Lolita at 62
November 3, 2008
[1955 cover from WikiMedia Commons]
Dolores Haze– the “nymphet” of Vladimir Nabokov’s greatest novel (rightfully found in many lists of best novels)– would be 62 this year… in America at least, where Lolita wasn’t published until 1958.
What would Dolores/Lolita be like today? Would she be a brassy, hyper-sexualized doyenne? A dolorous, quiet victim of years of Freudian psychotherapy? Would she have a Lolita of her own? The careful reader knows this is fiction on top of fiction, as Dolores, a.k.a. Lolita, a.k.a. “Mrs. Richard F. Schiller,” died giving birth to a stillborn girl on Christmas Day, 1952… not even a month after Humbert Humbert died in prison. How twisted is that fiction squared, the child giving birth to a dead girl child of her own and dying in the process? Emptiness come of emptiness.
Like many American men my age, my first experience with Lolita was as a young teen hoping for sex scenes that would justify the deeply forbidden atmosphere surrounding the book. I smuggled it out of the library and waited impatiently until everyone in the house was asleep before daring to retrieve the book from my book bag. My disappointment was immediate.
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta:
the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap,
at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”
What? I searched in vain for the keywords that had proved so rewarding in my worn copy of Clan of the Cave Bear. Nothing. Sure, Humbert recounts his first tryst with a girlfriend when he was young, but even– or perhaps especially– then, phrases like “I have her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion” resulted in disappointment. Whatever Lolita was, it wasn’t pornography.
Of course I returned to it years later, as many do. I’ve read it twice. Each time in awe at Nabokov’s ability to get inside the head of Humber Humbert, the creepy, conflicted, all-too-human narrator I always thought of as an old man was only 36 or 37– as of a few days ago younger than I am now! Exquisitely creepy, I tried to maintain the rational critical distance but couldn’t help but wonder about Nabokov. He must have thought about– and as– Humbert for a long, long time. How much of himself was in there? How much must writing that novel have twisted him?
Humbert Humbert, never tried but emphatically convicted. Victim of giving in to the fantasies we would label lurid but for that they are the stuff of everyman’s mind, recognized by and projected onto our culture but rarely admitted, much less discussed. The reality is, Humbert raises the spectre of guilty thoughts many men share to varying degrees. Had Lolita been a close relative, the disgust and dismissal would be easy. But the statutory dividing line of sexual legitimacy is a legal fiction not a biological or emotional reality. I’m not arguing against the idea of pedophilia, only pointing out that social mores change over time and the line that we draw has a Dolores Haze-y fringe.
Nabokov wisely made Lolita 12 years old, a child enough to provoke disgust but still at the higher end of the 10-13 year old age of consent that was the norm in Western countries as late as the mid-1800s. But even considering the reality of adult attraction to teens is verboten, the stuff of pornography sites none-too-subtle advertising. We are instead given to believe that recognizing the sexual attraction of an 18 year old is unwise, but recognizing that of the same girl a day before her 18th birthday is both unwise and unlawful. One day you would be a pedophile, the next day just an average consumer. Nabokov doesn’t need to be explicit in his descriptions; he doesn’t need to paint Humbert as an evil man… it is enough just to raise the queasy questions at all.
And as young as she is, Lolita is no “innocent.” She’s ultimately an empty set of acquired gestures, as much a victim of her mother’s jealousy as Humbert’s effete violence. She embodies the cruel attention coupled with a blithe lack of awareness that makes child beauty pageants a modern grotesque and demands that we irrationally attempt to legislate desire. Humbert isn’t just speaking of Lolita as a player, but as a woman, when he watches her play tennis:
Her tennis was the highest point to which I can imagine a young creature bringing the art of make-believe, although I daresay, for her it was the very geometry of basic reality.
The exquisite clarity of all her movements had its auditory counterpart in the pure ringing sound of her every stroke. The ball when it entered her aura of control became somehow whiter, its resilience somehow richer, and the instrument of precision she used upon it seemed inordinately prehensile and deliberate at the moment of clinging contact. Her form was, indeed, an absolutely perfect imitation of absolutely top-notch tennis–without any utilitarian results.
Is it any surprise that nothing in the brief lives of either Lolita or Humbert are destined to turn out well?
Yet in the end, the importance and power of Lolita is located beyond all of this, in a palace of super-charged, precise, fantastic language. As Humbert must admit:
Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!
Lolita the novel is important, not Lolita the character or symbol or moral lesson. It’s philosophically and psychologically interesting to see how Nabokov predicted the contemporary fetishization of adolescent girls but the continued relevance of the novel extends well past such contemporary concerns, Humbert’s obsession with “Lolita”– which is just a word– mirroring Nabokov’s obsession with words, delving deep into the heart of language at its most refined as aped by a human animal at its most primitive.
[Note: you might be interested in some thoughts about (and excerpts from) the collected correspondence of Nabokov and E. O. Wilson I posted a few years ago.]
Tags:
books, lolita, vladimir nabokov, writers, Writing
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