Book Review: Lolita
Over the course of fine literature none cuts opinions down so fine a line and construes interpretations such as Vladimir Nabokov's famous work Lolita. This is one of those novels that many have an opinion whether or not they have actually taken the time to devour this literary masterpiece. Simply put, Lolita is one of the most disturbingly beautiful novels America has to offer in the realms of contemporary literature. Beautiful not necessarily in what it tries to say —for the topic is revolting— but in how it goes about saying it. Reading such eloquent, but easily readable English, one would be shocked to find that English is a second language for this Russian-American author; yet for Mr. Nabokov, he found it sadly to be 'second-rate' to his much preferred and beloved "governess of Saint Petersburg." Lolita was not his first English novel, but it most certainly was the novel that vaulted him into literary status among the Anglo-sphere. With it, there came many a reviews and absurd opinions ranging from it being pornographic on the level of La Marquee de Sade, to it being one of the greatest romance stories of all time. I believe that I have a much more sober but still poignant view.
Lolita is the story of a man named Humbert Humbert —a silly name for a serious man— for Humbert is a serious man, criminally and monstrously serious. He writes his confession from the confines of a jail cell and attempts to justify himself to the reader about his actions. As most people should already know Humbert Humbert is a sophisticated, debonair l'homme who has a penchant for the sickliest and most insidious forms of sexual perversion, pedophilia. The story follows him and his chasing after a twelve-year-old named Dolores Haze, whom he calls by the name the title of the book is derived from.
It is here I will pause and ask that whatever prejudices you may have towards this book, if you have not read it, please do. It is a book that should be read with an open-mind and a closed moral conscience. Its subject matter is not for the faint of heart. While the book tingles your spine with cringe and may leave you with a foul taste in your mouth (or intestinal discomfort)...it is far less "pornographic" than the smut one reads nowadays in your local newspaper and as long as one has a firm foundation in morality, they need not fear of sinning. Spoilers ahead!
* * *
What can be garnered from a book whom its own author expressed in an essay written after its publication
"I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite [the book's forward assertion], Lolita has no moral in tow."
Many who decided to break the rules and skip ahead without reading the book first may decide that there's no point in reading a story in which its own master declares that there is no morality written in it. I argue however that there is indeed a moral assertion, but it is not one that will tell you flat to your face. Nabokov was indeed an intelligent man (about as intelligent as his brutish protagonist Humbert Humbert) and had a tendency to insult you, as Humbert would insult me on one or two occasions when in my attempt to finish the novel and foresee ahead of the events, instead of experiencing them as I read, I would find myself made to be the fool with Humbert/Nabokov scoffing at me for my sensationalist-American ways.
The book indeed has a moral assertion, but that can only come if the reader has a moral compass. If one is easily duped by charming, handsome, narcissistic psychopaths, then they will most certainly be duped by our perfectly unreliable narrator Humbert Humbert; who justifies his abominable actions in a charming and humorous way that deceives his readers into believing his sincerity. It is not controversial to say Mr. Humbert is a seducer, and he seduces not only his nubile prey, but the reader. There will be at times you will side with the monster and feel as though you understand him, but then a sentence, or an action, or a faint cry in the distant room will be heard, and you will find yourself backing away from the dangerous man you chose to get too close to. That is the fun in reading the book, stepping inside the mind of a narcissistic psychopath and getting wrapped up in his warped mind. It is akin to playing with matches or rubbing one's hands over fire like many of us did at one point during out childhood. Humbert Humbert is a man burning with a beastly carnal lust, and his depraved mind can irreparably damage you; but like the fire you played with as a child, you cannot help but play the cat-and-mouse game to see how close you can get before you have to pull away from the biting flames.
As exciting as Lolita is, it keeps with the stereotypical Russian theme that permeates throughout all of Russian literature, it is agonizingly depressing. Lolita. Far from being a romance novel —or a novel about love and sex— Lolita is a tragedy. A tragedy that once you have had time to digest it, it becomes sickeningly all too real. It is a story about lives destroyed by unbridled lust and selfishness.
