Red and Blue in Lolita

(I wrote this essay for my American Novel class at Harvard in 2018. While it’s not super important, it is interesting, and my TF said it was the best essay she’d ever received in that class.)

Vladimir Nabokov’s arresting novel Lolita agitated waves of controversy when it appeared in America in 1958, after years of difficulty convincing publishers to accept the book’s disturbing description of child molestation and manipulation from the point of view of a mad, voracious pedophile named Humbert Humbert. Since that time, the book has lost little of its shock value, as the plot’s content is meant to be troubling and sickening. However, the book’s literary esteem, like Humbert sitting with Lolita on the Haze couch, has swollen higher and higher over the years. People appreciate the artistic value of seeing into such an unsettling consciousness. Also, the author displays an absolute mastery of his adopted English language through his intricate and impish wordplay. Perhaps most importantly, the book is now seen as one of the highest achievements in literary aestheticism, thanks to Nabokov’s piercingly microscopic aesthetic eye. Aestheticism holds experiential beauty as the highest value of art, a value often summed by the phrase “art for art’s sake.” Humbert naturally inherits Nabokov’s keen eye, unearthing unique beauty from any real thing, distracting us from consequential plot developments by calling our attention to the aesthetics of a fire hydrant or golden midges, making the real purpose of the book clear— immortality through art and the capturing of ephemeral beauty. For Humbert, the object of his art and his heart is Lolita herself, whose beauty he seeks to suspend eternally in cool amber. Nabokov’s immortal creation is the entire book, which is overflowing with poignant, piquant, and poetic moments of beauty captured in the indelible amber of words. 

Essential to Nabokov’s aestheticism is color. Color enlivens our visual consciousness, our most important sensory existence. Nabokov absolutely drenches Lolita in color, and the discerning reader will quickly realize that almost no page of this book can be turned without getting some pigment on their fingers. In particular, the novel is saturated through with the colors red and blue. This essay will explore the application and interaction of these colors throughout Lolita, and endeavor to explain the value of their aesthetic tinting of the novel in a way that remains faithful to the author.

I will begin with a discussion of Nabokov himself as an artist and in relation to this book. As I embark on a discussion of color in Lolita, I would be remiss to neglect the author’s own words on this very subject. In his “Note about Symbols and Colors re ‘Annotated Lolita’” Nabokov writes: “There exist novelists and poets, and ecclesiastic writers, who deliberately use color terms, or numbers, in a strictly symbolic sense. The type of writer I am, half-painter, half-naturalist, finds the use of symbols hateful because it substitutes a dead general idea for a live specific impression…When the intellect limits itself to the general notion, or primitive notion, of a certain color it deprives the senses of its shades.” Nabokov here makes clear his distaste for strict symbolic readings of his works. The reader would be misreading Lolita if they were to make a rigid category out of any color, an act which substitutes a hollow generalization for something beautiful that lives, moves, feels, and changes, something inherently sensory and experiential. By ascribing a set objective “meaning” to a certain color, the reader tragically loses the real, present, subjective meaning of the image.

Does this mean we cannot read any meaning into the novel’s tints? I believe we can, as long as that meaning is contingent and impressionist rather than constant and realist. Nabokov is a soi disant “half-painter,” a just description given the visualizable beauty of the various images and scenic descriptions filling the novel. However, this painterly aspect goes even deeper than one might think. While researching this nagging idea of color in Lolita, I discovered that Nabokov is a famous synesthete. Synesthesia is a general classification of sensory phenomena wherein people experience certain, seemingly unconnected stimulations of one sense in association with another sense due to proximal “cross-wired” brain connections. One of the most common is grapheme-color synesthesia, where people perceive letters, numbers, and words as having specific color associations. Nabokov has this form of synesthesia and was vocal about its strong impact on his life and art. This impact is understandable. Many synesthetes report pleasure at certain alignments of impressions; for example, a synesthete who senses a sharp yellow in the letter “s” would squeal with satisfaction at the alliteration in sunny sentences such as this, especially if her blonde friend Sally Soros is the subject of said sentence. It’s not that s or yellow “mean something,” it’s that they feel somethings. I contend that this sensory cross-wiring in the mind of an artist such as Nabokov, an artist of words and an artist of images, inevitably results in contingent meanings and feelings associated with colors in a literary work, especially a work of words as saturated with color as this one. Of course, we must not read “dead general ideas” into these colors, but rather try to feel connections between various “live specific impressions.”

