Long Post on Lolita

When I was thirteen I asked my 9th-grade English teacher if she knew a book called Lolita. She had a copy on the shelf in the classroom, which she took down for me and handed off, no questions asked and no expressed worries. Should I be surprised that in '88, 30-plus years after the book couldn't find an American publisher and was banned from entering the States, a high-school teacher gives a copy to one of her students? Was that the difference between the Fifties and the Eighties? Or had Nabokov's taboo topic been sufficiently reckoned with over the intervening years that it had lost its initial shock? In other words, did its literary merit overwhelm its reputation as an immoral book so much so that an English teacher had no fear of reprisal for handing it off to a curious kid?

I read the book then, didn't understand a word, and then read the book once or twice a year throughout high school until it started making sense. I worked at the mall my senior year, and an older woman I worked with saw me reading the book on break and asked how I could read such filth. For all my English teacher might have known, my mother could have felt the same way as she did. My English teacher might have been handing a book to a student whose mother would insist she be fired for giving a child pornography. Lolita's reputation was, I realized, among many people, still stuck in the Fifties.

At the time of its appearance, Edmund Wilson could recommend the book no more than my colleague at the mall. Nabokov had the opposite impression. He was quick to condemn Humbert Humbert as a moral monster eternally damned, but about the book, he held firm. Though he says in Lolita's afterword that it has no "moral in tow," he described it, in his letters, as "deeply moral."

We don't talk often about the book in moral terms. The overwhelming sweep and emotion of the love story hoodwinks the willing reader. It's easy to concentrate on the language, the hopeless and heartrending romance, the whodunit mystery, the Nabokovian gamesmanship -- but as to whether or not it's a "moral" book, well, that just doesn't engage much debate for those who know the book. For them it's a masterpiece, and its morals don't matter -- or they matter, but as a side note to all the rest. For those who don't know the book by anything but reputation, its morals are all that matters. The two camps don't talk much.

As far as I'm concerned, thank god it doesn't engage much debate. Yes, Humbert's a monster. Yes, he victimizes and abuses Lolita irrevocably, and nothing can repair the breach, not even an appeal to her conspiracy in the affair. Luckily, most readers know how to distinguish between the narrator and the characters, and the narrator and the author, and can reserve censure for the one while freeing the other from judgment to do the business of storytelling.

Yet there's often a double-standard when talking about Nabokov. What gets discussed as often as anything else? Nabokov's playfulness, his man-behind-the-curtain puppetry. It seems you can't bring up Lolita without some nod to Nabokov's embedded trickery, his anagrams and puzzles and artful red herrings. And these things are discussed without worry that one might point out we're making the classic mistake of confusing the narrator with the author.

But when talking about the "morals" of the book, we tread lightly. Oh, it's the narrator's story then, not Nabokov's. Let's not confuse the two.

But if we're free to talk about Nabokov's appearances artistically throughout the book, why can't we talk about his appearances morally?   

Take this for example, on page 20: "It happened for instance that from my balcony I would notice a lighted window across the street and what looked like a nymphet in the act of undressing before a co-operative mirror. Thus isolated, thus removed, the vision acquired an especially keen charm that made me race with all speed toward my lone gratification. But abruptly, fiendishly, the tender pattern of nudity I had adored would be transformed into the disgusting lamp-lit bare arm of a man in his underclothes reading his paper by the open window in the hot, damp, hopeless summer night."

Or this: Humbert, on a tip from a lewd magazine, goes in search of consummation. What he finds for a trick is a "monstrously plump, sallow, repulsively plain girl of at least fifteen with red-ribboned thick black braids who sat on a chair perfunctorily nursing a bald doll." He can't flee fast enough, and pays the girl's handlers without touching her.

In both instances, and many others besides, Nabokov makes a decision, as consciously and artfully as he does to anagrammatize his name or hide Quilty in a clever maze, to thwart Humbert's attempts to despoil an innocent. When he does give Humbert some sexual satisfaction, it's with sad, youthful, legally-aged Monique. Had he done otherwise, the book would have fallen into tawdry eroticism.

This has turned into more of an essay than a post, for which I'm sorry -- and without so much as a link! I'll wrap it up here. The point I'm trying to make is that I think we should have the liberty to talk about Lolita in moral terms, with Nabokov as the agent of those morals, just as we talk with such freedom about Nabokov being the agent of the games deployed in the book. In lesser hands, that lamp-lit bare arm would have more likely turned out to be the nymphet undressing before the co-operative mirror. That it isn't makes Nabokov the superior artist, and what's fiendish about that transformation on page 20 -- of the nymphet into the disgusting man in underclothes -- is Nabokov's unwavering moral vision for his filthy book.