If Lolita could be described in terms of a historical metaphor, it would be akin to the Russian Revolution. Pent-up frustration that explodes and unleashes its monstrous violence upon the poor afflicted motherland of Russia, in which after the dust settles, and the bodies are buried, the people look back with a combination of horror, guilt, and mourning.
That is the feeling one gets at toward the end of the book. We the reader get our last glimpse of the nymphet whom Humbert had his way for years and years, and now sees the final result of his magnum opus.
"...and there she was with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and her goose-flesh white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits, there she was (my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at seventeen, with that baby,"
Lolita at seventeen, is now a woman, and a well-worn woman. Although many would still call her a child, she has endured and suffered more than most women will see in a lifetime. A bright future she could have had, is therefore shattered. Thus the only bright future this poor vulgar teen can now hope for is motherhood in the barren tundras of Alaska to a simple, partially-deaf man. We and our protagonist finally come to the conclusion that our protagonist Humbert Humbert, is the real antagonist. He reveals in the end the tragedy of his monstrosity as we just spent hundreds of pages witnessing him destroy the childhood of Dolores Haze, our tragic Lolita.
We see this tragedy unfolding in the beginning as the book opens up in the forward with a man who is publishing a manuscript of a prisoner who called himself under the nom de guerre Humbert Humbert and changed names of others to protect their identities. Humbert is writing a confession. A confession in that it is about his love-affair, as he describes, but rape to any conscious reader. Our anonymous penitent Humbert has died in prison due to heart attack and our dear Lolita, whom we find out towards the end her final identity, dies on Christmas day giving birth to a stillborn. (Oh! of course our Russian-American author had to have her die in Alaska on Christmas day giving birth to a stillborn. Nothing says misery of the Russian kind, than a tragic death among a Russianesque winter.)
I do recommend after reading the book (if you took as long as I did) to go back and re-read the forward. It will further cement the banality of it all. Humbert Humbert had his fun, but what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
Humbert Humbert had gained the whole world. He had his Lolita in his grasp and would purge himself unto his poor prey day and night, but what he gained in the end was the loss of not just his soul, but of Lolita's childhood. Even during his blissful moments which he tries to convince the reader of his elated ecstasy, he was in fact a prisoner in his own sad alienated world, a slave to his carnal passion. Humbert tries excuse this and to explain to the reader how happy they were. How nights Lolita would cry to sleep and how he would be reduced to pathetic groveling, whimpering, and any sort of bribery towards his prisoner, in order that she will allow him to have just another taste of the poison that is so sweet and saccharine to his pitiful puckering lips.
His heaven, he describes to the reader of floating from cheap, dingy motel to motel, traversing across the continental states like a wandering nomad, describes more of a personal hell to the rest of us readers. Towards the end of his escapade, he would exhaust both his finances and his sanity, in order to exhaust his insatiable lust. Eventually Lolita decides to leave Humbert for of all people, an even more debased pervert who's personal hobbies are one of making child pornography.
Humbert bespeaks of his love for Lolita, but we see there is no love, but the one Humbert dementedly concocts in his warped mind. Eventually Lolita could no longer be bribed to continue this incestuous and perverse affair. In the end Humbert trades a mental prison for an aesthetic one of steel bars and concrete walls.
So we know of the tragic life and death of a man whom we struggle to sympathize with due to his disgusting and evil nature. Yet, you cannot help but pity him, despite the unnerving truth that he could be lying about every decent thing he did. You want to like him, you want to see him seek forgiveness that he cries out for in the end. In the end you hear that cry for repentance that gives you the hope you desire, you hear the mea culpas you hear the miserere mei and you close the book with a bittersweet feeling. Only to realize later that the book is a memoir and not a diary. The horrid things he wrote in the beginning, he wrote in the same prison cell years after he has had time to reflect of his ghastly trespasses. You then see your hopes dashed as you know that his confession and plea for forgiveness is what you desire, but in reality you cannot help but doubt Humbert Humbert. When consuming his Confessions he comes off less as a penitent who begs for forgiveness, and more as a man seeking vindication, going so far to tell you exactly what you want to hear in order to sympathize with him. Oh Humbert/Nabokov, you managed to fool me again.
