Posted on 08/18/2008 11:36:27 AM PDT by Borges
If Dolores Haze and Humbert Humbert were alive today, she would be 73, he 98, and that 25-year age difference wouldn't mean a thing.
But 50 years ago this month, (8/18/1958) when Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita was first published in the United States, its tale of a 37-year-old man obsessed with a 12-year-old girl was such a scandal that its title character's name entered the language as shorthand for a seductive teenager.
Poor Lo. Always misrepresented.
Nabokov's Lolita is nothing like the bottle-blond, lollipop-licking sex kitten played by Sue Lyon in the 1962 film directed by Stanley Kubrick (who, as was his habit, based his movie on the novel in only the very loosest sense). Nor does she bear much resemblance to the show-biz pop tarts and tramp-stamped bad girls often compared to her today.
The Lolita of the novel is a 12-year-old with unwashed auburn hair and grubby jeans, so uninterested in being seductive with Humbert that she picks her nose while sitting in his lap.
Humbert doesn't desire Lolita because she's a highly sexualized teenager but because she's a child. He is, as he tells the reader plainly if in high-flown language, a pedophile. He wants her not because she's a little hottie but because he believes she's an innocent.
The lascivious Lolita
Yet today the name Lolita evokes for most people a girl who knows she's sexy and uses it. Half a century of such misperceptions about Lolita and the novel that bears her name have inspired a new book, Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov's Little Girl All Over Again, by Graham Vickers.
Vickers, who has written books about architecture and a biography of another mid-20th century icon, Neal Cassady, surveys Lolita's many offspring: films (Kubrick's and a 1997 version by Adrian Lyne), plays (a musical by Alan Jay Lerner and John Barry, a drama by no kidding Edward Albee), operas, novels, comics, paintings, even a bizarre Japanese fashion cult called Lolita Gothic.
Vickers also looks at the book itself. Often decried as pornography, usually by people who haven't read it, Lolita contains not one explicit sex scene not even an obscene word. Its subject matter is certainly sexual, but it's sex veiled by the most elegant language.
Although banned for a time in England and France, Lolita was published in the United States by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 1958 without legal problems and became an immediate bestseller, garnering glowing reviews, selling 100,000 copies in the first three weeks and giving Nabokov his first and biggest commercial success after decades of writing fiction.
Vickers brings together many fascinating facts about Lolita's lasting influence, but he doesn't finally answer two questions: Why did the title character undergo such a dramatic change in the public's perception? And why, in the supposedly uptight and family-friendly 1950s, did the flamboyant tale of Humbert's seduction and exploitation of his subteen stepdaughter become a cultural phenomenon?
And the moral isn't
Certainly it must have seemed an unlikely subject for Nabokov.
The aristocratic, multilingual Russian expatriate was a legendary professor of literature at Cornell and an erudite devotee of chess and lepidoptery, the study of butterflies and moths.
Nabokov's theories of literature were controversial even before Lolita was published. He rejected the idea that novels ought to teach moral lessons; he considered ridiculous the notion that readers must empathize and identify with its characters for a novel to succeed.
To him, structure and language the art of the novel were far more important. His fiction, which also includes Ada, Pale Fire, Bend Sinister and Invitation to a Beheading, is marked by highly complex, experimental plot structures, a brilliantly polished prose style and intricate wordplay.
Lolita is his masterwork and most influential novel, shaping the work of generations of fiction writers, from John Updike and Thomas Pynchon to Michael Chabon and Zadie Smith. But Nabokov himself had doubts about it; his wife, Vera, snatched the manuscript from the flames after he tossed it into a backyard incinerator.
Nabokov knew its subject matter was incendiary, but he saw the book as a parody of romantic and confessional novels (Humbert tells us he's writing it from his jail cell). The author called it his most difficult book; it was an exercise in both his mastery of English and his ability, he said in a 1962 interview, to convincingly create a story "which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real."
The seduction of art
He did indeed. Humbert is one of the most dazzling examples of the unreliable narrator in all of literature. The novel comes to us entirely in his voice, which is cultured, witty, playful, observant and quite mad he mentions offhandedly his many stays in various mental asylums.
Humbert doesn't just seduce and carry away Lolita; he does it to the reader as well. He is such an accomplished storyteller that his obsession begins to sound plausible; outrageous as it seems, he even makes himself sound like a victim.
The novel begins in 1947, when America teetered on the brink of becoming the youth-obsessed culture it is today. The term "teenager" had been coined just three years earlier, and the baby boom, which began in 1946, was in its infancy.
The first tremors of that youthquake didn't escape Nabokov's notice. Although he claimed to disdain literary symbols, it's hard not to see Paris-born, scholarly Humbert as the old world and Lolita born in the Midwest and raised on movie magazines, pop music and junk food as the new. And the novel's meandering, yearlong, 27,000-mile car trip all over the United States is certainly Nabokov's paean to the undeniable (if sometimes vulgar) energy of his beloved adopted home.
It's also Humbert's report of his abduction of Lolita, whom he keeps under control, and in his bed, by alternately showering her with treats and threatening to send her to foster care or reform school.
More sinned against?
