Amazingly, Penguin in the UK very recently managed to publish an edition of the novel that cut the foreward because they didn’t realise this was part of Nabokov’s text. They had to pulp the run once the mistake was pointed out.
That’s true, but then again isn’t that how most men act toward the objects of their sexual interest? We call it “seduction” when the target is age-appropriate and “grooming” when she is not.
(Again, I am not excusing Humbert- just pointing out how words like “groom” and “victim” put a particular spin on the story not necessarily contained within the story itself.)
Well, Lolita isn’t of an age where it would be appropriate, so I’m not really sure what the point is.
None of this would be morally wrong if Lolita was age appropriate. If we add in what’s age appropriate, the entire premise changes.
The point is that describing the story with loaded words boxes in the narrative. I think the author left things with more room for interpretation and ambiguity.
Which is why it’s a great novel. If it’s just the story of some perv perving on a girl, as told from the perv’s perspective, and the perv is Evil, and the girl is Good until he corrupts her, well, that’s just not a very interesting story.
I don’t think the story is supposed to be ambiguous, though. What makes it great isn’t whether or not Humbert is an abusive creep–it’s the language.
Humbert comes into her life accidentally and manipulates her into a relationship. At first all is good, remarkably happy in fact. Humbert pretends at first to be twisted around her little finger. But he soon tires of that game and starts putting his foot down. He loves being bossed by her, he says, but really, American women are too bossy and the man must be master of the household. Then a truth is revealed and recriminations start. She attempts to escape, with a disastrous ending.
Who is she? She is Charlotte, Dolores’ mother. If you read that as Humbert’s life with Lolita, you’re right as well. And surely that should be a clue. This book is nowhere near anything as simple as a pervert with a young girl. She is not even the subject of the novel.
The subject of the novel, I would argue (and that’s the last time I’ll say that, but assume it for every line), is America. Lolita is a satire about America. It uses sex as a way to effect that satire but the satire is always foremost.
Nabokov was an exile, an immigrant to America. He had already written a version of this book, and threw it away before he arrived. That’s because he found that the true subject was not the relationship but what the relationship said about the world it was set in. What is the first thing that happens after Charlotte dies? Humbert takes Lolita out of school and exiles her in a strange world, the world of mid-continental America, a bizarre and totally un-European expense of motor hotels and consumerism and faux historic sites and milk bars. That section, so central to the book, is mostly neglected today because it is a world now without any resonance for even Americans. It is Nabokov’s world, though, one discovered by him on his butterfly hunting forays across the country. It fascinated, delighted, and appalled him, just as Lolita’s behavior would Humbert’s on the trip. Everything about the novel can be read twice in this fashion.
Marley made the apt and extremely important comment that every name in the book is a pseudonym. Yes, all the characters are hiding their true selves - there can be nothing less in a Nabokov novel. (And there is a whole chapter, Part II:23, of the pseudonyms used in her second whirlwind tour of America with Claire Quilty.) But it’s also true that America is legendarily the land in which old world names are discarded, old identities are shed, and new lives can be invented of whole cloth. America is the land of the new, and also the land with no history (see faux above), no traditions, no depth. It is a shallow world inhabited by the most shallow people, and the women are the shallowest of all. Humbert is European and represents all those virtues to the shallow adult women he encounters. He is not a dirty old man, though. He is all of 37. (Quilty is 36. Charlotte is in her mid-30’s.)
All these duplicates are not items to check on an English paper. They are integral to the book. The very structure of the book is of a series of distorting mirrors, which reflect previous events grotesquely, the lost Annabel Leigh most prominently.
Annabel Leigh! Holy English Lit, Batman. I’ve never taken Lolita in a course but I hope any prof worthy of the name would immediately pull out Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee and quote its second verse:
Um, wow. Read the rest of the poem. Then go back to Lolita. I’ll give you time or the chills to subside. (Annabel Lee/Leigh. Doppleganger!)
How does Charlotte die? In a car accident? How does Lolita’s childhood die? In a car trip that takes her to room 342 (also their house number!) of The Enchanted Hunters hotel.
And why were they sleeping in a double bed rather than the twin beds that fastidious fake father Humbert had picked out? A religious convention was in town and that was the only room left!
