Lolita Now
After almost three-quarters of a century, how are we now to think about Lolita? It may well be the most commented on novel written in English in the past hundred years, alongside Joyce’s Ulysses. In the case of Ulysses, the imperative for commentary is chiefly a consequence of the invitation to exegesis generated by that novel’s dense network of allusions and the multiple complexities of its structure. In fact, Alfred Appel, Jr., in the introduction to his splendid Annotated Lolita, has observed certain affinities between Lolita and Ulysses in the centrality of parody for both novels, in their resourceful deployment of popular culture, and, of course in their shared elaborate mobilization of literary allusions. Nabokov, we should recall, was a great admirer of Ulysses, and Lolita has its own formal intricacies, which have been duly explicated by much apt criticism ever since its initial American publication in 1958.
Yet the more obvious reason why Lolita has elicited so much commentary through the years is the moral questions raised by its subject. The crudest notes of the discussion were first struck by readers who imagined that the author must be a pervert and that the novel he wrote was altogether a sordid thing. In more sophisticated guise, some conservative critics, such as Norman Podhoretz, have contended that Lolita may corrupt morals and must be approached with caution by right-thinking people. Inevitably, the novel has also been excoriated by the feminist Left. In her diffuse but influential article “Men Explain Lolita to Me,” Rebecca Solnit seems to classify Lolita (her meaning is a bit opaque) as one of the books that “are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories.”
Serious considerations of the novel have properly dismissed all such views, and, indeed, many of the earliest critics recognized it as a literary achievement of the first order of originality (but not Nabokov’s erstwhile friend Edmund Wilson, who thought it regrettable). Indeed, powerful and persuasive arguments have been made for the moral character of the book, and these need not be repeated here.
What may be at issue for readers of Lolita in the twenty-first century is how to regard the book in an age when our culture has become so conscious of the sexual exploitation of children and of women in general, young or otherwise. This is, of course, a social problem that is alarmingly widespread and deserving of urgent reform, but it must be said that the public exposure of certain especially egregious cases has led much of the public to hair-trigger responses to any activity that is even obliquely related to such appalling exploitation. It is a sign of our confused and simplified and sanctimonious times that Dan Franklin, the editor-in-chief of the esteemed London publishing house Jonathan Cape, has declared that he would not publish Lolita if it were submitted to him now. His judgment stems from an acute nervousness about how thirty-year-olds on his company’s acquisition team would respond if he proposed publication, as he himself has said.
Is the new awareness of sexual harassment likely to make it altogether uncomfortable to read the first-person narrative of a middle-aged male who repeatedly, extravagantly, and at times brutally commits carnal acts with a pubescent girl who is quite helpless to free herself from him? Novelists, of course, have not infrequently chosen to write books about deviant, criminal, or murderous characters — Humbert Humbert is all three — but the sexual exploitation of a child surely touches a raw nerve, especially now. (One highly intelligent reader, recently reading Lolita for the first time, told me that he could see it was a brilliant novel but found it difficult to stick with it because of the subject.)
I would like to suggest that the way Humbert’s story is constructed anticipates this sort of discomfort, in a sense even aligning itself with the discomfort. Devoted as he was to the supreme importance of art, Nabokov had been concerned since his Russian novels with the phenomenon of the perverted artist, the person who uses a distorted version of the aesthetic shaping of reality to inflict suffering on others. Humbert Humbert is only his most extreme representation of such distortion. The perversion of the artistic impulse is a vital subject for Nabokov precisely because art matters so much to him.
The first thing that should be noted about the treatment of this subject in Lolita is that Humbert Humbert clearly regards himself as a monster, repeatedly emphasizing his own monstrosity. This goes along with the fact that he is insane, as he frankly admits, and that he has been several times institutionalized in asylums. Humbert’s assertions of his own moral repulsiveness abound in the novel. “I am,” he says of himself early in his story, as a boarder in the Haze home, “like one of those pale inflated spiders you see in old gardens. Sitting in the middle of a luminous web and giving jerks to this or that strand.” With Lolita tantalizingly sitting in his lap on the Haze davenport, he invokes a familiar fairy tale that here will have no happy ending as he wriggles in order “to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty — between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.” Humbert’s framing of this allusion altogether reduces the man to his imperious sexual member. And as we shall see from other citations, he has a clear awareness that his absconding with Lolita is bound to have dire consequences for both.
