Lo, a Tale of Woe in Exquisite Prose
Celebrating Nabokov's masterpiece in response to the hyperventilating philistinism of the New Puritans and their latest assault on J. K. Rowling.
I won’t waste free pixels commenting on the nothingburger that constitutes the latest attack on the somehow-controversial-author of the Harry Potter books, except to say that, where these frothing imbeciles claim that Rowling has failed a moral test, they have clearly flunked the most basic of literacy ones. Instead, I will take the opportunity to join one great writer in celebrating another.
First published in 1955, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is a work of lubricious brilliance as dazzling as it is disturbing. Anyone who reads this masterpiece will be astonished to learn that the author was writing in his second language. For myself, an unaccomplished scribbler and devotee of choice prose, I can only stand in awe of what the Russian émigré achieved in his non-native tongue. Nor is this point of appreciation one of mere aesthetics; it is the foundation on which the novel’s spectacular feat depends. As Rowling notes, in Nabokov’s hands, what should amount to the “most worthless pornography becomes … a great and tragic love story.”
This dichotomy is borne out via the novel's narrator, Humbert Humbert, a thirty-something-year-old European intellectual: a raconteur and monster, who wields his erudition and aesthetic sensibilities against the reader to devastating effect. Loquacious, poetic, and often funny, it is through the singular lens of this charming miscreant that we discover poor Lolita's fate. Strip the novel of its perfumed and bedizened prose and the plot could not be more sinister: middle-aged man abducts child and subjects her to prolonged sexual and psychological abuse. Yet this same story, told from Humbert's perspective, enchants the reader with an engrossing, erotically charged tale of love and loss.
A pressing difficulty for readers of Lolita is that the Beautiful is often synonymous with the Good. And Nabokov's novel is beautifully written. The protagonist’s calculated but artistic use of lyricism, paronomasia, and subtle manipulation effectively mask the reality of his thoughts and actions, shrouding the diabolical in garments of silk. In chapter 29, for instance, Humbert recounts one attempt to drug his young charge so that he might molest her without retribution. The passage begins with an appeal to the reader: “no matter your exasperation with the tenderhearted, morbidly sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these essential pages!” We are invited to imagine Humbert as a doe, “trembling in the forest;” someone to pity or perhaps smile with, for “there is no harm in smiling.” An allusion to an earlier crime — the non-consensual anaesthetising of Lolita's “mummy” — followed by a quip about the exact “science of nympholepsy” directs our awareness from the ethical to the analytic, distracting and discombobulating.
Even so, for many readers, the drugging of an unsuspecting child is surely a bridge too far. Humbert has risked alienating his audience. But our antihero knows this, and once again we are quickly and seamlessly ushered to more comfortably profane territory: a litany of sensual descriptions detailing the nocturnal resonances of the characters’ lodgings at The Enchanted Hunters. Here we are reminded of a recurring motif: the schism between European and American cultures. Humbert describes a “manly, energetic, deep-throated toilet,” a neighbour “coughing out his life with his liquor,” and the gurgle of concurrent flushings as a “veritable Niagara.” Such vivid observations, if scatological, sandwich the tension and pathos of Humbert's attempts to inch his “ravenous bulk” towards the sleeping Lolita, softening our judgement of the evil episode. While Humbert is unable to consummate his crime due to a pharmacological blunder, the passage nevertheless demonstrates the remarkable influence that dexterous writing exerts over our interpretation of events and characters, despite the depravity of its content.
In part two, chapter seven, Humbert again establishes his facility for dressing up the facts when he divests the sexual economics at play between the unhappy couple. He implores us not to laugh “as you imagine me, on the very rack of joy noisily emitting dimes and quarters, and great big silver dollars like some sonorous, jingly and wholly demented machine vomiting riches.” Beneath the jovial, horror lurks. Denuded of its comic vestments, the passage catalogues crimes of prostitution, statutory rape, incest, and theft — an unholy quartet of oppression and destruction. But here, Humbert is employing more than just humour. The phrase “rack of joy” is characteristic of a continuous endeavour to exploit our sympathy. We are entreated to see Lolita not as a victim but as someone “not easy to deal with,” someone who only “very listlessly” earns her “three pennies — or three nickels — per day … a cruel negotiator.” Poor Humbert, indeed.
Though the potentest weapon in our villain’s arsenal is undoubtedly his prose, the layers of artifice and deception are many. Humbert further mobilises drolleries and Old World sensibilities to charm and beguile. These are the features of a specific and romantic kind of privilege — social primary goods, to borrow John Rawls' term. But he is also blessed with natural primary goods: his intelligence, humour, and prodigious talent as a wordsmith, intrigue us, enlisting us to varying degrees and against our better judgement. Humbert presents a special challenge to readers of Lolita, particularly those inclined to identify with the character charged with narrating the story. This is no accident. In great literature, as Iain McGilchrist suggests,
the information available is so much more concentrated, the interrelations between qualities, and between words and phrases, are so much more dense and compact than in ordinary life, that the reader, the “outsider,” can break into the author's mental world, and see his meaning from the inside.
In the case of Lolita, this miracle is perverted and turned against the reader, demanding a perpetual and guarded dual awareness in order to curb the wholesale practice of empathy usually encouraged by a novel. We must resist the beauty of Humbert's prose to recognise its corruption.
It should surprise no one that Lolita is once again inspiring fits of pearl-clutching. Far from being the novel’s first rodeo, Lolita has motivated controversy since the very beginning, when a censorious USA and Britain refused to publish the book, sending Nabokov across the Atlantic to Olympia Press — a French outfit specialising in erotic fiction. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note the peculiar and distinctive confusion of our own time, when performative outrage is commonplace. In our blighted age of aesthetic retardation and literary delinquency, pornography and prostitution sex-work are staple industries, sexual deviancy kinks not merely tolerated but indulgently, often compulsorily, celebrated. Even pedophilia, the once universally reviled perversion so wickedly explored in Lolita now enjoys euphemistic rebranding as “minor-attracted persons.” And yet, when one of the world’s most successful authors expresses her appreciation for a fellow great’s unparalleled literary skill, we are inevitably subjected to the augmented bleating of the talentless and resentful.