We can start with the most obvious color, which is red. We must tread carefully here; after warning readers against prescribed color symbolism, Nabokov proceeded to specifically say that “I am therefore puzzled and distressed by the significance you lend to the general idea of “red” in my book…I think your students, your readers, should be taught to see things, to discriminate between visual shades as the author does, and not to lump them under such arbitrary labels as “red” (using it, moreover, as a sexual symbol, though actually the dominant shades in males are mauve-to bright blue, in certain monkeys.)” We will get to the blue of those monkey penises later; for now, we will explore the general impressions, feelings, and trends associated with shades of red in Lolita. Despite Nabokov’s protest against the stiff equation “red = sex”, there is undoubtedly a general association in the novel between shades of red and Humbert’s feelings of incensed passion, lusty stings, licks of hot desire or anger, infantilization, and of course his perception of Lolita, the “fire of his loins.” The stronger, sharper reds frequently appear around objects of Humbert’s sexual desire: romantic red candles in the Haze house, Lolita’s tantalizing scarlet lips, the blood-red armchair she sits in at the hotel (138), etc. When he first ejaculates (unbeknownst to Lolita) on the Haze couch, she is eating an “Eden-red apple.” Humbert intercepts the apple, and they play-fight over it— when she bites it, Humbert’s “heart was like snow under crimson skin” (58). Desire, passion, heat, blood rushing, heart melting; red tends to evoke these feelings in the novel, although of course in such a painterly novel the use of red itself does not automatically mean these connotations. They simply tend to reappear and raise similar impressions. For example, when Humbert picks up Lolita from camp after he becomes her sole owner, she appears in a dress “with a pattern of little red apples…” over legs “with scratches like tiny dotted lines of coagulated rubies” (111). Again she is the forbidden fruit. It is worth noting that Lolita herself is often dressed in red according to Humbert’s unreliable point of view; it could be that the “red” Lolita is more his projection onto her, hence its appearance on her external clothing, while her grey eyes represent the real Dolly. Pink has a slightly different shade of connotations for Humbert. When pink refers to Lolita or any other girl, it is usually cute, attractive, often “rosy.” Interestingly, however, when Humbert uses pink in association with boys, it is almost always negative. Their pinkness possibly threatens Humbert and he looks down on them, infantilizing them negatively as opposed to the positive pinkness of rosy nymphets. Pink men are gross, fat, lusty, and often “piggy” such as when Humbert describes the Enchanted Hunters employees as “pink and bald” and “two pink pigs” (118).

The color blue, my favorite color, stuck out to me like a sore thumb throughout the book, especially in the second half when it became much more glaringly frequent. My first impressions of blue associated it with hazy dreams and memories, blue appearing when Humbert tried to reach back into the fog of the past. Phrases like “a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream” (153), “a hazy blue view” (157), and “bluish beauties never attainable” (156) began this trend in the second half. This feeling of unattainability also radiates blue in the novel. As Humbert gropes through hazy nostalgia, he finds only melancholy blues. In fact, according to the book Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Painting by Gerard de Vries, Nabokov previously used blue in this sad, absent, longing way in his first english novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, so there is precedent for this coloring effect. The melancholic vibe of blue in Lolita is also that of loss, the pain of memory, a loved one’s absence. It is almost certainly no coincidence that, when Humbert finally loses his beloved Lolita from the hospital in Elphinstone, she was under the care of one Dr. Blue. The ache of blue has yet another dimension— let’s return to those blue monkey penises mentioned previously. Blue appears in the novel in the throbbing anticipation of a climax of (red) desire, fitting nicely with the common phrase “blue balls” used to describe the dull tight pain of unfulfilled male orgasm, a general feeling that Humbert often experiences in varying degrees. This throbbing feeling of doomed desire is displayed when Humbert describes loading his gun Chum before he sets out to murder Quilty: “Delightfully snug. Capacity: eight cartridges. Full Blued. Aching to be discharged” (292). Aching to be discharged, indeed. Blue also appears on the other end of orgasm, the remorseful slow comedown. On page 285, Humbert is beginning to feel the ache of remorse and regret for his mistreating of Lolita now that it is too late. He drifts into melancholy blue memory, writing “I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her— after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred— I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness” (285). Limp and azure-barred, his venose and flaccid penis feels a blue tenderness, a melancholic memory of ejaculations past, whether that past is a minute or a year behind. 

