Lolita

It took far longer than it should have done, but I’ve come to the end of Lolita, truly amongst the best books of all time. Nabokov’s prose is a tour de force throughout, and consistently beautiful – while in many places opaque. The story itself is functional and well-crafted, with only enough actual events for a short story so firmly fixed by foreshadowing, by allusions, by the intricate detail in which such events are unfolded, that the prose and the study of Humbert Humbert’s psychological state take centre-stage – and enchant and mesmerise the audience.

Before I go on, I’d just like to mention as an aside that I know about all the hullabaloo in Europe over a prior Lolita, a short story by a German writer with a plot remarkably similar to Nabokov’s The Enchanter, itself the short story that would later be fleshed out into Lolita. I care not if Nabokov refused to credit his source because he so hated Nazi sympathisers, or if he simply absorbed the story and (buzzword: cryptomnesia) later it trickled out of that vast lake in his head with all the freshness of our own second- (or sixth-) hand water, or even if it was just another work of McFate, which would no doubt appeal to Nabokov greatly. Frankly, it’s the style that is important here, and neither name nor story are great works of original thought.

Now, onto the book proper: a real masterpiece of vocabulary, eloquence and cynicism. Our narrator is Humbert Humbert, a monster, true, but a seductive one.

Humbert’s faults are many and extreme: he is a murderer, a wife-beater, a solipsist; he is entirely ignorant of the emotions and desires of other people. He is hideously selfish, for all his protestations. He treats Lo horrifically. I could blame his actions on a society that has backed him into a corner, made him a pariah, but he is simultaneously a hideous human being. He never loves Lolita, because he always puts his own desires first, desperate and ardent as they are.

When Lolita seduces him, almost a game, I would find it difficult to label him a rapist, despite legal terminology. But in continuing to abuse her, paying her like a whore, listening to her cry herself to sleep: his morals are challenged, but he can’t resist. He is weak, and ultimately destroys more lives than Lolita’s. Humbert isn’t a monster because he is a paedophile. Humbert is a monster because he is a selfish, blind fool, and mistakes lust for love. Lolita has her flaws, but she is after all a child, and her primary role-model is just as deceptive as she, and what Humbert does to her is unforgivable. But falling in love with a nymphet, in and of itself, is not.

Horrific, Horrible as he is, I see more of myself in him than I would like to, but then, it is difficult not to look at Hum the Hummer and see Nabokov the trickster staring back at you. This is perhaps the most important thing to note in the book – despite the slight imposed ignorance, Humbert (as well as Quilty, and, I’m increasingly suspecting, ALL Nabokov’s protagonists) simply IS Nabokov. Filtered, perhaps, distorted, maybe – but nonetheless Nabokov. I would have taken objection to Lolita’s dialogue, if not for the certainty that Nabokov spoke in just such a way.

Humbert and Quilty’s games centre impossibly on Nabokov’s literary knowledge (though to an extent, his references are ‘canon’, particularly those that are in French). The allusions are thick and often nigh-on invisible – so how cruel to insert the occasional fabricated quote or imagined reference! Always wanting to appear one step ahead of even the most educated reader, Nabokov never lets us forget it is HE who is writing the novel, HE who inserts Vivian Darkbloom (his anagrammatised alter-ego) and countless other little references, HE whose butterflies, unidentifiable to Humbert, flutter into view where no other writer would have turned their minds. This is my concern: Nabokov is a genius, a master craftsman, a wonderful artist – but he appears limited to himself, his own interests, his own obsessions, which happily coincide with Humbert’s (though I couldn’t say the same of ‘pederosis’; who knows?), and Pnin’s, and Van’s, and Kinbote’s.

An artist must be a chameleon. A writer must be prepared to take risks, to adopt another creature’s skin, even if that creature is a snake, and not just lie inside but amalgamate, assimilate, learn to BE a snake – or a bird – or a butterfly.

Humbert is surrounded by flimsiness, which he observes with an aloof eye and rebukes with a sarcastic tongue. It works beautifully for Lolita, and Humbert, which makes a masterpiece. But whether it can work for an entire body of work I am less sure.