How a profoundly moral book became famous as libertine & immoral. A cruel joke that the mastery of language played on its author.
I thought long and hard about whether to use epithet “erotic” for Lolita at all. But there’s just no way around it. It is profoundly erotic. And this is exactly the cruel joke that the mastery of language played on Nabokov. He himself did not view Lolita as an erotic novel. He was wondering why the reader glides over the “tragedy of it all”. Or over elaborate descriptions of the North American nature or ways of life, he so painstakingly described. Yet, from the moment of its publishing, the novel has created both a “moralistic” uproar and a profound interest as an erotic book. Tons of movies Hollywood spewed out are a testament to that :).
Let me explain what I mean by the mastery of language’s cruel joke. Lolita is one of the pinnacles of linguistic esthetics, for sure. Its language is exceptionally refined and delicious.
Rabbit-hole. Mind you, Nabokov’s native language is Russian. But he wrote Lolita in English first and then rewrote it in Russian. So, the English Lolita is NOT a translation. Not even an auto-translation. It is the original.
Now, imagine erotic scenes written in this exquisite, refined, allegorical, and yet clear way. Actually, why imagine? Find the “couch scene” and read it:
Let her stay, let her stay . . . As she strained to chuck the core of her abolished apple into the fender, her young weight, her shameless innocent shanks and round bottom, shifted in my tense, tortured, surreptitiously laboring lap; and all of a sudden a mysterious change came over my senses. I entered a plane of being where nothing mattered, save the infusion of joy brewed within my body. What had begun as a delicious distention of my innermost roots became a glowing tingle which now had reached that state of absolute security, confidence and reliance not found elsewhere in conscious life. With the deep hot sweetness thus established and well on its way to the ultimate convulsion, I felt I could slow down in order to prolong the glow. Lolita had been safely solipsized. 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-barmen ditty that no longer reached my consciousness.
No wonder readers are mesmerised by the eroticism.
But as one ages and re-reads the novel, it begins to show an attentive, aged and, hopefully, wiser reader all its facets.
While you read your way through the novel, all the way to its culmination scene (I will tell you which one it is in a moment), I urge you to keep in mind an idea. Certainly, this idea is just one of many ways to view the narration, but it is an interesting and contemporary one. Here it is: in our day and age, we ascribe high value to therapy (psychological one, that is). It is supposed to make us understand ourselves well enough as to be able to shape ourselves into better humans by way of introspective revision of our thoughts and actions, and their improvement, as a result. Now, I put to you that Lolita completely dismisses the premise that it is possible and makes an elaborate mockery of it.
Watch how Humbert Humbert psychoanalyzes himself every step of the way. Watch how clear his perception is, and yet how easily he rationalizes away the guilt, while he is with Lolita. It is like reading Marquise’s de Sade Justine, but if it had internal, not external dialogs and was… well… much better written :).
Also, observe how Humbert taunts and deceives the psychiatrists who treated him. It’s really all a game. Obviously, the author didn’t hold psychology or psychiatry in high regard.
And now – to the apex of the novel, its bestest scene, the scene that makes it profoundly moral and clearly shows the author’s take on all he has described.
When, after having lost Lolita, Humbert finally finds her, has a brief encounter with her and her husband, and then drives to find and kill her second abuser, he stops on the curb of a road overlooking a small town. And this is what runs through his head then:
At this solitary stop for refreshments between Coalmont and Ramsdale (between innocent Dolly Schiller and jovial Uncle Ivor), I reviewed my case. With the utmost simplicity and clarity I now saw myself and my love. Previous attempts seemed out of focus in comparison.
[…]
There was the day, during our first trip—our first circle of paradise—when in order to enjoy my phantasms in peace I firmly decided to ignore what I could not help perceiving, the fact that I was to her not a boy friend, not a glamour man, not a pal, not even a person at all, but just two eyes and a foot of engorged brawn — to mention only mentionable matters. There was the day when having withdrawn the functional promise I had made her on the eve (whatever she had set her funny little heart on—a roller rink with some special plastic floor or a movie matinee to which she wanted to go alone), I happened to glimpse from the bathroom, through a chance combination of mirror aslant and door ajar, a look on her face . . . that look I cannot exactly describe . . . an expression of helplessness so perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortable inanity just because this was the very limit of injustice and frustration—and every limit presupposes something beyond it—hence the neutral illumination. And when you bear in mind that these were the raised eyebrows and parted lips of a child, you may better appreciate what depths of calculated carnality, what reflected despair, restrained me from falling at her dear feet and dissolving in human tears, and sacrificing my jealousy to whatever pleasure Lolita might hope to derive from mixing with dirty and dangerous children in an outside world that was real to her.
This scene is the measure of all things in Lolita. Humbert clearly sees what he is to her. He also clearly sees that he would have done it all again if he had a chance. No amount of intelligent introspection can change a person’s true nature.
This is just ONE glimpse into the many faces of this wonderful book. Read it, then put it aside for 5-10 years and read it again. I promise you, you will read an entirely different book then. Experiment with intervals 😉
Happy reading!