Lolita

Oh boy. I just finished Lolita - a book that many people consider the finest one ever written in the English language - and I've got a lot to say about it. I'm still processing plenty of thoughts here and I'm not even sure where to begin. May as well break this post down into general sections in order to create some semblance of structure.

Background

Vladimir Nabokov was born to a wealthy family in Russia in 1899. His family fled for Western Europe after the Bolsheviks took control of the country in 1917. He married a Jewish woman in 1925 and, naturally, fled for America in 1940. The man was multi-lingual from an early age and by his fifties he'd lived all over both Europe and America. He had written all kinds of stories in Russian throughout his life but upon moving to America began writing in English instead. In 1955, his third English-language novel, Lolita, was published.

Plot Summary

Lolita is framed as a prison confession from a man named Humbert. The narrator is a pedophile, or more accurately a hebephile; he is sexually attracted to preteen girls. He refers to them as nymphets. In the beginning of the novel, he explains how his first love, a thirteen-year-old girl (when he was a thirteen-year-old boy) influenced his perversions; how he tried but failed, repeatedly, to maintain normal relationships with women his own age during adulthood; and how eventually he came to meet a nymphet more captivating and striking than he had ever encountered before: Dolores Haze, who he immediately dubbed his "Lolita." Humbert marries Lolita's widowed mother in order to maximize his time with Lolita. He is careful not to act on his infatuations by molesting the girl, but is barely able to conceal his excitement when she brushes up against him or flirts innocently like any twelve-year-old girl. Humbert's new bride quickly finds out about his sexual attraction to her daughter and reacts with appropriate disgust, but immediately afterward she dies in a car accident, giving Humbert sole custody of his new stepdaughter. Overjoyed, he takes her to a hotel room, drugs her, and plans to molest her, but finds himself unable to act on his desire while she sleeps. Instead, to his delight, when Lolita wakes up, it is she who ends up seducing him. They have sex, and although Lolita almost immediately regrets it and threatens to report Humbert for raping her, Humbert manages to talk her out of it by reminding her that if she's taken away from him she'll become a ward of the state. What follows is a year-long road trip where Humbert tours America with Lolita in tow, acting on his urges nightly, but beyond just lust, falling deeply in love with his blossoming teenage stepdaughter. Lolita, for her part, runs increasingly hot and cold with the man, and when they finally settle down in a New England town, there's a thick tension. Lolita, fourteen or so, wants to do normal teenage things like go out on dates; Humbert, selfish, wants her all to himself, and becomes even more controlling and domineering; Lolita, in return, slowly comes to learn how to tease and manipulate Humbert into allowing her to do things. Knowing that Lolita's time as a nymphet is running out, Humbert begins to take her on another road trip, but quickly realizes that they're being followed by another man. Humbert assumes it's a cop, but grows increasingly paranoid when he starts to see Lolita interacting with the man. As it turns out, the man is in fact another nymphet-lover, and Lolita runs off with him, breaking Humbert's heart. Years pass, and one day Humbert receives a letter from Dolores; she's seventeen now, and married to another man entirely, and pregnant, and she needs some money. Humbert visits her and finds himself no longer attracted to her at all. He gives her ten times the amount of money she asked for, and demands to know who took her away from him all those years ago. Once she tells him, he leaves her for the last time and sets out to kill her abductor. He does just that, gets arrested, and currently awaits trial for rape and murder in prison, where he has written this very confession, pleading for his audience to understand his plight and not to judge him too severely. In a foreword to the whole manuscript, a fictional psychiatrist notes that Dolores ended up dying during childbirth, and that Humbert died in prison shortly afterward of a heart attack.

Tone

The biggest thing about Lolita that you can in no way gather from the plot summary alone is that the narrator, Humbert, is quite a charming and charismatic guy. He makes little puns and jokes throughout the book and describes himself as a handsome and educated man, soundly breaking the "creepy pedophile" stereotype. He also repeatedly professes his love for Lolita. He's constantly reminding the reader that he understands how perverse his desires are, but he comes across as such a lovestruck goof that it becomes easy to understand where he's coming from. Not to respect or condone his actions, by any means, but to see them as a sick man giving into his vices - as something more than an incestuous child predator. Furthermore, no sexual acts are ever described in any detail; the dirty deed is done repeatedly, but very much "in between the lines," and therefore out of sight from the reader. Humbert's wit and carefully selected language are essential to enjoying Lolita; without them, after all, you're just reading about a guy who has sex with his pubescent step-daughter.

