Maybe as story progresses, Lolita character gets more and more aggressive in trying to ruin her beauty. Hacks off her hair. Starts cutting herself. This makes narrator only want her more. Aches to heal her. So that his empathy overrides his common sense?
Nabokov’s narrator on “nymphets”: “Good looks are not any criterion; and vulgarity, or at least what a given community terms so, does not necessarily impair certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering insidious charm. I was consumed by a hell furnace of localized lust for every passing nymphet whom as a law-abiding poltroon I never dared approach. Humbert Humbert tried hard to be good. Really and truly, he did.”
These entries were followed by more of the same, plus occasional allusions to some of the strip clubs Huston had visited.
McKeesport place: Smoky, noisy, big bouncer. All in all a bit frightening. Men at horseshoe-shaped bar mostly older, middle-aged or more, mostly blue collar but a couple in suits. Watered-down draft beer is free with $20 cover charge. Most of the girls look stoned. Only one of them looked me in the eye. Afterward came to my chair, sat on my lap, made me squirm. She looked fourteen but surely must have been older. Are there age limits for strippers in this state? In the booth later, she told me her real name is Joyce. Pretty but not up close. Christ she was hungry for something, not just my money. I kept thinking about Alyssa. Went home so fucking sad.
His visits to clubs in Titusville, Wheeling, Beaver Falls, Ambridge, New Castle, and one along Exit 7 of Interstate 80 left him similarly depressed, not only for the way the dancers must have felt, how they viewed themselves, but also for the way he felt when they thrust their shaved pussies at his face.
Is it even going to be possible to make the Lolita character sympathetic?
How can men enjoy this kind of thing? I feel like scum.
DeMarco found the entries interesting, but not until the ninth page did he come to one that he thought might be useful. Opening scene! he read. The entry was dated only four weeks earlier.
If you get up early enough, or better yet fail to close your eyes at all the night before, a morning in gray can lay all the night’s detritus before you, all the night’s litter emptied now of its noise and bluff and whiskey-ed bravado, leaving nothing but the sticky, squeezed-out wrapper of a self licked clean of its truculence. In that last misted hour before sunrise, all of your shrieking spirits will have lapsed into a muted misery, their throbbing hearts squeezed into something akin to reconciliation but not quite, a weary truce perhaps, not yet surrender.