When he finally consummates his lust for Lolita, he declares that it was she who seduced him, not an altogether improbable claim given her sexual precociousness, but she on her part says, fearing that he has torn her internally — though it is unclear whether she might be merely joking — that she ought to report him to the police for rape. At least in a moral sense as well as in the statutory one, this could be quite right. The year-long frenzy of sexual gratification with a sometimes reluctantly submissive, sometimes resistant, twelve-year-old has its particularly sordid moments beyond its intrinsic sordidness, as when Humbert insists on sex when Lolita is running a high fever or in his repeatedly bribing her with magazines and treats to make herself available to his insatiable desire. Humbert’s admission of all this repeated abuse culminates near the end of the novel in his often cited recognition, as he watches school children at play, that he has deprived Lolita of her childhood. But a summarizing assess-ment of what he has perpetrated in the throes of his obsession occurs earlier, as he and Lolita head back east in his car:
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, truthful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more 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.
Here the defiling of America and the defiling of Lolita are virtually interchangeable. This self-revelatory moment, coming at the end of a chapter, is very telling in two ways — first the invocation of slime, cognate with the earlier image of the spider, to indicate the repulsiveness of this sexual odyssey, and then, at the end of the little catalogue of the detritus of the journey, interwoven with it and constituting Humbert’s first report of this wrenching fact, Lolita’s sobbing through it all, night after night.
If Lolita were nothing but this, it would merely be a riveting and also unappetizing representation of a sexually obsessed madman. Yet what is enacted in the novel is more complicated and more interestingly ambiguous. In the afterword that Nabokov wrote to Lolita in 1956 to accompany the Ameri-can publication of excerpts in The Anchor Review, he offers a curious origin for the idea of the novel. When he was laid up with illness in Paris in 1940, he came across a newspaper story about a caged ape in the Jardin des Plantes that had been given charcoal and paper and produced a sketch of the bars enclosing him in. (One thinks of Rilke’s famous poem about the panther, “Au Jardin des Plantes,”: “It seemed to him there were a thousand bars / and behind those bars no world.”) The ape inspired Nabokov to write a Russian story with a plot roughly like that of Lolita, but, unhappy with the piece, he destroyed it.
What does an ape in a cage drawing his prison have to do with Lolita? The obvious answer is that Humbert Humbert’s predicament is of a man hopelessly imprisoned by his obsession. The narrative he produces is the representation of his prison, which is not an enclosure of vertical bars but rather an alluring and also vulnerable girl whom he has desperately fixed as the object of his desire. This transformation of a cage into a sexual obsession has a double effect: Lolita as its object is repeatedly celebrated in radiant prose as a thing of beauty, and the reader is led to perceive Humbert not only with horror but also with a qualified kind of sympathy, as a man hideously trapped in his own impulses that inflict grave harm on someone he comes to love and that in the end destroy him. It is relevant in this connection that the Russian story Nabokov discarded ended with the suicide of its perverted protagonist. The central paradox of Lolita, and one of the effects that makes it a great novel and not just the story of a psychopath, is that one simultaneously recoils from its narrator and is drawn into both the anguish and the lyric exuberance of his point of view.
Especially in regard to the second of these contradictory responses, the extraordinary style of the novel surely takes the book well beyond the fictional case-study of a madman. Nabokov himself characterized the book as his love affair with the English language, and there are few other novels since Joyce that deploy its resources with such pyrotechnic virtuosity. In the famous first paragraph, which is a spectacular prose poem, Humbert ends by saying, “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” Humbert, with his inventor standing firmly behind him, is wonderfully having it both ways: the extravagance of the musical prose might push to the brink of excess, and Humbert is perfectly aware of this, yet the prose is glorious and is surely a part of the reader’s enjoyment of this troubling story. This is the narrative of a man repeatedly doing something morally ugly conveyed in language that is often quite beautiful. The contradiction between subject and style poses a certain moral dilemma for readers, who may well relish the novel and at the same time feel uneasy about the delight they take in it. Perhaps that double-take was part of Nabokov’s intention.
For a characteristic instance of this tricky balancing act, let us return briefly to Humbert on the davenport in the Haze home with Lolita, who is evidently unaware of his sexual excitement, sitting in his lap. As he approaches climax, deliberately prolonging the pleasure, he says, in a phrase that shrewdly defines his relationship with the pre-pubescent girl, “Lolita had been safely solipsized.” He continues in his habitual extravagant style:
The implied sun pulsated in the supplied poplars; we were fantastically and divinely alone; I watched her, rosy, gold-dusted, beyond the veil of my controlled delight, unaware of it, alien to it, and the sun was on her lips, and her lips were apparently still forming the words of the Carmen-barman ditty that no longer reached my consciousness. Everything was now ready. The nerves of pleasure had been laid bare….I was above the tribulations of ridicule, beyond the possibilities of retribution. In my self-made seraglio, I was a radiant and robust Turk, postponing the moment of actually enjoying the youngest and frailest of his slaves.