So what about the other main character of this tragic tale the woman of a dozen names Dolores Haze, Dolly Schiller, Carmencita, Lo, Lola, Lolita. We never hear her voice, at least we never hear her own story in her own words, but we hear enough. Lolita is the tragic character, a girl who is either viewed as a brat, a tease, or someone to simply pity. For those who see her merely as a brat, what do you expect from a neglected, fatherless twelve-year-old. For the tease-crowd, you are only listening to the gruntings of Mr. Humbert's voice. For the majority pitying crowd, I will assert that Dolly is someone to pity, but she is not pitiful, but the heroine of the story.
We have little and dubious information to gather from, but we know that Dolly is a girl who lost her father at a young age. Its a truism that sons cling to their mothers, as daughters to their fathers. This is simply a horse-sense truth and not because of some Freudian perversion that Misters Humbert and Nabokov, and I all mock. Dolly lost her father and was left to be raised by her selfish and vain mother Charlotte. Charlotte is a rotten mother who, like many single-mothers, put their desires for romantic companionship above their natural obligations. So much in Charlotte's case that she invites a creep and pervert into her home and ignores every sign this guy gives off.
She ignores all her instincts in order to chase a fantasy, an obsession in the same way Humbert chases Dolly, going so far as to rush into marriage with a man she barely knows. Now if you think I am being too hard on Charlotte, allow me to remind you that she was desperate to lock Dolly away to a boarding school in order to imprison Humbert the same way he would eventually do with her daughter. Only after Charlotte discovers Humbert's secret diary, complete with all the lewd naughty details about his lust for Dolly and disgust for Charlotte, does she take horror and offence, not to his lecherous perversion, but to the fact he rejects her for the brat she cannot stand. Destiny will richly reward Humbert with the same fate when Lolita dumps him for his depraved doppelganger.
We need not go over the horror Dolly will face the next few years under the captivity of Mr. Humbert Humbert. Let us focus on my point. Lolita, Dolly is the heroine of the story and is the only one who comes out of this redeemed. She is a girl who lost her childhood to a maniac sex-pervert and had to run away with another demented sex-pervert to get free. Well we could end the story here and say that Lolita ends her life the way many poor, sexually-abused girls end their story, sex as a cold business to earn money from perverts and degenerates, drug-abuse, and possibly a suicide. However, we hear from Dolly through Humbert's narrative that when asked to participate in pornography with other young teens at the behest of her new lover Claire Quilty, she refuses and leaves. Here, Lolita becomes Dolly, an emancipated woman.
She struggles and goes working numerous jobs, but eventually she settles for a bit of a loser named Dick. While to most of us, he appears a loser because he's partially deaf, does not speak much, appears to have low intelligence, and has a blue-collar job that requires relocation to remote Alaska for any decent livelihood, he is at least decent and good-natured, much more than the other men she has had in her life. He does not seem to abuse her, and appears to treat her with some dignity and respect. But to me the redeeming aspect of Mrs. Richard F. Schiller, Dolly Schiller; goes from being one of the most despised livelihoods to one of the most virtuous...she becomes a mother. One wonders what sort of mother she will be like, will the ghost of Charlotte Haze haunt Mrs. Dolly Schiller and render her a mean, old bat to her child as she was treated? We never will know, but we could guess from Dolly taking care to Dick's friend Bill, that she would at least be more compassionate and tender than Charlotte. However our sad hero dies giving birth to a stillborn. While this may be a tragedy, we at least are spared of the possible future of another mother-daughter relationship that Dolly had with her mother. Although Dolly dies miserably, she at least dies with dignity and thus dies as the only redeemable character in this wretched tale.
