But there is also a hypocrisy within the narrative itself, in the succulent way in which the child’s sexuality is presented. It is not so much that the reader is drawn helplessly into the paedophile’s obsession; rather, that obsession is depicted in the conventional language of voluptuousness, ’suede-like fissures’ (whatever that means), ’shapely thighs’ and all.
The narrative is written in the third person and therefore cannot retain its objectivity when undressing the little girl, so that the paedophile’s idea of the little girl’s irresistibility is presented as a universal truth that is obviously apparent at the same time as it is castigated as ’unnatural. ’
As a result, the paedophile’s desire starts to seem as feasible as the next man’s, and the moral underpinning of the story falls away, leaving, surely unintentionally, only the infrastructure of pornography.
In Lolita, Nabokov solves the technical problem of the specious objectivity of the third person narrative by telling the story in the person of Humbert Humbert, and Humbert Humbert can constantly remind the reader of the unsanctified nature of his desires.
The nameless paedophile of The Enchanter meets his end in the soiled raincoat characteristic of the habitué of dirty bookshops; but, of course, I am not assuming that it was indeed Nabokov’s intention to write a dirty book, even if the masturbators consummation is written in such a way that it looks as if he is having his titillatory cake and eating it. Indeed, I would not put it past Nabokov to be parodying a dirty book, though Paris in the winter of 1939 seems an odd place to play this game.