This entire scene is the most explicitly sexual moment in the novel — after this, Nabokov pointedly refrains from explicit representations of sex — but it is also something rather different. The murderer’s fancy prose is exquisitely orchestrated in a virtually musical sense, the passage beginning with a spectacular set of alliterations that also incorporates a rhyme: “The implied sun pulsated in the supplied poplars.” The sun is “implied” probably because Humbert, totally focused on Lolita and his pleasure, is not directly observing the sun and the “supplied” poplars on which it is shining, though he does notice the sunlight on her lips. Beyond that detail, Lolita’s presence, radiant for Humbert, is evoked only in the brief phrase “rosy, gold-dusted” because Humbert is completely concentrated on his own sexual excitement.
The verbal pyrotechnics of the kind one sees here, which are abundantly deployed throughout the novel, are surely a source of delight for readers, perhaps even eliciting a certain sense of admiration for Humbert’s “sensibility” or his inventiveness, though the acts he performs trigger moral revulsion. The novel’s perverted protagonist is manifestly a man of high culture — and, at the same time, following the precedent established by Joyce, avidly attentive as well to popular culture — and so this passage, like so many others in the book, spins a web of allusions in its very representation of sexual arousal. The invocation of Carmen, one of several in the novel, probably refers to Merimée’s novella rather than to the opera based on it, as Alfred Appel, Jr. plausibly suggests, thus conjuring up from fiction a young and sexually alluring woman, here appearing in a silly ditty. Humbert as a Turk in his seraglio, depicted in still another alliterative chain (“In my self-made seraglio, I was a radiant and robust Turk”) taps into an old cliché of Western culture in which the Orient is figured as a theater of exotic sexual license. Leopold Bloom plays more than once with this same Orientalist notion.
Again, I think that the articulation of Humbert’s fantasy produces a double effect. A reader may enjoy the exuberance of his inventiveness, but surely what the fantasy reveals about his intentions is repugnant. What is especially telling is the phrase “enjoying the youngest and frailest of his slaves.” Presumably, this compliant or helpless victim of the Turk Humbert’s lasciviousness is almost or actually a child, and the fact that she is the “frailest” of the female slaves in the seraglio betrays his awareness of Lolita’s vulnerability, an aspect of her that may well pique his twisted desire. What I have characterized as the balancing act of Nabokov’s prose in this novel is abundantly evident here.
I would like to offer a final example of the odd allure created by Humbert’s writing, a passage in which the sheer literariness of the writing is especially prominent. It is Humbert’s first sighting of Lolita, peering at him over her dark glasses as she sunbathes on the patio. Her appearance will present to Humbert, or so he claims, the very image of Annabel Leigh, his first love met on the Riviera when both were still pre-teens, and then forever lost to him through an early death:
It was the same child—the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair. A polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest hid from my aging ape eyes, but not from the gaze of young memory, the juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day. And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess (lost, kidnapped, discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at the king and his hounds), I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side. With awe and delight (the king crying for joy, the trumpets blaring, the nurse drunk) I saw again her lovely indrawn abdomen where my southbound mouth had briefly paused; and those puerile hips on which I had kissed the crenulated imprint left by the hem of her shorts—that last mad immortal day behind the “Roches Roses.” The twenty-five years I had lived since then tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished.
The idea of a formative experience in early life imprinting itself so indelibly on the psyche that the person becomes its lifelong captive is, as quite a few commentators have noted, Nabokov’s mockery of the Freudian notion of the causation of sexual pathology by childhood trauma, a notion he famously despised. Given that it plays an altogether determinative role in Humbert’s perversion, one must conclude that the “psychology” of the novel, based as it is on a parody of Freud, can scarcely be regarded as realistic.
It is, instead, a central instance in which playfulness is paramount in this representation of a sexual deviant, an unanticipated conjunction of manner and subject that may compel us to reconsider how to think about Humbert Humbert. In one respect, he is a powerful fictional representation of a disturbed person that one can readily relate to troubling manifestations of this kind of disturbance in the real world; in another respect, he is a kind of pawn in a wild literary game. One should note that the caged ape in the Jardin des Plantes breaks through the surface here in Humbert’s self-denigrating characterization of his own “aging ape eyes.” He proceeds to embark on the fantasy of the little princess kidnapped by gypsies — the introduction of gypsies ties in with the allusions to Carmen, who is a gypsy — comically casting himself, a male figure to uncomfortable excess, as the nurse of the vanished infant.
