Lolita

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita, is a novel that in many ways superseded my expectations but also which failed to meet the image unfounded popular belief surrounding the work had implanted in my mind. I expected it to be a work filled to the brim with vile, uncomfortable sexual scenes with even more revolting language and it was to my surprise and relief that I found Lolita to be hardly obscene at all, despite the expected sense of discomfort to come with exploring such a subject as paedophilia, there was no unnecessary excess. Indeed, in one of the early sex scenes between Humber Humbert (HH), the narrator protagonist, and Lolita, his abused step-daughter, HH emits that ‘[he is] not concerned with the so-called sex at all’ and so completely emits it. I was also not prepared for the frequently comical tone that came with the work, especially given the subject at hand. HH, who is writing the collection of papers with a judgemental audience in eye (spawning all kinds of debate on the reliability of the narrator among critics) incessantly uses tools such as irony and humour, as exemplified by the following…

‘we all wonder if anybody in the family has instructed Dolly in the process of mammalian reproduction’ – as said by a naïve teacher regarding Lolita’s lack of interest in sexual matters when she has been far more than instructed by HH already

and the passing quote:

‘since I had disregarded all the laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic’

The question of whether using such a comical tone towards such a damaging and pressing issue is something that I shall be exploring later on in this article. To conclude this intro of sorts, I would like to emphasise how great a read I found Lolita to be, writing extraordinarily well and powerful through its portraying the issue of paedophilia through a different lens and so being even more successful in pressing forth the evident moral that other works on the same subject.

Lolita in many ways challenges the stereotype of the paedophile that seems common knowledge almost nowadays, that of the ‘glum repulsive fat introvert’, taken from the description of Humbert’s ‘friend’ Gaston. It also challenges this stereotype in terms of the reasons towards paedophilia through Humbert’s opinion on Lolita. To start with, Humbert is by no means a ‘glum repulsive fat introvert’ instead (admittedly these words are from his own mouth) noting how ‘[he] could obtain at the snap of my fingers any adult female [he] chose’, except for the fact that he doesn’t want an adult female….  Furthermore, Humbert’s reasons for pursuing Lolita are not out of a rapacious lust towards any child he can get his hands on. Instead, it lies with his essential wish to recapture the past (something mirrored in Nabokov, the author’s own life, who having been forced out of Russia in the Bolshevik Revolution longed to recapture the scenes of his early childhood, though knowing it to be all too impossible). Humbert had lost the love of his life, Anabel, at a very early stage of his youth, and so seeing Lolita, an almost exact replica of Anabel when he last saw her all those years ago, an uncontrollable lust overtakes him, this whole concept being surmised by the line ‘Lolita began with Anabel’.  Furthermore, his love for Lolita is far more than a mere bodily lust; it almost obtains a note of purity for its all-encompassing, absolute nature. This, for instance is seen in Humbert’s stating that, ‘[Lolita’s school list] is a poem I know already by heart’ and how, when he is with her he finds himself to be ‘above the tribulations of ridicule, beyond the possibilities of retribution’. Lolita belongs to a different species of being called the nymphets, these are, according to Humbert’s definition, sporadically appearing young girls between the ages of nine and thirteen, whom certain men would be ‘ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch’, with this feeling multiplied by say a thousand (due to Lolita’s stark resemblance to his past love), one can only start to gain a sense of the expanse of Humbert’s feelings. His complete and utter, undying infatuation is perhaps at its most extreme in the following line:

‘[a wish to] turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys’

…where his wish for complete possession of this goddess-like figure is accentuated.