Lolita is not for the faint of heart and certainly not for those who lack a certain moral compass. However approaching the book with said compass and the foreknowledge that you are being told a story by an unreliable narcissistic psychopath makes a deep and engaging novel that will make you question in how you may view the things you love and how others express their love to other people. In the end we see the allegory, the moral tale of what XIII-Century Italian poet Dante described of the layer of Hell for the sinners of Lust. An eternity of damnation whipping from end to end in a never-ending tempest, never grasping one's feet, always moving about with no control. That describes the lust that took hold of our protagonist Humbert Humbert and the one that we too are in danger of succumbing to. Lust as described by Dante, is the sin of passion without reason. Humbert Humbert was a cavernously passionate man, but the object of his passions lacked reason and thus was how he lived, and most likely is now spending an eternity in Hell that Dante visited. As for our dear Dolly Schiller, we can only hope in the literary world she received mercy and will come to see the Beatific Vision.
"I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite [the book's forward assertion], Lolita has no moral in tow."
Many who decided to break the rules and skip ahead without reading the book first may decide that there's no point in reading a story in which its own master declares that there is no morality written in it. I argue however that there is indeed a moral assertion, but it is not one that will tell you flat to your face. Nabokov was indeed an intelligent man (about as intelligent as his brutish protagonist Humbert Humbert) and had a tendency to insult you, as Humbert would insult me on one or two occasions when in my attempt to finish the novel and foresee ahead of the events, instead of experiencing them as I read, I would find myself made to be the fool with Humbert/Nabokov scoffing at me for my sensationalist-American ways.
The book indeed has a moral assertion, but that can only come if the reader has a moral compass. If one is easily duped by charming, handsome, narcissistic psychopaths, then they will most certainly be duped by our perfectly unreliable narrator Humbert Humbert; who justifies his abominable actions in a charming and humorous way that deceives his readers into believing his sincerity. It is not controversial to say Mr. Humbert is a seducer, and he seduces not only his nubile prey, but the reader. There will be at times you will side with the monster and feel as though you understand him, but then a sentence, or an action, or a faint cry in the distant room will be heard, and you will find yourself backing away from the dangerous man you chose to get too close to. That is the fun in reading the book, stepping inside the mind of a narcissistic psychopath and getting wrapped up in his warped mind. It is akin to playing with matches or rubbing one's hands over fire like many of us did at one point during out childhood. Humbert Humbert is a man burning with a beastly carnal lust, and his depraved mind can irreparably damage you; but like the fire you played with as a child, you cannot help but play the cat-and-mouse game to see how close you can get before you have to pull away from the biting flames.
As exciting as Lolita is, it keeps with the stereotypical Russian theme that permeates throughout all of Russian literature, it is agonizingly depressing. Lolita. Far from being a romance novel —or a novel about love and sex— Lolita is a tragedy. A tragedy that once you have had time to digest it, it becomes sickeningly all too real. It is a story about lives destroyed by unbridled lust and selfishness.
If Lolita could be described in terms of a historical metaphor, it would be akin to the Russian Revolution. Pent-up frustration that explodes and unleashes its monstrous violence upon the poor afflicted motherland of Russia, in which after the dust settles, and the bodies are buried, the people look back with a combination of horror, guilt, and mourning.
That is the feeling one gets at toward the end of the book. We the reader get our last glimpse of the nymphet whom Humbert had his way for years and years, and now sees the final result of his magnum opus.
"...and there she was with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and her goose-flesh white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits, there she was (my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at seventeen, with that baby,"
Lolita at seventeen, is now a woman, and a well-worn woman. Although many would still call her a child, she has endured and suffered more than most women will see in a lifetime. A bright future she could have had, is therefore shattered. Thus the only bright future this poor vulgar teen can now hope for is motherhood in the barren tundras of Alaska to a simple, partially-deaf man. We and our protagonist finally come to the conclusion that our protagonist Humbert Humbert, is the real antagonist. He reveals in the end the tragedy of his monstrosity as we just spent hundreds of pages witnessing him destroy the childhood of Dolores Haze, our tragic Lolita.