The story of the kidnapped child rediscovered in adulthood through the recognition of a birthmark is very old, originating in the Greek romances of Late Antiquity and continuing to lead a literary life in the Early Modern period and beyond. Fielding, for example, employs it in Joseph Andrews, birthmark and all, with the kidnappers there identified as gypsies, a European fantasy about them in that era. Nabokov, then, is playing not only with Freud but also with the contrivance of an old tale told many times since the Greeks. What may properly be described as the highjinks of Humbert’s consciousness, however tormented he often may be, is on display as he quickly switches roles from nurse to king, clearly the child’s father, crying for joy over her discovery. The fact that the nurse is imagined to be drunk at this moment is a wildly extraneous and incongruous detail, Humbert indulging in a riot of the imagination as he recreates this old story for his self-explanatory purposes.
In regard to his function as a narrator of the novel, it should be kept in mind that Humbert speaks in two distinct and intertwined modes: his language reflects an obsessive and, indeed, deranged mind, as in the excessive doubled insistence on “immortal” in this passage; and it also deploys the extravagant resources of Nabokov, shrewd and witty observer and master stylist. One might note here the lovely precision of the adjective in “the crenulated imprint” and the wit of “my southbound mouth” to refer to the ultimate sexual destiny toward which the mouth is traveling. The two twelve-year-olds on the Riviera, it seems, were going a step beyond ordinary pre-adolescent fooling around. The wonderful concluding sentence goes on to strike a distinctively Nabokovian note. It is strongly reminiscent of at least a couple of sentences in Speak Memory, a book cast in its initial version not long before the composition of Lolita. The literary and, one could also say, stylistic recapture of the past was an urgent undertaking for Nabokov, splendidly achieved in Speak Memory, and in Lolita the intellectual joke of a “Freudian” childhood experience becomes also, at least at this moment, an emotionally fraught and joyous realization of the past returned in all its luminous presence.
This concert of surprising and vividly inventive effects in the passage, and elsewhere in the novel as well, leads me to propose an aspect of the readerly experience that one would certainly not expect in the narrative of a sexual abuser of young girls: for all the moral dubiety of the protagonist’s story, Lolita is a pleasure to read, and anyone who denies this is likely to be suffering from terminal moralism or bad taste. In this import-ant regard, we should consider the essential role of parody in this novel, because parody is also not something generally associated with the fictional portrayal of psychopaths.
Parody, of course, is pervasive in Nabokov’s novels. What its presence necessarily implies is that we must see the novel not as a direct representation of reality — a word, we should keep in mind, that for Nabokov must always be wrapped in scare quotes — but rather as a response to the world outside literature entirely mediated by literature, which is to say, both the novelist’s own literary contrivances and the variegated background of literary tradition on which he chooses to draw. As critics and scholars through the decades have abundantly shown, Nabokov constantly calls attention to the status of his fiction as literary artifice, executing what the Russian Formalists of the early twentieth century referred to as “laying bare the device.” Yet the double edge of this procedure as he practices it may be a little hard to get a handle on. Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister are ostentatiously self-reflexive novels, but they are also serious engagements with the horrors of totalitarianism, whose potential for the wholesale extirpation of humanity was all too evident during the years when they were composed. Much the same is true of the totalitarian state fantasized by Kinbote in Pale Fire. Nabokov’s early novel The Defense abundantly calls attention to its own artifices, as we would expect, but it is also a wrenching representation of a genius trapped in the world of chess that is the vehicle of his genius. One could extend this Nabokovian catalogue of grave human predicaments, historical or personal, confronted through the medium of self-reflexive fiction.
In Lolita, then, we get the probing portrait of a sexual deviant who kidnaps a girl-child and inflicts great harm on her that is conveyed through a novel which reminds us of its status as an invented fiction and plays quite exuberantly with literary tradition. Parody, again, is ubiquitous. It begins on the first page of the novel with the quotation from Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” a poem that lends the name Annabel Leigh to Humbert’s first love. Is she, after all, a “real” character in a novel or a kind of personified citation, Humbert living out the role of the male speaker in Poe’s poem? Allusions to Poe’s poem are scattered through the novel. The “winged seraphs” of the poem flit across these pages. Here is one especially telling instance: “I should have known (by the signs made to me by something in Lolita — the real child or some haggard angel behind her back) that nothing but pain and horror would result from the expected rapture. Oh, winged gentlemen of the jury!”
