Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

“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, life is a joke) I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art”.

Lolita was first published in 1955, in a Parisian press after being rejected by a string of publishers who feared that the novel will attract the ire of the multitudes, which it actually did. The novel grazes the controversial topic of relationship between a middle aged European man and a twelve year old American nymphet. The novel was announced as a story of “Old Europe debauching the young America” by certain critics from the west, and was accused of mocking the twentieth century America, but still was received with great enthusiasm by the Americans. Such has been its influence that Lolita is now a publically acclaimed term for a precocious young girl.

The story is told in the first person by narrator Humbert Humbert, a seemingly intellectual, middle-aged but otherwise handsome European, who regularly uses his French witticisms to convey his literary transcendence over regular good old Americans. He reminisces of young Annabel, with whom he committed carnal debaucheries in his childhood that left him addicted to young girls of nine to fourteen, whom he fondly calls nymphets. The narrator as he makes a clean breast of his inner feelings accepts that he would go to any extent to ogle at young girl or to fondle with her. Despite his exploits, it is rather harsh to declare him as a paedophile; rather his erudite narratives often arouse a sense of sympathy and awe in the readers.

His quest for the nymphets takes him to the forlorn town of Ramsdale, where he is accommodated in the house of a widow Charlotte Haze, mother of an auburn nymphet, Dolores or Humbert’s Lolita. He starts on his quest of seducing the young Lolita, and goes as far as marrying her mother Charlotte, a melodramatic woman who aspires to be a typical American sophisticated lady and utterly fails at her attempts to do so, or at least Humbert thinks so. She is considered as an obstacle by Humbert on his way to Lolita. But a series of unfortunate events leave Lolita in the custody of Humbert, who grabs the opportunity by both hands and leaves for a yearlong trip through America with Lolita, in the hopes of wooing her before she is intimated of her mother’s death. From then, the novel reduces to a series of puns and farces that Humbert introduces between his bouts of lustful sordidness in which he debases Lolita along with himself.

Humbert doesn’t qualify as a reliable narrator. He would regularly modify the versions of his history and describe his most heinous treacheries with an utmost sense of gaiety. His regular cribbing about the federal laws of guardianship reflects his insecurity about Lolita. While Lolita, from the viewpoint of Humbert, is a spoilt child and is his seducer. Whenever he describes her, his lust and possessiveness for her pervades into the picture, but she stands out as a confused youth herself. Her flinching at her step-father’s touch is wrongly interpreted by Humbert as her indolence.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that it is an extremely tragic story of a young girl who is deprived of her childhood, which has been told in an equally farcical manner. Novelist Robertson Davies says that “the theme of Lolita is not the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child”. It can be said that Nabokov has left Lolita at the discretion of the reader to decide. Although at the beginning, it reeks of a mediocre clichéd pornographic novel, promising everything that a promiscuous brain would expect, Nabokov conveniently manages to iron out all the hideous details and never do the narratives appear sensual. Nabokov has given birth to an entirely new form of writing, full of puns, and humorous jeering of the then American culture, giving rise to words that are hard to find in most of the dictionaries.

Perhaps the novel is a bit overhyped, because of the sensitive issue it addresses, but it still is one of the greatest works of the century, and definitely among the best works by an author in his second language. Nabokov manages to weave the magic with his play of words, amazing many by various interpretations his narratives are open to. As he says in his afterword that his novel does not stand for any motto, it was an urge that didn’t let him abandon the story midway. To those who question his anti-American sentiments he concludes his afterword by saying, "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammelled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian language for a second-rate brand of English".

-Sanskar Jain, 2008TT10701