Comments

[Andrew Karre]

Long comment for a long post . . .

This is an interesting approach . . . Though I don't think any of Nabokov's novels tend toward a "moral apotheosis" as James Ray Jr. suggests, I do think applying your method to his PNIN might also be really interesting--perhaps even more so than to Lolita. I'm thinking particularly of this passage:

"In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself, during the last ten years, never to remember Mira Belochkin--not becasue, in itself, the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind (alas, recollections of his marriage to Liza were imperious enough to crowd out any former romance), but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to foget--because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past. And since the exact form of her death had not been recorded, Mira kept dying a great number of deaths in one's mind, and undergoing a great number of resurrections, only to die again and again, led away by a trained nurse, inoculated with filth, tetanus bacilli, broken glass, gassed in a sham shower bath with prussic acid, burned alive in a pit on a gasoline-soaked pile of beechwood."

I think these lines are some of his most powerful, particularly: ". . . if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible."

[janitorman]

"Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash." -VN

So, then, what unwavering moral vision?

[Josh]

Janitorman and Andrew --

I don't think, Janitorman, that the preeminence of style and structure in VN's notion of good books precluded a moral vision. They preclude evaluation of a good book soley on its "moral," but not its morality. As he says in introducing his Lectures on Literature, the great writer is, among the storyteller and the enchanter, also a teacher. He'd give that status a lower rung on the totem pole, but he still included it.

Thanks for that passage from PNIN, Andrew. I'd forgotten it -- or more accurately, hadn't read it close enough to have remembered. It is a knockout.
jpf

[janitorman]

Josh, I don't entirely disagree. We don't have to have great ideas to have a moral vision. Just look at... Oh, forget it: I'm not going to get into politics.

The quotation itself is something of a conceit as VN said or wrote over the years many things that seemed at least a little contradictory -- witness what you mentioned, what he wrote in the novel's afterword versus his later letters.

I just don't know about discussing "Lolita" in moral terms. I mean, VN always insisted it was just a story. Having read it the first go without having read any analysis of it at all, I thought it was a story about the all-consuming destructive power of obsession -- the context, though salacious, was less relevant, for me. And I think we have to consider that VN tranforming the nymphet into the lamp-lit bare arm may not be the author in his solid morality saving a little girl from an evil man, but just because it came out funny that way.

Several years ago, a couple things I read that VN and Borges wrote about writing -- I'm sure they contradicted themselves at some point or another -- greatly changed the way I think about books and the process of creating them. One of those was the style/structure thing. The Borges thing, I wantonly paraphrase, was that introducing some concept and then spending a lot of time explaining it so that it seems believable -- science fiction writers revel in this -- is just a waste of time. What Borges said to me, if not to anyone else, is that the contract between writer and reader stipulates the writer will provide story, believable or not, and reader will suspend disbelief. And the reader has to fulfill his terms of the contract. Therefore no chapter-long explanations of trivia.

Those are about the only two things I think about when I write; maybe that's taking the easy way out.

[Josh]

Janitorman --

I think that's taking the hard-way in, not the easy-way out. Chapter-long explanations of trivia are easy and not all that interesting. I suspect your approach is capable of reaping a lot of reward. I remember (uh-oh, workshop topic again) the WORST workshop I ever attended, and a dude there who'd written a story sort of opposite from the "explanation of trivia" model that tends to prevail around those tables, meaning basically he'd sublimated the story he was telling so thoroughly that it was incomprehensible. Bad, but in a different, more respectable way. There was no exposition, not so much as a narrative street direction, and while it failed, I remember that story for its conviction, and I bet the writer's gone on to do better and better things. I'm going to try to respond in depth to the MFA debate I started in a later comment, but that's certainly one of the degree's failings: it too often assumes complete stupidity in the reader.

[nnyhav]

I think the narrational complexities serve in part to depict moral complexities: It is a deep concern across Nabokov's writings, in which exile and expropriation are consistent themes. The main thread of Lolita, Humbert's expropriation of Dolores Haze's life, is echoed not only by Quilty's toying with Humbert but also by John Ray Jr.'s expropriation of Humbert's life story (with amendment: there's a time discrepancy at the end that suggests tinkering to impose a redemptive moral upon the story). As with philosophy, the cumulative argument does not just depend on its parts, it also frames the interpretation of those parts, with local argumentation often exploring contrary directions (did Socrates invent the red herring?); but interpretation is itself part and parcel of novelistic discourse. Dogmatists are the more inclined to be concerned about moral issues in fiction, eliding all such nuance to pronounce upon what is portrayed (and to judge the text as unambiguous moral message, and the author as rightthinking or perverse). Should it be any surprise that this 'debate' isn't engaged?

[anon]

i have only words to play w/!