The parodies and satiric references in the novel include Merimée, A. E. Housman, T.S. Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, Pierre de Ronsard, and many other writers. The elaborate development of Clare Quilty as Humbert’s doppelgänger harks back to Dostoevsky’s The Double, the work of a writer whom Nabokov despised, as well as to Poe’s story “William William.” Parody is also deployed generically, as in the old romance story of the kidnapped child discovered through a birthmark, or in the desperate, farcical physical battle between Quilty and Humbert, about which he himself observes, “elderly readers will surely recall at this point the obligatory scene in the Westerns of their childhood.” All these allusions and parodic elements have a paradoxical effect. Humbert is an appallingly twisted figure repeatedly operating in a literary landscape evoked through his own rich background in culture high and low. In the climactic scene with Quilty, we do not cease to see him as a violently jealous lover seething with rage against the man who has stolen his beloved girl from him, but the scene, with its plethora of parodic literary and cinematic references, is also hilarious: fun and horror are interfused and unmediated. The aesthetic does not usurp the ethical, but the ethical is made to co-exist with the aesthetic, and in this way the reader is made to read complexly, and is never let off the hook.
Nabokov approaches two things with the utmost seriousness: the despicable act of sexually exploiting a child and the instrument of art through which the moral issue is represented. For all of the fun and games of his play with artifice, strong and moving emotions are expressed, as in the great moment near the end, when Humbert discovers the now pregnant Lolita with “her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and her goose-flesh white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits” (which earlier were called “pristine” when he watched her at tennis), and he can assert, “I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else.”
The defining dimension of art in Lolita must be kept in mind. Parody and the overlapping practice of allusion are essential to the adventure of the novel at the same time that they point again and again to its status as a work of literature. Allusion itself is intrinsic to the dynamic of most literature: you would scarcely think of writing a story or a novel or a sonnet or an epic if you had no familiarity with other such works, and allusion, through which you insert your own writing in the body of its predecessors, remaking them and often challenging them as you invoke them, is a recurrent method for the creation of new literature. Parody may be thought of as a special category of allusion, usually in a comic and critical vein. These twin processes in Lolita constitute an implicit affirmation of the artfulness of the novel, of the pervasive operation in it of literary art. That art is of course manifested in the spectacular prose that Nabokov creates for his deranged narrator, at times deliberately over the top in keeping with his derangement but very often brilliantly original, witty, finely lyrical, and on occasion quite affecting. Here is a moment when Humbert introduces circus performance as a metaphor for art — the same trope will recur in Ada — that suggests how artistic skill can convey the plight of a pathetic and unseemly character, which is precisely what his author has done for him: “We all admire the spangled acrobat with classic grace meticulously walking his tight rope in the talcum light; but how much rarer art there is in the sagging rope expert wearing scareclothes and impersonating a grotesque drunk!”
Lolita is the most troubling and touching representation of a morally grotesque figure in the fiction of the last century. At the very end of his painful story, in his prison cell, his death imminent, Humbert affirms that he has used his fleeting time to make Lolita “live in the minds of later generations.” He then goes on to proclaim these grand concluding lines: “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.” The very last word of the novel, as Alfred Appel has observed, is the same as the first, affirming a kind of architectonic unity for the novel as a whole. The reference in “aurochs” to the cave paintings of early man and in “angels, the secret of durable pigments” to Renaissance art set this narrative in the grand tradition of art going all the way back to prehistory, much of it still enduring. There is a certain ambiguity as to who is speaking here at the end. Of course, it has to be Humbert, reflecting on what turns out to be in the end the truly beloved human subject of his story as he senses his own end approaching. Yet his voice merges with Nabokov’s in the proclamation of the perdurable power of art.
Humbert Humbert is not Vladimir Nabokov: the point is worth emphasizing in our cultural circumstances. And the real identification of the novelist with his protagonist is not in regard to Humbert’s perversion, as some readers of the book have misguidedly imagined, but in the celebration of art as a fixative of beauty and feeling, anguish and love — as a fixative of humanity. It is this, finally, that lifts Lolita above the currents of shifting attitudes toward sexual exploitation or toward sex itself. The novel is obviously not a case study in perversion, as the highly parodic foreword by the fictional psychologist John Ray, Jr. would have it. It is also something more than a riveting fictional portrait of a repellently disturbed person. A murderer may have a fancy prose style, but in this instance the prose style turns out to be both arresting and evocative, at moments sublime, leading us to experience through the moral murk of the narrator a great love story that seeks to join the company of the cave paintings of Lascaux and the sublime angels of Giotto and Raphael, and nothing less.