Various Interpretations

Any reaction to Lolita of course begins and ends with addressing the uncomfortable subject matter. Plenty of would-be readers through the years have dismissed the whole work as lewd and bad pornography, its reputation as one of the best books in the English language aside. Still, it has inspired a wide array of responses since its initial publication. Initially, some considered it an erotic novel; others, a tongue-in-cheek parody of an erotic novel. In Soviet Russia it was described as "an experiment in combining an erotic novel with an instructive novel of manners." Its reputation as a great literary novel would grow with time while its erotic label diminished. Some tried to find a deeper symbolic message in the book. Was is Nabokov's commentary on totalitarian regimes destroying Russia? A metaphor for the exploitative nature of capitalism? A sneaky comparison study in morality, of European decency to American crassness? Or perhaps an open love letter to the wild and untamed America? I could see it being all of these things, which is pretty amazing, but Nabokov himself insisted that he hated literary symbology and never liked being asked why he'd written something, or what its moral was.

My Reactions

One thing I really appreciated was that, even though Lolita was only 300 pages long, my reaction to the book changed wildly over the course of reading it. At first I thought, "hey, this is pretty bold - the author is trying to get me to empathize with a pedophile." This led to some thoughts on moral relativity, which were only supported when the narrator helpfully pointed out that, hey, not all that long ago, people used to bed twelve-year-old girls all the time, so this wasn't even necessarily unnatural. At first I actually admired Humbert's restraint with Lolita and his ability to keep his hands off of her for the first half of the book. Then, abruptly, when the pair had sex, I spent several chapters trying to recuperate and recover; I honestly did not expect Humbert to give in before what I imagined would be the book's climax (no pun intended) and was worried that the whole second half of the book would be one long sex-filled road trip. That wasn't the case, and instead as things began to go south for Humbert and Lolita's "relationship," I began to appreciate the novel as a satire on a failed relationship. Boy meets girl, boy loves girl, girl begins to change, boy falls out of love with girl. Except, here, the change was made blatantly into puberty and the teenage angst that comes with it. Kind of like how when a once-great relationship goes south, it can often be dismissed as, "hey, people change," except that here, the change was very literal and obvious and foreshadowed. In this respect I actually came to see the novel as a great little tragedy of sorts. Humbert likes his girls a certain age, after all, and Lolita is "doomed" to grow up, so of course what they have can't last. Then when Humbert thought he and Lolita were being followed and stalked, I began to wonder about Humbert's mental state. Was he slowly going insane with paranoia? It turns out he wasn't - Lolita had in fact conspired with another pedophile to run away from Humbert - but once this seed was planted, I was finally reminded of something I should have been considering all along - that Humbert could be an unreliable narrator. The story's framing, after all, spells out bluntly that Humbert is in prison writing down his confessions; of course he might favor certain details, and change or omit others entirely.

The Gut Punch

And here's where the brilliance of Lolita really finally hit me in all its power. If Humbert was an unreliable narrator, then how could we know for sure that anything he had said was true? What if he'd forced himself on Lolita, rather than being seduced by her? I mean, it's rape either way, but formerly it was only rape in the statutory sense. What if Lolita's mom hadn't died in a car accident, but had instead been killed by Humbert? What if Lolita's abductor wasn't another pedophile at all, but instead her savior? A cop after all, maybe. A relative. Less importantly, what if Humbert wasn't the charming, handsome man he had described himself to be? And, worst of all, that entire two-year period where Humbert claimed to be captivated by the hot and cold whims of Lolita - what if she was simply a scared shitless rape victim with severe Stockholm Syndrome, which, come to think of it, seems to be very obviously what she was? Holy shit. The greatest trick Nabokov pulled here was getting me to empathize with an incestuous kidnapping murderous pedophile in the first place, with nothing more than a silver tongue and a platform from which to speak. Surely, a first-hand account of these events from Lolita herself could read quite differently. But we'll never get one, because how she's dead! And so is Humbert. The truth of their story goes to the grave with the pair of them, but only one side of it remains for the world to see. And it's so carefully crafted by Humbert that he succeeds in making the reader - most readers, I imagine - see him as a victim of sorts and not the criminal lowlife he really is. Such is the power of the English language in the right hands, and such was the power of Nabokov's writing.

Anyway, I've talked at great length now and I've spoiled plenty. I'll duck out here, but seriously, give Lolita a shot. It's well worth the reward if you can stomach the content, and, again, Nabokov makes that much easier to do than perhaps you would like. What an author and what a book!