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Lolita
February 14th, 2010
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. 2nd Vintage International ed. New York: Random House, 1997.
Unless it can be proven to me — to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction — that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.
- Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
*~*~*
Whenever I make acquaintance with the average, non-literary person, and they subsequently discover I have a Master’s degree in English, their first impulse is always to give me the titles of books they have happened to read, and if I’ve never heard of those books, their response is to look at me as though my education has in some way proven useless and deficient. Despite the fact that thousands of new books are published every year in the United States alone, it is automatically assumed that English majors have (or should have) read all of them. Admittedly, after two degrees and a Master’s thesis, I confess I have still not made it through even the established literary canon. Thus I picked up a copy of Vladimir Nabokov‘s Lolita, I book about which I knew nothing other than that it is (in)famous.
First of all, I must comment on the remarkable ignorance of the Random House editors who published the 1997 Vintage International edition of Lolita. The back-cover text bills the novel as “a meditation on love” and “the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America.” Any reader with an IQ above 70 will discern within the first ten pages that Lolita is in no way about clashing cultures or love. Had the editors bothered to actually read either the novel itself or Nabokov’s 1956 essay, “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” which they included in the back of their edition, they may have avoided embarrassing themselves with their irrelevant jacket copy.
Lolita is not a love story; it is instead a tangle of pedophilia and adolescent promiscuity that burn and tear and consume their subjects. Humbert Humbert — psychologist, academic, author, and one-time ad man — serves as the novel’s mentally ill, alcoholic, highly unreliable pedophile-narrator, who becomes infatuated with his landlady’s twelve-year-old daughter, Dolores Haze (Lolita). Humbert marries his landlady in order to gain permanent access to her daughter, and when his new wife is suddenly killed in a car accident, Humbert, now Lolita’s sole guardian, is free to enact his ravenous fantasies. Together he and Lolita traverse the United States for two years, staying in motels as father-daughter, criminal-victim, and lovers.
Lolita, for her part, is a complicated girl. Humbert’s initial plan is to drug her with sleeping pills and violate her unconscious body. However, when she informs him that she has had both lesbian and heterosexual liaisons while attending summer camp, that she is not truly innocent, he pursues her openly, consciously, unapologetically and unrelentingly. For a time, the pill-popping, gin-sipping Humbert portrays Lolita as his willing lover, his co-conspirator. Yet the cracks in his story give him away: Lolita cries herself to sleep every night, and when she gazes at herself in the mirror, even Humbert senses the wounded hopelessness in her look. While Lolita may initially enjoy and even invite the attentions of the older Humbert, she is still an orphan, still a child. The sex she initially finds novel becomes oppressive and grotesque as she realizes she has nowhere else to turn, no one to provide for her other than her father-abuser.
Humbert in turn never redeems himself — he continues to espouse a lust for underage girls (“nymphets”) and hopes to have a daughter with Lolita, so that he may violate her also — but he does eventually recognize himself as the monster he is, although the recognition never proves transformative. He remains obsessed, broken, and unsatisfied. His only solace lies in his writing, for only in art can he immortalize their forbidden relationship, freeze it, preserve it.
Lolita is not an easy read. It is profoundly disturbing, so much so, in fact, that four American publishers turned down the manuscript before Nabokov retained a French publisher, Olympia Press, in 1955. It likewise lacks a clear theme, moral or message; indeed, Nabokov writes in “On a Book Entitled Lolita” that his purpose in writing is merely and always either aesthetic or to purge a burgeoning book from his brain: “I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no other purpose than to get rid of that book.” Yet Lolita is also rife with an ironic humor (“since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic”) that renders the book uncomfortably funny. And, despite Nabokov’s lamentations that the Soviet Union’s ban on his Russian novels had forced him to write in “a second-rate brand of English” for an American readership, his writing is lofty and fluid. Lolita thus defies categorization, for it laughs at the mechanisms of literary interpretation, simultaneously embracing horror and humor, pornography and art. Like Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, it seems Lolita may have earned its place in the literary canon through its very inscrutability.