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.
Ole Vlad WAS a hippie. I submit the following:
A)Of Russian heritage. He was from a communist country!
B)His obsession was butterflies — a well known symbol of hippies.
C)He wrote poems! Pale Fire.
D)He lived in France for a time.
E) He knew Peter Sellers, a well known actor famous for playing hippies wearing lovebeads. Lovebeads!
F) He lived in Ithaca, a hippie stronghold.
i think lolita is a creepy, dreadful book. i hated the writing and i still
feel nabokov wrote it because he was at least a latent pedophile.
i’m a fan of joyce, austen, proust, waugh, twain, flaubert, etc., so i am
not unlettered. but i really did not catch the beauty of the book.
i must admit, the opening sequence of the kubrick movie, with james
mason going after peter sellers is highly entertaining. but rest of
the movie misses point of the book.
WIFE-O-BUCKHEAD
Of course. Anyone who has read the book knows that Humbert just wanted to be a father figure to her. ;)
I’ve never read the third book in that trilogy; I will have to check it out. Thank you.
The ‘Love Story’ angle was a marketing invention not something Nabokov said nor something the book conveys. He intended it as a metaphor for a love of Americana and the English language.
It’s extremely difficult! He was writing his version of a Russian family chronicle like Anna Karenin.
It’s implied but never described. That’s the difference between literature and porn.
G) Lolita was directed by Stanley Kubrick, another immigrant from a COMMUNIST COUNTRY who grew up in The Bronx, just blocks — BLOCKS! — from where Leon Trotsky had once lived.
H)He moved to this country and didn’t even his the decency to change his name to something American, like Steve or Howard.
Not all morality tales are from the positive perspective. You can have a good story about bad people which thus tells it’s not a good thing but tells you that in a good way.
Lolita isn’t about sex with kids being a good thing, it’s about it very much being a bad thing. That’s what makes it a good story.
Kubrick was born in NYC.
For me, the most important scene in the movie is the last one. Lolita has married a young lunk named Biff (or Baff, I can't remember, and neither can Humbert). They've set up household in a tiny apartment, and are planning to move to Alaska.
Lolita has become just a normal housewife. She's lost her power, and seems just utterly normal and unremarkable. The spell is broken for Humbert. She's become exactly what he'd hoped to save her from. She's no longer on a pedistal, and can never again be on a pedistal of any kind.
Humbert loved Lolita as a goddess, a symbol, and she was just a typical American kid. She had no comprehension of what he saw in her.
That’s pretty much on the money. The Kubrick film also rather softened the books grim ending.
apparently nabokov was molested at age 12 by his mother’s brother
who was 37 at the time. apparently, the man molested him numerous
times and then left nabokov his fortune when he died. also, flaubert
was not a closet adulterer. he was simply an adulterer. just finished
a bio on him.
Thanks.
For what it's worth, I thought it was a brilliant movie, and I assume the book is brilliant as well. At least, if you consider it "brilliant" to have chosen one of the most intimate and mysterious aspects of the human condition, analyzed it to perfection, and then built a story that is funny, tragic, and unforgettable around that analysis.
Humbert, in middle age, thinks he's discovered what's best in life, and tries to grab it and put it in a little bell jar to enjoy forever. The transcendent splendor that delights him is owned by a little bozo who values nothing other than makeup, movie stars, and rock n' roll music. She squanders his treasure while he's trying to build a shrine around it.
Also funny, as I recall, is her husband, to whom Humbert is this old man who is somehow related to his wife. The fact that he was once involved with her in a romantic sense goes right over his head; he can't imagine that this old fart is any kind of a rival. Perhaps because Lolita never took him seriously; the audience is left to wonder.
Hmmm...
Sounds daunting, but I will still give it a go. Thanks!
i have yet to read a bio on an important writer whose life is not
intimately reflected in their writing. again, i’m speaking of flaubert,
joyce, fitzgerald, cheever, twain, waugh. granted, i’m simply posting
my feelings for nabokov. i also dislike henry miller and
tropic of capricorn. norman lear is universally regarded as a genius
for creating archie bunker, however, i never laughed at or enjoyed
the show. i found it to be a horror.
Kubrick was born in NYC.
...or so the Soviets would have liked us to believe!
that’s a point of view that Nabokov used to poke fun at in his lectures. What does anyone really know about Shakespeare, Tolstoy (before he became a moralist) and so forth. Henry Miller’s work is unsubtle and sexually explicit. Nabokov’s is most defeintely not. You seem to dislike anti-heroes.
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