After exploring the mutable yet thematically linked impressions evoked by the color red and the color blue individually, now we shall see how the two colors work in juxtaposition. Nabokov places the colors conspicuously together too many times in the novel for it to be coincidence, and he says near the end that “there are colors and shades that seem to enjoy themselves in good company” (307). Some examples of red and blue enjoying each others’ company occur in happy Humbert memories of his loves. He fondly recalls “the sapphire occasion and rosy contingency of my Riviera romance” (167) and describes Lolita at the beginning of Part Two as a girl of “blue sulks and rosy mirth” (148), a pair of impressions that seem to beautifully capture the essence of these colors for Humbert. However, rather than harmonize, the juxtapositions usually serve to strengthen and polarize the individual colors’ effects. The first striking interaction comes just after he implies that they have sex for the first time, and Humbert writes a short, cryptic chapter with a series of images, imagining “There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower… There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child” (135). Ah! Burning stinging reds hissing in contact with cool watery blues, this is how Humbert chooses to describe his first mixing with Lolita! This artistic choice clearly illustrates both red’s role as stinging, burning passion and blue’s role as the antithesis of red, the dissolver of desire, the wide cool pool. 

The dichotomy of red and blue reaches new intensity in Part Two, when blue begins to appear more and both colors settle upon avatars. Red is not only associated with Lolita, but with the boys who gain her affection. Humbert’s rivals all tend to be associated with red, from a boy he calls “Red Sweater who one day… saw her home” (187) to the true rival, Clare Quilty. Humbert frequently notes his unknown pursuer’s flashy “Aztec Red car,” comparing his own “humble blue car and its imperious red shadow” (219). The warm/cool color relationship here, where of course the red is dominant and “imperious,” illustrates Humbert’s own increasing blueness. Indeed, the phrase “humble blue” is no accident: Nabokov assigns the color blue to Humbert, whether he did so on purpose or as a natural result of his painterly instincts and synesthesia. I researched online and found a quote from Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory, where he describes the colors of his synesthete alphabet; lo and behold, Nabokov tells us that “passing on to the blue group, there is steely ‘x’, thundercloud ‘z’ and huckleberry ‘h’.” For Nabokov, the letter h evokes huckleberry blue, and he happened to name his protagonist the alliterative Humbert Humbert. Delicious! Humbert as the avatar of blue has a lot of textual evidence. For example, Humbert notes that Lolita is wearing the same color as Quilty’s car, “her Aztec Red bathing briefs and bra,” and then proceeds to observe that “the turquoise blue swimming pool some distance behind the lawn was no longer behind that lawn, but within my thorax, and my organs swam in it like excrements in the blue sea water in Nice” (237). This passage shows the divergence between Lolita/Quilty and Humbert, between red and blue, Humbert figuratively absorbing the blueness into his very innermost being. Thus, in Part Two, both colors tend to repel the other and increase their saturation.

We are now in a position to conclude our chromatic adventure. Not only do red and blue interact in the novel, they occasionally mix and appear as purple. Purple in the novel has its own connotations, and they can be seen as the violent collision of red and blue. When red and blue smash together, there are two possible results: consummation or pustulous bruising. We first see purple in the opening sequence with Annabel by the blue sea in the “violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave” (13). When Humbert is about to drug Lolita, he shows her “Papa’s Purple Pills” or “Purpills” made of “plums and figs, and the grape-blood of emperors” (122). Before they consummate for the first time, it is interesting to note that Humbert sees the pills as staunchly purple whereas Lolita exclaims that they’re blue. The bruising negative result of red-blue collision is also described a few times: “the purplish spot on her naked neck where a fairytale vampire had feasted” (139), “a raised purple pink swelling… which I… sucked till I was gorged on her spicy blood” (156). These both appear on Lolita, who of course bears the brunt of the collision. The image of purple reaches its triumph in the final scene when Humbert murders Quilty. Quilty and Humbert, who had been red and blue for so long, smash together in a wild final purple explosion. Quilty is wearing “a purple bathrobe, very like one I had” (294), establishing the fusion of the doppelgangers, a theme furthered when they mix together while wrestling on 299. Humbert shoots Quilty, pursues his “purple target” upstairs, where he shoots him in the head, releasing “a burst of royal purple where his ear had been” (304). Finally, after Humbert thought Quilty was dead, he sees Quilty crawling at the top of the staircase, “flapping and heaving, and then subsiding, forever this time, in a purple heap” (305). Thus, a novel filled with nostalgic, aching, melancholy, Humbert-y blues and stinging, burning, passionate, rivalrous reds, a novel where blue and red held hands, juxtaposed, subsumed each other, polarized each other, and spurred each other to deeper saturation, ended its story in a fitting purple consummation, a wild purple copulation, a mad head-on collision between blue and red that left them both collapsed in a final, purple heap.