“And I shall be dumped where the weed decays,
And the rest is rust and stardust.”
What to make of such a wonderfully written book about such a sordid subject? Most people I know who are familiar with Lolita at all know it via Stanley Kubrick’s film version, and perhaps then only by reputation. But it’s been adapted a second time for the silver screen as well as several times for Broadway. It’s been referenced in numerous films—such as Woody Allen’s Manhattan and Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers—was parodied by none other than Umberto Eco, and has received a shout-out in a song by The Police. The term “Lolita” has even become used in common parlance. But the actual content of the novel wouldn’t lead one to believe that it would become a minor phenomenon. The prose is dazzling and dense, and by the end I had a running list of several dozen new words to look up (e.g. incondite, contretemps, purblind). The scattered, unreliable narration is chock full of literary and other high brow references1 (of which I “got” but a few) and is often focused on emotions, perceptions, thought processes, and states of mind rather than action. It’s integration into popular culture seems out of place compared with the bland pulp that usually catches on. It’s possible that Lolita is in the same boat as works like Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace or Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (two authors who were obviously influenced by Nabokov), books which many people know of and about, but which only a relatively daring few have taken the time to read.
The real genius of Lolita is that it is presented to us by Humbert Humbert, the mid-30s hebephile (not pedophile—he makes it abundantly clear that he is only attracted to girls of a certain age, who exhibit very specific qualities) who through his eloquent speech gradually convinces the reader to condone his dreadfully long game of seducing the pubescent Dolores Haze. He is so successful in his endeavor that oftentimes the book is described as a “love story” when it is anything but. The structure of the plot is fairly basic—and probably makes a fine three act play (the grooming of the Lolita, the forbidden consummation with Humbert, and her transition into adulthood)—but the structure of the novel is really brilliant, with Nabokov playfully leading the reader through a dangerous conflict between aesthetics and morals.
The novel is presented as a first-hand account written by Humbert, mostly from memory, over an eight week period after he was imprisoned for murdering Clare Quilty, a man who had aided in Lolita’s escape from Humbert’s clutches. In the closing pages, he requests that the work be published only after both he and Lolita are dead. Sandwiched between a foreword written by a fictitious psychologist and an afterword from Nabokov himself, the book then becomes something of a confession where the reader is not continuing because the contents are titillating but because it is confounding that the story is being told at all; Humbert is already imprisoned for the murder of Quilty, so for him to confess to his years of abuse unprompted makes us curious. So we are reading not as voyeurs, but as jury members fascinated when the defendant begins an hours long, poetic, mesmerizing recitation of his own life and circumstances in order to justify sustained morally depraved behavior. In other words, the teller of the story is almost more interesting than the story itself.
We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the novel is the mismatch between what Humbert believes of himself and what his natural emotional responses tell him. The early portion of the novel, in which Humbert details his past loves and how he became fixated on girls ranging in age from nine to fourteen, reaches its fulfillment in a wonderfully written yet morally filthy scene where Humbert derives sexual pleasure from Lolita without her knowledge. During these early pages he confesses his love for Lolita—but not Lolita the person; instead, he has created in his mind a mythical Lolita that will remain forever as he knew her then. There is not any sort of potential “happily ever after.” Instead, he knows that his time with the Lolita of his dreams will be short-lived, and so he spends little time thinking about how the rest of Lolita’s life play out after his abuse.
I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
He wishes to live in a Neverland where Lolita remains a wanton preteen. Facing that impossibility, he knows he has only a few short years to spend with the Lolita he truly desires.2 But after she makes her escape with Quilty, and Humbert tracks her down a few years later, he is confronted with a severely pregnant, married Lolita—and he realizes two things: that he genuinely loves her3 (not just the image of her in his mind that has since ceased to exist in physical reality) and that he never actually knew anything about her because he had only given attention to the Lolita of his imagination.
And there she was with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and her goose-flesh white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits, there she was (my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at seventeen, with that baby, dreaming already in her of becoming a big shot and retiring around 2020 A.D.—and I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds… but thank God it was not that echo alone I worshiped. […] I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child.
I don’t know if the book was trying to teach anything (in the afterword, Nabokov makes it clear that he wrote novels in order to get rid of ideas that had become lodged in his mind), but if you look beneath its surface, there is a clear criticism of our tendency to elevate aesthetics at the expense of real people.4 That Humbert is so successful in convincing the reader that he is a goodhearted caregiver and that it is somehow good and right to take advantage of the beauty of youth can only induce a feeling of moral guilt for having even given even momentary consideration to his justifications.
The book is technically brilliant, and very enjoyable despite the disgusting content of the plot. Nabokov creates new words and organizes others into phrases that were likely never uttered before. There’s an annotated version of the book that apparently elucidates a number of clues that I am 99% sure I wasn’t picking up on as I read through. And English wasn’t even Nabokov’s native tongue! He was able to take a disturbing subject and present it with wit and charm rather than carnality. Though I can’t fathom why one would choose to write creatively about the repeated sexual abuse of a child, Nabokov does it about as pleasantly as it could be done (his works The Enchanter and Ada cover similarly provocative romances). I understand why many choose not to read the book based on an elevator pitch of its plot, but I think the actual text—what actually appears on the page—is less blatant than one would imagine, and is so enjoyable to read that it is worth wading into the morally murky waters of its subject matter.
1. He also frequently lapses into French for short spurts. I didn’t have an internet connection when I was reading the book so I only partially deciphered like 2% of those sections.
2. Trigger warning. Humbert even briefly contemplates the timeline for a “second Lolita” if he and Lolita became pregnant.
3. I’ll set aside any discussion of how love is defined. Suffice to say that at the very least Humbert comes to see Lolita as supplanting his idea of her as the paragonic nymphet of his deepest desires and becoming someone whose long term prosperity and wellbeing are of concern to him.
4. E.g. think of all the physically beautiful young people who went to Hollywood to satisfy society’s appetite for youthfulness and ended up self-destructing later in life.