The last lines of Lolita are: “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita” [p. 309]. What is the meaning of this passage? What does art offer Humbert and his beloved that sexual passion cannot? Is this aesthetic appeal merely the mask with which Humbert conceals or justifies his perversion, or is the immortality of art the thing that Humbert and his creator have been seeking all along? In what ways is Lolita at once a meditation on, and a re-creation of, the artistic process?
Humbert yearns for immortality, or perhaps to live in an eternal present when he can possess Lolita. It’s interesting that Humbert includes ‘aurochs and angels’ in his brief alliterative list. Aurochs were extremely large cattle-type animals that went extinct in the 17th century so they no longer exist. Angels, if one scoffs at religion as Humbert does, never existed. This seems to tinge his insistence on the immortality of art more ephemeral than he seems to insist.
Humbert conveys several times throughout the novel that the downfall of his so-called “nymphets” is the limited time of their “nymphancy,” each eventually growing out of the innate charm and wile that his is so obsessed with. Art, however, remains a permanent fixture of perfection and beauty, never tarnishing or aging, forever captured for admiration. Art affords Humbert something that human flesh and sexual passion never can, which is immortality. Even in his final work, the very novel of Lolita penned long before their demise, Humbert immortalizes himself –and Lolita– in the art of written word, which is used as a theme throughout the book to further illustrate his obsessive personality and pursuit of perfection.
Art offers a permanence that a nymphet cannot. Humbert the character wrote as an artist. He imbued all of the confession with so much deliberate and self-conscious mastery of the tale. If no Lolita existed, he would find a way to write the story brilliantly. I think this was his true self, that he saw himself as a superior artist.
Art changes Humbert’s sexual passion into something beautiful and spiritual. He is humiliated because he knows sex with young girls is criminal and grotesque. Art enables him to elevate it beyond lust and sex. He turns it into a tragic romance instead of a sordid crime.
By wrapping his obsession in poetic language, he attempts to win over his “jury”—readers who might forgive him because the prose is dazzling. The aesthetic appeal is both a mask and a genuine goal—he hides his crimes in it, but he also earnestly believes art is the one way to preserve what otherwise slips away.