I’ve read the novel several times, but not for many years. Many things popped out of me as I flipped through pages, but as noted, there are entire journals of Nabokov Studies devoted to picking the carcass. I’m just trying to intimate that looking at Lolita as older man in an “inappropriate relationship” with a young girl loses everything that gives the book depth, that keeps it alive when much of its satire is forgotten, that conveys so much more. (Every relationship of every character in the book is inappropriate.) Ambiguous doesn’t begin to cover it. Nothing is as it seems. Not a line, not a scene, not an event, not a character, not a name, not the culture or the larger world. Certainly the language is memorable, certainly Humbert is an amazing literary creation. You may read it for that the first time through with great reward. If you do go back, however, treat it as a hologram. Each part captures a piece of the whole which can gauzily be viewed. By the end you’ll have seen the whole through 360 degrees, a three dimensional book rather than a two-dimensional one.
Who seduced who? Who is the villain? Who is the unreliable narrator? I think there are bigger questions to play with. Because it is a bigger book.
That’s an important point. Lolita herself is a metaphor for America. A young nation just on the cusp of maturity, alluring and yet appalling to the European mind.
In this context, what does it mean that Quilty starts spouting French when Humbert confronts him? 
I don’t know if you are doing it intentionally or not, but this was a common analysis contemporary with the release and one that infuriated Nabokov. 
Great discussion. Nabokov is one of my favorite writers. I think the OP hit on a very important about re-reading; I’ve found every trip through the book is different and there was one I particularly didn’t enjoy, where all of Humbert’s humor fell flat and I was hyper-aware of the artifice of the narrative. VN would have said that is when I finally got it, I guess.
Fantastic post, Exapno Mapcase, and I hope you’ve got more of those in store. I do have a minor correction here:
It turned out Nabokov did not destroy this story. He found it among his papers, and after he died it was published as The Enchanter.
No I honestly did not know that. That’s funny. Well, happy to set the old boy spinning in his grave. He needed the exercise!
What’s the difference between loving someone and thinking you love someone?
As well as of course being referenced in the name of the lodge mentioned above. Plus alluding to the “who is seducing whom” debate in that sometimes it is the Enchanted Hunter while other times the Hunted Enchanter.
This is in the postscript to the annotated version.
Upton Sinclair wrote that with The Jungle, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”
What Nabokov intended, even with the care he lavished on the book, is not necessarily what readers take out of it. Given that a half century has passed, it certainly isn’t.
That same essay that people have been quoting (and contained the destroyed the original manuscript quote) is a 1956 piece that was appended to the original paperback edition. (Probably elsewhere, too, but that’s where most people read it, including me.) In it, Nabokov refutes those who called the book “anti-American.” I agree, but I also assert that it absolutely a satire on America, and many people confuse satire with attack.
He ends by lamenting that he had to give up his “untrammeled, rich and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses - the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions - which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.” This is, simply put, horseshit. If you believe this, you will believe anything. The same goes for the rest of the essay and everything Nabokov says about anything. And every other writer too. They are professional liars, to quote Lawrence Block. Believe your own eyes.
Whom are you asking?
Everyone in the thread. The idea that Lolita wasn’t really in love, she just ‘thought she was’, has been mentioned a few times and I really don’t think there’s a difference.
Well, I think if you grow up so damaged that for you, abuse and love are intertwined, then maybe you don’t know what love is. And I think that Lolita is essentially a textbook example of someone growing up that way. In the case of Humbert, I think she had a crush on him that ended with him exploiting her and in the case of Quilty she saw what she thought would be escape from constant sexual abuse.
It depends on how you define love. I have two definitions that I find satisfying in different moods.
One is that love is the state of mind in which the well-being, both physical and spiritual, of another person is essential to the lover’s peace of mind.
The other is that love is a concatenation of affection, respect, trust, and lust.
I’ll have to give some thought to whether I think Dolores truly loved Quilty.
There is absolutely nothing in the book that supports that. She seems perfectly fine with Quilty sexually abusing her. Hell, she professes her love for him. It’s only when he wants her to appear on camera having sex with boys her age that she rebels. Never does she express shock or surprise that Quilty had a sexual interest in her.