Lolita in A Book Walks Into a Bar

Oct 13, 2011 Travis rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Lolita is one of those classics that, for the longest time, I intended to read but just never could bring myself to read. I just didn't see what could be so great about some creepy pedophile's story of his love and lust for a pre-pubescent child. Finally, a week ago, notwithstanding my apprehension regarding the subject matter, I decided to just "gut it out" and read Lolita, and I'm glad that I did.

Clearly, Nabokov is a master of prose. His writing is so vivid and so natural; it is absolutely pe Lolita is one of those classics that, for the longest time, I intended to read but just never could bring myself to read. I just didn't see what could be so great about some creepy pedophile's story of his love and lust for a pre-pubescent child. Finally, a week ago, notwithstanding my apprehension regarding the subject matter, I decided to just "gut it out" and read Lolita, and I'm glad that I did.

Clearly, Nabokov is a master of prose. His writing is so vivid and so natural; it is absolutely perfect. With all too many writers, the text is clearly a text; by that I mean, one can tell that the author is self-consciously writing a narrative. But with Nabokov, one gets no sense of Nabokov as author expressly writing a story: rather, the story just unfolds perfectly on the page, completely unforced, completely naturally. It's really hard for me to describe what I mean apart from suggesting that one read some typical second-rate romance novel or thriller and then compare it to Lolita, not in terms of content but of style: it seems that writing is for Nabokov as natural as breathing and seeing. Writing is just a part of him. And he is so brilliant at his craft that he completely disappears from the narrative: were I to write a story, doubtless anyone who read it would say, "That's Travis all right. You can hear him through the words"; yet Nabokov is not present in this fashion in Lolita: the narrative falls to us as if from heaven, as Athena birthed from the very mind of Zeus.

***SPOILER ALERT***

After I finished reading Lolita, I went back and skimmed the foreward again. The foreward is not an actual foreward but is a part of the fictional narrative of Lolita. There, I noticed that the "author" of the foreward noted that "Mrs. 'Richard F. Schiller' died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl on Christmas Day, 1952." Now, when I first read the foreward, of course, I had no idea who Mrs. Richard F. Schiller was; we only learn that Mrs. Schiller is Lolita in the last quarter of the novel. I had completely forgotten this detail until I re-read the foreward, and so had I not re-read the foreward, I would have had no idea that Lolita herself died just a month after Humbert Humbert. Before I re-read the foreward, I thought that the ending was quite fitting to this dark, somewhat comedic, farce, but then learning of Lolita's death soon after Humbert's, the novel became almost a tragedy to me.

I say it was almost a tragedy, but I can't really classify it as a tragedy. It remains for me, ultimately, a farce. There is nothing heroic in Humbert or in Lolita. Clearly, Humbert is a flawed man, actually a rather despicable man: let's be frank: he's a child rapist, an unapologetic pedophile. His death is not tragic. Yet, and herein lies the genius of Nabokov, we somehow sympathize with Humbert; we actually care about him, and at times, though we may not want to admit it, we almost hope that maybe he and Lolita can somehow live happily ever after. Neither is Lolita heroic: she is a snotty, snide, bratty child, and, yes, she has been grossly abused and warped by Humbert's exploitation, but she would, even had Humbert never taken advantage of her, not been a very likable character. And now I must take a bit of these disparaging remarks about Lolita herself back: in the last scenes in which we see her after Humbert has finally tracked her down and discovered that she is pregnant with Schiller's child and planning to move with Schiller to Alaska, she seems to have matured quite a bit since the days she spent as Humbert's child concubine. Clearly, Lolita has matured far more than Humbert. But she is still, at this point at the age of 17, just a child, and while her death is sad, it is not tragic.

That Lolita is a farce is most clearly exemplified in the denoument, in the ridiculous murder of Quilty: it is a bungled affair that is grotesque and that has little rational justification: Humbert murders Quilty for taking Lolita away from him when, in fact, Lolita was actually quite glad to go with Quilty, and because Humbert seems to think that Quilty had sex with Lolita, which is especially audacious an offense for Humbert, Lolita's long-time rapist, to have taken. Lolita is not a comedy because, although Nabokov's wit and humor abound, it is ultimately not funny nor does it end happily, and it is not a tragedy either (for the reasons enumerated above). With the revealing insights into Humbert's mind, I am reminded of the brilliant psychology in the prose of Dostoevsky, but Lolita is not an epic work revealing the soul of humankind (for Humbert is certainly a rather atypical example of the species), as in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.

Thus, in the final analysis, Lolita is, for me, a farce: it is an utterly brilliant and simultaneously entertaining and revolting story; we can laugh, in spite of ourselves and our moral qualms, at the characters, and we can feel sad for them, but ultimately we cannot weep for them, nor can we be happy for them. ...more

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