We see this tragedy unfolding in the beginning as the book opens up in the forward with a man who is publishing a manuscript of a prisoner who called himself under the nom de guerre Humbert Humbert and changed names of others to protect their identities. Humbert is writing a confession. A confession in that it is about his love-affair, as he describes, but rape to any conscious reader. Our anonymous penitent Humbert has died in prison due to heart attack and our dear Lolita, whom we find out towards the end her final identity, dies on Christmas day giving birth to a stillborn. (Oh! of course our Russian-American author had to have her die in Alaska on Christmas day giving birth to a stillborn. Nothing says misery of the Russian kind, than a tragic death among a Russianesque winter.)
I do recommend after reading the book (if you took as long as I did) to go back and re-read the forward. It will further cement the banality of it all. Humbert Humbert had his fun, but what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
Humbert Humbert had gained the whole world. He had his Lolita in his grasp and would purge himself unto his poor prey day and night, but what he gained in the end was the loss of not just his soul, but of Lolita's childhood. Even during his blissful moments which he tries to convince the reader of his elated ecstasy, he was in fact a prisoner in his own sad alienated world, a slave to his carnal passion. Humbert tries excuse this and to explain to the reader how happy they were. How nights Lolita would cry to sleep and how he would be reduced to pathetic groveling, whimpering, and any sort of bribery towards his prisoner, in order that she will allow him to have just another taste of the poison that is so sweet and saccharine to his pitiful puckering lips.
His heaven, he describes to the reader of floating from cheap, dingy motel to motel, traversing across the continental states like a wandering nomad, describes more of a personal hell to the rest of us readers. Towards the end of his escapade, he would exhaust both his finances and his sanity, in order to exhaust his insatiable lust. Eventually Lolita decides to leave Humbert for of all people, an even more debased pervert who's personal hobbies are one of making child pornography.
Humbert bespeaks of his love for Lolita, but we see there is no love, but the one Humbert dementedly concocts in his warped mind. Eventually Lolita could no longer be bribed to continue this incestuous and perverse affair. In the end Humbert trades a mental prison for an aesthetic one of steel bars and concrete walls.
So we know of the tragic life and death of a man whom we struggle to sympathize with due to his disgusting and evil nature. Yet, you cannot help but pity him, despite the unnerving truth that he could be lying about every decent thing he did. You want to like him, you want to see him seek forgiveness that he cries out for in the end. In the end you hear that cry for repentance that gives you the hope you desire, you hear the mea culpas you hear the miserere mei and you close the book with a bittersweet feeling. Only to realize later that the book is a memoir and not a diary. The horrid things he wrote in the beginning, he wrote in the same prison cell years after he has had time to reflect of his ghastly trespasses. You then see your hopes dashed as you know that his confession and plea for forgiveness is what you desire, but in reality you cannot help but doubt Humbert Humbert. When consuming his Confessions he comes off less as a penitent who begs for forgiveness, and more as a man seeking vindication, going so far to tell you exactly what you want to hear in order to sympathize with him. Oh Humbert/Nabokov, you managed to fool me again.
So what about the other main character of this tragic tale the woman of a dozen names Dolores Haze, Dolly Schiller, Carmencita, Lo, Lola, Lolita. We never hear her voice, at least we never hear her own story in her own words, but we hear enough. Lolita is the tragic character, a girl who is either viewed as a brat, a tease, or someone to simply pity. For those who see her merely as a brat, what do you expect from a neglected, fatherless twelve-year-old. For the tease-crowd, you are only listening to the gruntings of Mr. Humbert's voice. For the majority pitying crowd, I will assert that Dolly is someone to pity, but she is not pitiful, but the heroine of the story.