That phase of their relationship what happens after the ideal that Humbert is obsessed with becomes real is analyzed at length in another bestseller engendered by Nabokov's novel, Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, published in 2003.
Nafisi, an Iranian professor of literature who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University, writes about a private class she taught in her home in Tehran. Her students, all women, find freedom there, not just to remove the veils they must wear in public but to speak openly about books and about their lives.
The relationship between Lolita and Humbert does not shock Nafisi and her students as it does American readers. In Iran, she writes, the age of consent for girls is 9, and marriages between girls Lolita's age and men two, three or more decades older are legal and not uncommon.
That does not mean Nafisi's class approves of Humbert; indeed, they abhor him as a tyrant who selfishly robs the girl of her identity a plight they can identify with.
"The desperate truth of Lolita's story," Nafisi writes, "is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual's life by another. We don't know what Lolita would have become if Humbert had not engulfed her. Yet the novel, the finished work, is hopeful, beautiful even, a defense not just of beauty but of life, ordinary everyday life, all the normal pleasures that Lolita . . .was deprived of."
Perhaps, in an American culture that equates beauty and desirability with youth, it's inevitable that Lolita the little girl was transformed into Lolita the siren. Perhaps we have to see her that way because it's too heartbreaking to see her as she really was. Or perhaps Humbert, that elegant monster, has persuaded us to see her as he did, as a willful temptation responsible for her own fate. Victim or vixen, she haunts us still.
Macbeth is a story of murder. Would you brag about that?
I will say this — I’ve come to the conclusion that books are a dead art form.
A)They cannot compete with the electronic media in capturing the attention of the young.
B)Those parents who do instill a “love of reading” in their young do it for harmless crap.
C)The idea of a single author’s voice is quaint to the point of antique.
D) The number of people capable of reading a “difficult” book is rapidly shrinking.
E)The idea of a “dangerous book” is laughable.
Macbeth doesn’t celebrate murder as this story celebrates child sex.
Interesting. Having never read it, I never realized what the novel was really about. I’ll have to add it to my list.
I would argue that's not true at all. A beautifully composed sentence of trite nonsense is still just trite nonsense. For writing of great beauty to become a matter of great consequence, the pith of it must be seen as consequential.
I'm not a fan of art for art's sake. If the artist is unwilling or unable to talk to me on the substantive level that I demand, then I can't praise the artist except in the most superficial way. That said, superficially, Nabokov is a great artist.
It's a great work about an incredibly uncomfortable subject.
Have you read it? If you had you would know that it does no such thing. It doesn’t even mention child sex.
Julia Keller writing in the Chicago Tribune said a few years ago that Victorian novels like ‘Middlemarch’ are becoming unreadable to most people due to changes in langauge and pacing expectations.
Nabokov disliked the phrase ‘Art for Art’s sake’ since most of the people who used it like Oscar Wilde were actually ‘rank moralists’. Anyway, as I decribed ealier, he did deal with important issues. Read his ‘Lectures on Literature’ on writers like Austen , Dickens, Proust, Tolstoy. It’s illuminating.
“If you had you would know that it does no such thing. It doesn’t even mention child sex.”
It doesn’t need to. How can you possibly read a story of a 12 year old involved with a man and think that is a good thing?
It doesn’t claim it’s a good thing.
Books are becoming unreadable to most people. There is no interest in exploring the range of human emotions/flaws/foibles/follies/appetites etc.
However, there is a profound — nearly pathological — interest in the lives of the wealthy and having one’s own existing beliefs confirmed. These are jobs for electronic media.
“It doesn’t claim it’s a good thing.”
Was the story written to expose a bad thing? No, it celebrates pedophilia. Typical liberal trash: As long as the story is about loooovve. loooovve, loooovve, loooovve, frolic in the flowers and talk about loooovve. He loves her, how precious. loooovve, loooovve, loooovve.
The story was not about the demented aspects of pedophilia. It was about celebrating “love” for a child by an adult.
Nabokov didn’t write to ‘expose’ anything. It does not celebrate the beliefs and/or actions of the protagonist. Period. It uses the subject matter to deal with a great many other things that have nothing to do with pedophilia. You didn’t say if you had read it or not...if not then you’re arguing from a position of ignorance. As for liberal, Nabokov was a staunch anticommunist and a friend of William F Buckley.
Have you considered writing a novel yourself? You certainly have a way with words. ;)
It’s hilarious to use hippie rhetoric to describe a text written in the early 1950s that was actually a piece of glowing Americana.
I hear ya. My hunch is he hasn’t read it.
I hear ya. My hunch is he hasn’t read it.
“As for liberal, Nabokov was a staunch anticommunist and a friend of William F Buckley.”
We have RINOs who claim to be Republican, too. It is amazing how many people with hard-core liberal ideas think they are conservative because they are a hair to the right of their friends. Even Communists think of themselves as conservative.
A story of pediphilia told as a story of love is simply a story of pedophilia told to suckers who will look past the child rape aspect because they get teary-eyed. Go to court sometime and when the judge asks, “Did you have sex with that 12 year old?”, I don’t think you’ll get away with a flowery description of love that gets you off the hook.
Hey, that’s the first time I’ve ever double-posted. Yay! I’m a veteran FReeper now!
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