In addition to challenging the general convention of the unfeeling, ugly, introverted paedophile, at many points in the novel Humbert Humbert attempts to challenge one’s sense of morality in general. At frequent intervals he looks to examples of foreign cultures and their general sense of acceptance of a ‘love’ such as his and Lolita’s, as conveyed by the line ‘amid a civilization which allows a man of twenty-five to court a girl of sixteen but not a girl of twelve’. Furthermore, he strikes the argument that his ‘abnormal’ feelings are not so abnormal as one would like to think, highlighting the commonality of paedophilia among men, at one point using a statistic as high as 12%. Indeed, a passing remark made along his and Lolita’s seemingly endless road-trip is ‘what frolics, what twists of lust, you might see from your impeccable highways if Kumfy Kabins were suddenly drained of their pigments and became transparent as boxes of glass!’ and the image of ‘children and old men’ standing outside a cinema to watch a kid’s film adds him to one of many. Furthermore, and more specifically to his case with Lolita, he suggests that she had already been morally stained and corrupted long before he turned up on the scene suggesting that ‘she had been coached at an early age by a little lesbian’ and also portrays her as the instigator of the relationship in the first place. Indeed, at their earliest sexual encounter, Humbert claims that it was Lolita who ‘seduced’ him. Equally, he uses Clare Quilty, in many ways his mirror through their mutually paedophilic ways to paint himself in a positive light through their contrast. Whilst he settles for one young girl, whom he happily devotes his whole life to Quilty has mass orgies with the youth, having an even greater effect of corruption. However, as events in the novel pan out, Humbert’s case is duly dismissed. This is done through the gradual increased occurrence of predatory motifs describing him (e.g. ‘my tentacles moved towards her’), stark reminders of Lolita’s youth and juvenility (e.g. ‘conventional little girl’) and the inappropriate mixing of sexual images with childish ones (e.g. ‘my muscular thumb from reaching the hot hollow of her groin – just as you might tickle and caress a giggling child’). Equally, as the relationship sours and Humbert becomes more and more like a father figure, in Lolita’s eyes, rather than a lover, he starts prostituting her in effect, as seen in the line, ‘her weekly allowance, paid to her under condition she fulfil her basic obligations’. The damage that his actions on her have done also become increasingly apparent as events unfold. Following a sexual encounter HH notes how it was ‘as if [he] were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed’, viewing her playing tennis he notes how ‘had not something within her been broken by [him]…she would have had on the top of her perfect form the will to win,  and would have become a real girl champion’ and how a teacher makes the remark that her ‘biologic and psychologic drives are not fused’. Indeed, his last face to face meeting with her is perhaps the most effecting, Lolita, who is noted as being ‘hopelessly worn at seventeen’, ends up being pregnant, meaning that her life is in effect completely over. In the afterword, in fact, it is revealed that she eventually dies from a stillbirth a few months after these events, further installing the sense that Humbert has destroyed her life. Furthermore, Humbert’s using Quilty as a means to somewhat deflect the reader’s scorn off him is crushed by the Lolita’s emission that ‘[Quilty] broke her heart’ whilst ‘[Humbert] merely broke her life’. On another note, HH’s actions also defile his opinion of his once-loved country, as seen in the line ‘I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country…’.Thus, despite Nabokov’s determined statement that he is ‘neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction’, the novel does firmly end on a moral, strongly condemning Humbert’s actions. However, it doesn’t scream out this moral, nor relentlessly repeat it, instead the reader sees HH gradually reach this conclusion through the self-evaluation that must have come with ‘writing’ the work.  Even if Lolita is the temptress-like character whom Humbert portrays her as, what he has done is wrong on many levels and he comes to repent for this. 

As aforementioned, there is the question as whether the frequently comical tone of the novel, when discussing such a topic as child molesting, is appropriate. Though there is a strong case for this being improper and unfeeling towards such an effecting and widespread issue, I found the comical tone to be used in the right places of the novel, leaving emotional realisations such as Lolita’s pregnant ruin to have the feeling and emotional impact that they deserve. Furthermore, through using a comical tone I found the novel to be on the whole more effective, rather than appearing relentless didactic, it gave the morals expressed greater weight and power. Furthermore the use of irony and satire in the novel, as one critic expressed, can also have the effect of outlining how ludicrous it is that this criminal is still able to portray the abuse of such an innocent little girl on the terms of her being a temptress and his being the victim, the starkly childish images of Lolita (as aforementioned) evidently contradict Humbert's vision of her as this lustrous nymphet, as Nadel notes '[HH] persists, willfully oblivious of the fact that Lolita is no nymphette'. Equally this comical tone can be seen as reflecting the ridiculous nature of American civilization at the time, a society which continues completely unaware of the horrific events behind closed doors. As Nadel notes Nabokov is making fun over 'everything about the 1950s - from its relentless normativity, its self-serving worship of young girls...its dogmatic belief that father knows best...its blindness to closeted behaviour and its trust in the concepts of progressive education (as seen in the ludicrious '4 Ds' of Lolita's school)', which indeed acted as a 'paradise' for him, in terms of the vast abundance of material to use. 

Moving on, in terms of my few criticisms for the overall excellent work, as a reader I would have liked to have heard Lolita’s side of events, despite clearly knowing that this may have weakened the story as a whole, through self-narration the young girl would most likely have lost her magical aura, but would also be more instantly sympathetic. Furthermore, with the issue of an unreliable narrator, I believe that Humbert’s insanity would be all the more shocking when compared to the notes of the young, innocent girl who he were abusing who is far from the evil temptress he portrays her as (though of course this whole idea of Lolita’s narrating completely contradicts the whole means for the works existing in the first place). Equally, merely in terms of the plot, I found it to be an opportunity missed that Humbert never took Lolita to his homeland of Europe (this merely being discussed as an option in his mind), the place where he and Anabel frolicked all those years ago. Personally, I felt that some scenes of beauty almost could have been created as Humbert’s wish to recapture the past, in terms of both the people and setting, could have been, at least for a moment, complete. This would also take away the novel for a while from the subject of physical lust and admiration as his true motive, as it were, would be starkly unveiled. However, despite these small and (for the most part unrealistic, I admit) critiques, I found Lolita to be exceptionally well written, with an excellent use of symbolism, and its position on the upper half of so many of the ‘best books ever written’ lists to be wholly deserved.

As aforementioned, the defining motive for HH is his wish to recapture the past, or more specifically, achieve a sense of immortality. Lolita represents this, as seen in the line ‘the word “forever” referred only to my passion, to the eternal Lolita as reflected in my blood’, Humbert’s love for Lolita (the reincarnation of his past love Anabel) is everlasting, though he soon realises that their love, in the plural sense, cannot be so (as seen in the fretful ‘oh my Lolita, we shall never get there!’. However, at the end, there is a sort of happy ending, for the evil protagonist at least, through the immortality the collection of papers that Lolita is offers him. This is seen in the ending line:

‘the refuge of art…is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita’

Thus to briefly conclude I would thoroughly recommend Lolita to anyone who wishes to be morally stretched and receive the version of events from the wrongdoer rather than the victim.