We have little and dubious information to gather from, but we know that Dolly is a girl who lost her father at a young age. Its a truism that sons cling to their mothers, as daughters to their fathers. This is simply a horse-sense truth and not because of some Freudian perversion that Misters Humbert and Nabokov, and I all mock. Dolly lost her father and was left to be raised by her selfish and vain mother Charlotte. Charlotte is a rotten mother who, like many single-mothers, put their desires for romantic companionship above their natural obligations. So much in Charlotte's case that she invites a creep and pervert into her home and ignores every sign this guy gives off.
She ignores all her instincts in order to chase a fantasy, an obsession in the same way Humbert chases Dolly, going so far as to rush into marriage with a man she barely knows. Now if you think I am being too hard on Charlotte, allow me to remind you that she was desperate to lock Dolly away to a boarding school in order to imprison Humbert the same way he would eventually do with her daughter. Only after Charlotte discovers Humbert's secret diary, complete with all the lewd naughty details about his lust for Dolly and disgust for Charlotte, does she take horror and offence, not to his lecherous perversion, but to the fact he rejects her for the brat she cannot stand. Destiny will richly reward Humbert with the same fate when Lolita dumps him for his depraved doppelganger.
We need not go over the horror Dolly will face the next few years under the captivity of Mr. Humbert Humbert. Let us focus on my point. Lolita, Dolly is the heroine of the story and is the only one who comes out of this redeemed. She is a girl who lost her childhood to a maniac sex-pervert and had to run away with another demented sex-pervert to get free. Well we could end the story here and say that Lolita ends her life the way many poor, sexually-abused girls end their story, sex as a cold business to earn money from perverts and degenerates, drug-abuse, and possibly a suicide. However, we hear from Dolly through Humbert's narrative that when asked to participate in pornography with other young teens at the behest of her new lover Claire Quilty, she refuses and leaves. Here, Lolita becomes Dolly, an emancipated woman.
She struggles and goes working numerous jobs, but eventually she settles for a bit of a loser named Dick. While to most of us, he appears a loser because he's partially deaf, does not speak much, appears to have low intelligence, and has a blue-collar job that requires relocation to remote Alaska for any decent livelihood, he is at least decent and good-natured, much more than the other men she has had in her life. He does not seem to abuse her, and appears to treat her with some dignity and respect. But to me the redeeming aspect of Mrs. Richard F. Schiller, Dolly Schiller; goes from being one of the most despised livelihoods to one of the most virtuous...she becomes a mother. One wonders what sort of mother she will be like, will the ghost of Charlotte Haze haunt Mrs. Dolly Schiller and render her a mean, old bat to her child as she was treated? We never will know, but we could guess from Dolly taking care to Dick's friend Bill, that she would at least be more compassionate and tender than Charlotte. However our sad hero dies giving birth to a stillborn. While this may be a tragedy, we at least are spared of the possible future of another mother-daughter relationship that Dolly had with her mother. Although Dolly dies miserably, she at least dies with dignity and thus dies as the only redeemable character in this wretched tale.
Lolita is not for the faint of heart and certainly not for those who lack a certain moral compass. However approaching the book with said compass and the foreknowledge that you are being told a story by an unreliable narcissistic psychopath makes a deep and engaging novel that will make you question in how you may view the things you love and how others express their love to other people. In the end we see the allegory, the moral tale of what XIII-Century Italian poet Dante described of the layer of Hell for the sinners of Lust. An eternity of damnation whipping from end to end in a never-ending tempest, never grasping one's feet, always moving about with no control. That describes the lust that took hold of our protagonist Humbert Humbert and the one that we too are in danger of succumbing to. Lust as described by Dante, is the sin of passion without reason. Humbert Humbert was a cavernously passionate man, but the object of his passions lacked reason and thus was how he lived, and most likely is now spending an eternity in Hell that Dante visited. As for our dear Dolly Schiller, we can only hope in the literary world she received mercy and will come to see the Beatific Vision.
Comments
Post a Comment
Please be respectful in your comments.