The Ultimate Subversion: Lolita (1955)
By Yoojin Shin
This review contains minor spoilers
Lolita (Vintage Books, 1977; originally published by Olympia Press, 1955), by now, is an indisputable, although controversial, classic of Russian literature—and the novel that, arguably, raised Vladimir Nabokov to the ranks of his legendary predecessors like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Pushkin. Like Dostoevsky’s musical, sprawling, and epic tales, Lolita manages to feel immense in scope and lyrical in its execution; however, unlike Dostoevsky, Nabokov was a naturalized American, and his prose reflects a curious, and rather diabolical, fuse between Old Europe and the newness of America.
Some contemporary reviewers of Lolita have commented upon this fuse and exclaimed that the first part of the novel was “Old Europe debauching young America,” or “Young America debauching old Europe” (314). Indeed, the story of Mr. Humbert Humbert (a humorous but brilliant pseudonym) is a retrospectively narrated tale of an aging French immigrant—captivated by his old, rotting past—being confronted by a young, sumptuous greenery and expansiveness of America. Dolores Haze, a young, rosy American child of twelve, is perhaps the most striking part of that greenery, the well-watered summer lawn of widow Mrs. Charlotte Haze where Mr. Humbert first encounters the young nymphet—darling Dolly with honeyed shoulders, Lo, Lolita.
According to the New York Times report, the psychological roots of pedophilia can be traced to prenatal developments in the womb. Pedophilia, then, is likely to be biological condition, which confronts its patients with a deviant clinical urge—an urge which overtakes Mr. Humbert’s life from early adulthood. But does the classification of pedophilia as a biological disease lessen its criminality? Does the helplessness of the perpetrator make them less of a villain?
Interestingly, however, how we should face pedophilia—or pederosis, as Mr. Humbert says, which somewhat dulls its criminal connotations through its sister-relation to pederasty, actively practiced in Ancient Greece and Rome as a method of sexual education—is not the main trouble, or debate, present within this novel. Lolita is not a novel with a lesson, or as Nabokov more eloquently puts, he is “neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction” (314). In writing Lolita, Nabokov did not aim to condemn Mr. Humbert, the rapist, pedophile, and murderer; rather, Lolita delves deeper, to a murkier plane of emotions, where definitions, classifications, and boundaries are no longer clear.
Mr. Humbert Humbert is an unreliable narrator who is devoured by his own feelings and desires. This unreliability of Mr. Humbert’s narration is not an unmentioned secret ripe for literary interpretations, because towards the end of the novel, Mr. Humbert declares it outright: “it was always my habit and method to ignore Lolita’s states of mind while comforting my own base self” (287). Indeed, the reader is completely blocked from the inner workings of Lo’s mind, and is left to speculate. However, Lolita is not a legal document, but a novel, which is why this subjectivity does not take anything away from Humbert’s engrossing tale, delivered in his moody, self-absorbed, and self-pitying writing—a reflection of Nabokov’s masterful, lyrical command of the English language. By the end, Humbert’s side of the story succeeded in convincing me that he truly did love Dolores Haze in twisted, manifold ways: as a father, a lover, and a captor.
Humbert’s unreliable, but nevertheless convincing, tale of love produced a rather surprising and chilling effect: a sense of deep sympathy with his life. I frequently found myself despairing over Humbert’s unrequited infatuation, peeved over Lolita’s unabashed derisiveness, and irritated by the meaningless clutter of Lolita’s surroundings. But such bloated, dreamy understanding was often subject to loud punctures of reality, with the sudden realizations that Lolita was, in fact, a pubescent child, strung along a life of sexual slavery across the vast void of the American continent. These realizations—carefully timed by Nabokov, I am certain—left a hollow, sickening feeling in my stomach, which is impressive in and of its own: it was the first time in my life that I had gotten such a visceral reaction to written material.
When Dolores escapes Humbert’s reach, he composes a poem, a part of which is quoted below:
“Oh Dolores, that juke-box hurts!
Are you still dancin’, darlin’?
(Both in worn levis, both in torn T-shirts,
And I, in my corner, snarlin’).
Happy, happy is gnarled McFate
Touring the States with a child wife,
Plowing his Molly in every State
Among the protected wild life.
My Dolly, my folly! Her eyes were vair,
And never closed when I kissed her.
Know an old perfume called Soleil Vert?
Are you from Paris, mister?” (256).
Mr. Humbert Humbert’s love is manic, consummate, obsessive, self-absorbed, and finally, criminal. But this sort of love is not exclusive to pedophiles; rather, it is ubiquitous around us, in corrosive expressions of desire that can inflict ruinous consequences in its recipients. Which begs the question: what is love? Who is it defined by? Is it love if it’s considered as one by its giver? Or must its recipient consider it love as well? Answers to such questions are beyond me.
The scenic American backdrops of the novel are astutely, humorously described, albeit also in an unreliable way. It pokes frank, verging on sadistic, fun at the pink fat men, the garrulous and self-absorbed women, the trashiness of popular entertainment; but it also provides illustrious and lyrical descriptions of the great American West, the infinite stretch of highways, the mauve-tinted mountains, crunchy gravel of the side roads, and the motor courts, which bring Mr. Humbert and Lolita’s long journeys across America to breathing, shuddering life. It’s difficult and uncomfortable to imagine that such landscapes—the sways of wild grass, the beaten roadside shrubberies—concealed the debauchery of Humbert’s ruinous love with small Lolita.
Mr. Humbert Humbert and Dolores Haze meet their respective fictional deaths in 1952, the former during his legal captivity and the latter during her childbirth. Such fictional deaths are described by the equally fictional foreword to the novel—penned by the fictional John Ray, Jr. Ph.D.—a fitting end to the maddening whirlwinds of Humbert and Lolita’s lives. But as was Humbert’s purpose in writing down his confession, Lolita immortalizes their brief time together and makes its readers ponder about the varied intentions and consequences of love, in its most grotesque types and expressions.
Yoojin Shin is a writer, editor, and translator who has been nurturing a lifelong love for the creative arts. After accumulating an eclectic range of experiences in journalism, academia, and the fine arts, she launched the Baram House with Natalie Anderson over a plate of cheesecake. You can follow her personal journey on her Instagram (@yoojinshin1) and on her website (www.yoojin-shin.com).
