Cambridge University Press, New York,

2012.

Werblowsky, R. J. Zwi Lucifer and Prometheus: A Study of Milton's Satan. Rouledge &

Kegan Paul, Braodway House, London, 1952.

Zimmerman Shari A. “From Insufficiency to Imaginary Mastery: The Illusory Resolve of

the Miltonic Subject.” Essays in Literature, pp. 21-41.