Lolita at 50: She’s Finally Legal

By Emily Ghods-Esfahani | Friday, October 13, 2006

Editor’s Note: This past year marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. To cap off Lolita’s anniversary, The Dartmouth Review presents the following retrospective.

It seems to be a calling-card, an intellectual gold-card of sorts to lay claim to having accomplished—that is to have read—Lolita. Most people then stick this accomplishment behind their ears, like a cigarette, to be smoked later on such social occasions as deemed necessary, or more to the point, cool and taboo. Others, as Garrison Keillor may put it, stick it like a gold hairpin above the leveled heights of mediocrity; a bit naughty wouldn’t you say? But to read the book for the saucy parts: that Lolita is a sexy scandalous underage vixen, the scent of whom turns a bookish professor into a repeat offender; that the book is scandalous; that the theme is a parody of American society, etc—is to miss the point of Nabokov’s literature and high-minded art. And, of course, to misunderstand the purpose of art is to misunderstand something very fundamental about the human soul, about the self—about yourself.

As a great artist, Nabokov is exquisitely concerned with the individual—the trials and motivations of being launched into the world as it is. Lolita is not a book about politics. It is certainly not a parody of American “society,” as some reviewers, crippled by Marxist lit-crit would have it. Instead, like its classical peers, the Divine Comedy, Hamlet, even The Great Gatsby—like any illustrious literature deserving the word—it is the moral journey of one individual, faltering gravely, bearing the weight of a remorse that doesn’t resolve in these cynical times.

Redemption? Humbert is afforded no such glory or grace, skipping right over limbo, he falls deeper and deeper into an abyss that eventually fades from sight, swallowing all light, virtue and goodness. As the pages of Lolita turn, the souls of Lolita and Humbert are lifted out of this moral and otherwise impregnable abyss and in their exposure their essence remains to touch another human soul, the reader’s soul, the moral voyeur: Nabokov is our Virgil.

So let’s define the terms and consider the blue-print. Indubitably, the European-born professor, Humbert Humbert, the narrator, is a lost soul, a wander. His pleasure is limited to sexual pleasure, concupiscence, and that to titillating coquettes he imagines between the misty palisades of 9 and 12 years old; or, nymphets as he sublimates them into his abysmal fantasy.

But Humbert’s fantasy of nymphet-love is a dream, and like all dreams, he will awaken as the sun rises to expose his world and his pitiful place in it. He reminds the reader, only at reform schools and orphanages can, “pale pubescent girls with matted eyelashes be stared at in perfect impunity remindful of that granted one in dreams.” The beauty of the language carries the affliction of the thought into the dream world of fiction, into the innocent mind.

So the Fates scheme: Humbert finds his way through life into an apartment in New Hampshire (made famous, it is said, by its association with one Dartmouth College, a haven of solitary types with a shine for translating the poetry of Catullus) whose landlady’s daughter is the hazy, doleful Dolores Haze, not yet a debutante but a coquette, Lolita.

With his knees “like reflections of knees in rippling water,” Humbert stumbles, like “Adam at the preview of early oriental history, miraged in his apple orchard.”

Initially, Humbert is ridding-high-and-stiff across the United States with his child-wife after Lolita’s mother dies in a freak accident (a promiscuous fate). Humbert slips away with his prize, the fleshy, pouty Lolita. It soon becomes clear that Lolita could not now and never will love Humbert, as the love he seeks is not love but the corruption of desire and the self; she honestly denies him the “dim and adorable regions” of her soul while she passively submits the lusty terrain of her body to the odd pleasure of Humbert.

At one point, when Lolita is feeling feverish and Humbert offers his coital prophylactic, she pleas, “you can kiss me, but please not like that.” Humbert hears her sobs every night, and yet takes sardonic pleasure in the delusion that rouses him to muse, “you see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.” Humbert, deluded by the passions of the flesh and corruptions of the heart, replaces the world she inherited with himself, and in so doing gnarls the moral spine of a young girl.

Then the fates resume their chug-a-lug-a motion, choke off his impossible dream, and drop the heaving Humbert into a moral wasteland where “everything is soiled, torn, dead.” Humbert curses, even blames the fates, who melt time—his time with Lolita—such that it trickles away from him; and he learns that inasmuch as you cannot resist the physical laws of nature, equally, you cannot defy the moral laws that are attached to humanity. Discreetly, either could have defeated him, but the fate of the professor is such that, in the end, both will.

