Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

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 as 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