Lolita at 50

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.

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.

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?

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."

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.

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.

we know a lot about hemingway, faulkner, fitzgerald, balzac, poe, alcott,
etc. others we know less about. i find it amazing when writers claim their
writing(particularly graphically violent or sexual) is no reflection on
themselves. are picasso’s feelings about women not reflected in his
paintings? do composers claim their music has nothing to do with them?
you cannot make people feel things artistically without feeling them yourself.

WIFE-O-BUCKHEAD

depends on who anti-hero is-i always liked the ramones and sex pistols!

you cannot make people feel things artistically without feeling them yourself.

That won't do for a highly stylized Courtly Love lyric or the Icelandic Sagas. :-) I don't know how much Bach's music tells us about him. We thought we knew Poe for a long time until scholars came to realize that a lot of his fiction is satirical.

Anyway Lolita takes no position on the subject matter it's simply used to examine other issues.

We thought we knew Poe for a long time until scholars came to realize that a lot of his fiction is satirical.

Wow. I thought I was the only one who noticed a brilliantly subtle sense of humor in everything Poe wrote, and I don't just mean his tales of comedy. Even in his tales of horror, he often employed the syntax and diction of a great work of comedy. In fact, in virtually any Poe horror piece, you'll find sentences that are so structurally hysterical that you'll laugh in spite of yourself.

Poe was a true genius of comedy, and he gets so little recognition for that. I very much enjoyed your post -- and this thread!

i find it amazing when writers claim their
writing(particularly graphically violent or sexual) is no reflection on themselves.

It may be a reflection on the artist, but it’s also a fun house mirror. And, let’s face it, people are morons. They read something or see a painting and take it literally.

I would hope that his intent was comic because a sentence as laden with 'dread' as this had to be intended as funny...

"During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher."

i thought that said courtney love lyric and i was going to comment that she was no artist. i see courtly love as a bit of theater or acting. i do think actors are
the one group of artists who don’t reflect themselves. although we study
courtly love in literature i do think of it as the artifice of the theater. and, the
artiface of the writer is evident.

WIFE-O-BUCKHEAD

It did not celebrate pedophilia. It is Humbert Humbert's destruction. As is the case in much of Nabakov's work, primal lust is destructive. You've not read the book, that is clear. It is not about loooovve, loooovve.

If anything, the story probably bothers you because it does humanize Humbert Humbert. Sorry, but one of the most disturbing things in the real world is that evil people are human. I remember hearing an interview with Hitler's secretary in which she said that many times she considered suicide because she knew the evil that he was doing but the man she knew would tell jokes, play with his dog, u.s.w.

It's a disturbing work. It's a disturbing world.

By many accounts the great American novel of the 20th century.

It has a place on the shelf with Gravity's Rainbow, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Absalom! Absalom! and a hundred or so others.

Your namesake wasn't too shabby either. He wrote more in twenty pages than most "novelists" write in their entire body of work.

If Humbert and Lolita were alive today Nabokov would have come up with another end to the novel. But never mind that...

A brilliant work, but I do think that one of Nabokov's literary tenets was called into question within its pages, namely that a novel need not contain a character with whom the reader empathizes. One spends the entire time attempting to empathize with Humbert and only in that attempt experiences the full force of the dissolution of his personality. He is a classically tragic character in a very funny novel. Part of the critical ambivalence in assessing his character is, I think, a reaction on the part of the reader to this more or less hopeless attempt to empathize with a most unempathetic fellow.

Plainly Humbert is not in love with Dolly at first, but with some idealized projection - of what, purity? Innocence? - that isn't at all like the girl she turns out to be. And yet Nabokov convinces us that Humbert does, in fact, succeed in loving the real person in the end, and one of the ironies of this supremely ironic treatment is that it is the genuine love that kills him.

Dolly turns out to be, to absolutely no one's surprise except that of Humbert himself, a crass, manipulative adolescent not beneath playing Humbert like a cheap violin. It is ridiculous - without Nabokov's literary brilliance these two unlikable characters would populate a sordid little melodrama by now forgotten altogether. But it isn't forgotten at all, and despite my every intention not to I do like them, just a little. An author good enough to pull that one off has my complete admiration.

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