It’s true that the-human-soul-in-shambles is exposed in Lolita, and sex provides the ideal medium to express this too-familiar fact. When Lolita’s teacher anatomizes the act of love as, “mammalian reproduction” and “mutually satisfactory mating,” is it a wonder that a man of forty is engaging in “sexual congress,” satisfying himself with an unsatisfied girl of 12?

Yet, Lolita is not a book about amorality; it’s a book about immorality, and by virtue of its being immoral, it reminds the reader of what it means to be moral and compassionate. Certainly Humbert is no Faust, but neither is he Bill Clinton; he will not hang on the meaning of “is” in his moral exchange. To merely conclude that Lolita is a shoulder-shrug to moral tawdriness, and dismiss Humbert’s act accordingly would be like concluding that the solution to moral crisis is decadence—after all, Nabokov’s prose is gloriously rich. No, even Humbert knows the consequences of what he’s done, “my soul [was] actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent.” At one point in the novel, Humbert supplies the reader with Lolita’s thoughts. They are speaking about a former lover of Lolita’s: “He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.”

Humbert’s ultimate penance to his destroyed Dolly is to immortalize her in his pages, to create and compose. Yet initially, his devouring of her is so complete that the reader can only catch the odd glimpse of Lolita through Humbert’s encumbered understanding of a girl as a nymphet: the delicate outline of cheek-bones; musky youthful scents and aromas; acute vulnerability outdone by precocious courage. But at the end of the book, as Humbert realizes the “world of total evil” he’s created, flashes of Lolita penetrate his dark musings, and these scenes are beautiful because they reveal a gentility and softness uncharacteristic of the Lolita we’ve known heretofore.

He remarks that once he heard Dolly reason out, “you know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own’; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind.” Even sadder is that by her own definition, Lolita is dying throughout the novel. She’s a waif, who loses the honeyed and auburn glow of her childhood—without blemish at the onset of the novel. By novel’s end, she has drains into washed-out grey eyes, vacant gestures and wanton misbehavior.

Humbert, though little more than a shadow of a man, is capable of thoughts of great beauty. He hears the “melody of children at play” and reflects “I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.” Humbert knows that he is outside the laws of man and nature—the most basic of which, the golden rule, requires an abject selflessness foreign to Humbert. His own pain as well as that which he inflicted on another is captured in not only the darkness that shrouds him, but in the beauty of the language that penetrates it.

Humbert miserably remarks, “unless it can be proven to me—to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction—that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke [can we be tempted to quip, ‘and life is not a joke’?]), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art. To quote an old poet: ‘the moral sense in mortals is the duty/we have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.”

And mortality is at the prethrombotic heart of Lolita. Death drips off each page as characters die of Typhus, cancer, freak-wrecks, coronary thrombosis, and finally (initially, actually, for the close reader), Lolita dies in childbirth, along with her child. The reader learns in the preface that Lolita, Mrs. Richard F. Schiller, married to a Richard F. Schiller by the time the hell-ride’s over, died at seventeen giving birth to her stillborn child. Indeed, the novel conveys how Humbert’s selfishness chisels away as Lolita’s existence, so much so that the poor nymphet is ashes and dust, a nothing before she is a something.

So happy birthday, Lolita, dead now all these years. Almost in the form of an inside joke, Lolita’s gross and engrossing narrator takes the reader on a hell-ride, and we look into the foggy glass of Humbert’s car, and their find our own reflections. And surely, Nabokov was dead-on even if obvious; the solution to disorder is order. Creating order out of the bits and pieces of letters and words—or paint, or alabaster—is the magic of art. Art, in such rarified air, is Aesthetic bliss, ecstasy and redemption.

Lolita has been called the saddest and funniest book ever written, a travesty, a tour-de-force, an outrage, a parody, three hundred pages of sex in the head, a masterpiece—yet, it may be what another author—obsessed with the problems or mortality particularly of late—in his hubris, aimed to achieve: The Great American Novel.

Lolita’s raw center reminds the reader of the full-swung force of Emerson’s Law of Compensation: that out of death comes an Awakening, a Creation, a Beauty. This may only be understood with Humbert’s own words. After 300 pages of torrential storms, violent and destructive, the gentility, the sadness and stillness, the requited resolve, the pristine beauty of language, the human sense of pity for a penitent man who has committed a grave sin, all this comes to a solemn end in Humbert’s first and only sincere attempt at being the only thing he ever could have been to Lolita, a father.

Thus neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love you baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pit C.Q .[Quilty]. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

Lolita at 50: She’s Finally Legal

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