"You Can Always Count On A Murderer For A Fancy Prose Style": Nabokov's Lolita
Written: Sep 23 '02
Product Rating:
Pros: Language and, to my second-time-reading surprise, the story
Cons: Overly obscure, hides its pedophilia (which will upset the smut-seekers and the reactionaries).
The Bottom Line: Reading Nabokov makes you smarter, makes you laugh, and makes you contemplative. Are there any other reasons to indulge in literature? I think not.
The novelist and critic Martin Amis, in his collection of essays and reviews entitled "The War Against Cliche" (which sadly, as of this writing, is not available through Epinions), wrote an 8000+-word dissection/paean on Vladimir Nabokov's controversial 1955 novel, "Lolita". Amis comes by his love of Nabokov naturally, as he was probably read from the master's works while a babe in the crib. My genealogy being less than literary (where Kingsley Amis wrote "The Old Devils", Papa Stone merely *is* an Old Devil), I wondered, "What right do I have to follow Amis down 'Lolita' lane?" For goshsakes, I don't even speak French (causing many of the book's more humourous asides to be lost on my anglo ears)! All I can offer you, gentle reader, is a layperson's take on a book important enough to rank #4 on the Modern Library's list of 100 Best Novels.
This being my second trip through Humbert Humbert's "Confession of a White Widowed Male" (as the Foreword so designates "Lolita"; this is the first reference to the novel's book-within-a-book structure), I thought I'd quickly run through my impressions of the book the first time round: Yawn! Well, that's being a bit hyperbolic, I confess. But I do remember thoroughly enjoying the book's first half, thrilled by Nabokov's extravagant use of the English language (a feat made even more admirable when one realizes that Nabokov was equally adept in French and Russian), but bored silly when the novelty of the language wore off, and the story was not strong enough to bear the book's weight.
That was my first read. My second read, happily, ended much better.
Humbert Humbert (ever after, "HH") is a European intellectual, come to a small New England town to teach French literature. In a search for last minute lodging, he looks at a room in the house of one Charlotte Haze, a boorish and bloated widow whose every shrieking utterance causes him to recoil in disgust. Needless to say, he takes the room. Needless to say, that is, once one realizes that HH, on first sight, falls in love with Charlotte's 12-year old daughter, Dolores ("…she was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita," says the book's precise and poetic first paragraph). After a fantastic turn of events, HH takes Lolita, whom he passes off as his daughter, on a road trip across the United States, in search of tacky tourist attractions and opportunities for fondling.
The book's most controversial element, one that caused its initial ban by the French government (and that later made the two movie versions, by Stanley Kubrick in 1962 and Adrian Lyne in 1997, such difficult productions), is this relationship between middle-aged man and pre-teen girl.
Nabokov, in one of literature's most dubious cases of neologisticity, coins the term 'nymphet' just for this occasion. A nymphet, by definition, is bounded by the ages of 9 and 14, a fact that causes HH to constantly update the reader as to the current age of his object of desire. Lolita is "12 years and 7 months old" as they start their road trip, we are informed. But later, to a nosy hospital nurse, she is "practically sixteen". His anxiety is palpable, ever aware that she is creeping closer and closer to the outer limits of nymphetdom.
HH considers himself part of a rare breed, but is well aware that said breed might need some defending. He notes that connoisseurs of nymphets are "not sex fiends. We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are… ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet." Ever the academic, he further argues nymphets have existed throughout literary history: "Oh Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe's and Bea Dante's." It all makes nymphetology sound like a respectable vocation. Nabokov can't help but puncture that pompous balloon by having his narrator assert that all of this just "goes to show how dreadfully stupid poor Humbert always was in matters of sex." Hear, hear!
While he has HH bending over backwards justifying the book's content and themes, Nabokov the author can't help but intrude, either implicitly or explicitly, offering his own reasons. The book-within-a-book structure offers the author and narrator a chance to directly address their detractors. HH is constantly referring his comments, tongue firmly in cheek, to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury, or the mercy of the court, in a direct parody of an accused's testimony. Early on, in the foreword written by the fictitious John Ray, Jr., PhD., the reader can't help but hear Nabokov's voice bellowing out the following, in a pre-emptive strike against his detractors: "'offensive' is frequently but a synonym for 'unusual'; and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise." This sentiment is very nearly echoed in the afterword, when Nabokov himself says, "For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss." Art must confront, but art must also provide beauty, is what he seems to be arguing. I'd argue that "Lolita" does both, rather successfully.
"An American critic suggested that 'Lolita' was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel," writes Nabokov in the afterward. "The substitution 'English language' for 'romantic novel' would make this elegant formula more correct." This focus on the malleability and liveliness of the English language is, and I'm sure I'm not the first to say so, the book's real strength. HH himself seems to know this implicitly, when he says early on, in reference to his criminal past and his new incarceration: "Quine the Swine. Guilty of killing Quilty. Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!" Other choice examples of prodigious wordplay abound. Talking, with hatred, about Charlotte Haze, HH comes up with this little nugget: "I think I had better describe her right away, to get it over with." And later, regarding the woman's banal existence: "Her autobiography was as devoid of interests as her autopsy would have been." Nabokov even indulges in his appetite for lowbrow, grown-worthy comedy (to counteract the proliferation of literary-heavy references, many of which went delightfully over my head), like the mention in HH's memoir that he and Lo "had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop. 1001."
This last bit leads nicely into the book's dominant running motif: America as a place of glorious tackiness, kitsch, and joie de vivre (okay, maybe I do know some French). Lolita herself, so young and innocent while showing a character fraught with grit, exuberance, tough-mindedness and an inability to suffer fool's gladly, acts as a neat little metaphor: just as the intellectual older man comes to love the young girl, so does the intellectual European come to love the young country.
Led around by the nose by his youthful charge, whose appetites for "sweet hot jazz, square dances, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines" could never be quenched (Lolita was "the ideal consumer"), HH, a snob when he arrived, learns to love his adopted homeland. "[Our] long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country," he says, showing equal parts shame in his actions and adoration for the sights he's seen. Maybe part of this stems from his infatuation with the young girl (he's constantly describing the weather as full of "haze", an allusion to Lo that can't be missed), but I suspect that like his author, HH's hard-won feelings for the country are true. "It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe," says Nabokov, of his previous literary life, "and now I was faced by the task of inventing America." A task, which based solely on the evidence found in this book, he truly enjoyed.
The yawn-inducing "Lolita" that I found on my first read was absent from my second. Taking Nabokov's trail more slowly and methodically, paying attention to the details he so lovingly crafts, the story becomes sly and witty, subversive and substantial, but always propulsive. The signposts -- leading to the book's one great narrative mystery -- are sometimes hidden along the way, but an attentive reader won't get lost along the path. And if you find yourself bothered by the lechery and pedophilia (which exists, to be sure, but is never ever explicit), just remember that it's supposed to be fantastic and fanciful As Lolita herself says at one point, "If somebody wrote up her life nobody would ever believe it."
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