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Lolita
Lolita
Thirty Years On
Lolita made
Nabokov rich and famous, but the scandal surrounding its publication
created a
misunderstanding that is still with us today. Now that the
beautiful nymphet is approaching, horror of horrors, forty, it is time
to
locate her where she belongs, as one of the most subtle and complex
literary
creations of our time. That does not mean, of course, that it is not
also a
provocative book.
But the fact
that the first readers of the novel could only see the provocative
parts and
not its subtlety - something that is now apparent to any average reader
- shows
us how difficult it is for the true worth of a really original book to
be
appreciated. Four US publishing houses rejected the manuscript of
Lolita before
Nabokov gave it to Maurice Girodias at Olympia Press, a Parisian
publisher that brought out
books in English and had become famous for being subjected to numerous
court
appearances and book seizures for pornography and indecency. (Its
catalogue was
a bizarre mixture of cheap pornography and genuine artists like Henry
Miller,
William Burroughs and J. P. Donleavy). The novel appeared in 1955, and
one year
later it was banned by the French Ministry of the Interior. By then it
had
already circulated widely - Graham Greene started up a polemic by
declaring it
the best book of the year - and it had gained an aura of being a maudit novel.
It never really managed to escape from this maudit
label, and to some extent it
deserves it, but not in the way we usually understand the term. But it
was only
after 1958, when the US edition appeared, alongside dozens of others
throughout
the world, that the book made an impact that spread much further than
the
numbers of its readers. In a short space of time a new term, a
'Lolita',
appeared for a new concept: the child-woman, emancipated without
realizing it,
an unconscious symbol of the revolution taking place in contemporary
society.
To some extent Lolita is one of the
milestones, and one of the causes, of the age of sexual tolerance, the
flouting
of taboos by young people in the United States and in Western Europe,
which
would reach its apogee in the sixties. The nymphet
was not born with Nabokov's character. It existed, without doubt, in
the dreams
of perverts and in the blind and tremulous anxieties of innocent girls,
and a
changing moral climate was beginning to give it credence. But, thanks
to the
novel, it took on a distinct form, shook off its nervous clandestine
existence
and gained the keys of the city. What is extraordinary is that it is a
novel by
Nabokov that provoked such turmoil, affecting the behavior of millions
of people,
and becoming part of modern mythology. Because it is difficult to
imagine among
the writers of this century anyone less interested in popular and
contemporary
issues - even in reality itself, a word that, he wrote, meant nothing
if it
were not placed between inverted commas - than the author of Lolita. Born in 1899, in Saint
Petersburg, into a Russian aristocratic family - his paternal
grandfather had
been the Justice Minister of two Tsars and his father a liberal
politician who had been assassinated
by monarchist extremists in Berlin - Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov had
received a refined education that made him a polyglot. He had two
English
nannies, a Swiss governess and a French tutor, and he studied in
Cambridge
before going into exile in Germany following the October Revolution.
Although
his most daring book, Pale Fire, came out in 1962, by the time Lolita
appeared he
had published most of his work. It was a vast, but little-known, body
of work:
novels, poems, plays, critical essays, a biography of Nikolai Gogol,
translations into and out of Russian. It had been written firstly in
Russian,
then in French and finally in English. Its author lived in Germany,
then in
France, before finally opting for the United States, where he earned a
living
as a university professor and pursued, in the summers, his second love:
entomology, in particular, lepidopterology. He published several
scientific
articles and was, it seems, the first descriptor of three butterflies: Neonympha maniola nabokov, Echinargus nabokov
and Cydargus nabokov.
This work,
which, thanks to the success of Lolita, would be revived in multiple
re-editions and translations, is 'literary' to a degree that only one
other
contemporary of Nabokov - Jorge Luis Borges - would manage to achieve.
By
'literary' I mean entirely constructed out of pre-existing literatures
and possessing
an exquisite intellectual and verbal refinement. Lolita has all these
hallmarks. But in addition, and this was the great novelty within
Nabokov's
work as a whole, it is a novel in which the almost demonic complexity
of its craftsmanship
is garbed in an apparently simple and attractively brilliant story: the
seduction
of a young girl of twelve years seven months - Dolores Haze, Dolly, Lo
or
Lolita - by her stepfather, an obsessive forty-year-old Swiss man known
only by
a pseudonym, Humbert
Humbert, and the passage of their love through the length and breadth
of the
United States.
A great work
of literature always provokes conflicting readings; it is a Pandora's
box in
which each reader discovers different meanings, nuances and even
stories. Lolita
has bewitched the most superficial readers at the same time as it has
seduced,
through its torrent of ideas and allusions and the delicacy of its
style, the
most demanding of readers who approach each book with the insolent
challenge that
a young man once made to Cocteau: Étonnez-moil
(Surprise me!) In its most explicit version, the novel is Humbert
Humbert's
written confession to the judges that are going to try him for murder,
of his
predilection for precocious girls, that began with his childhood in
Europe and
reached its climax and satisfaction in Ramsdale, a remote small town in
New
England. There, with the cynical intention of having easier access to
her
daughter Lolita, H.H. marries a relatively well-off widow, Mrs
Charlotte Becher
Haze. Chance, in the form of a car, facilitates Humbert Humbert's
plans,
knocking over his wife and placing the young orphan literally and
legally in
his hands. The semi-incestuous relationship lasts for a couple of
years, until
Lolita runs away with a playwright and scriptwriter, Clare Quilty, whom
Humbert
Humbert kills after a tortuous search for the couple. This is the crime
for
which he is going to be tried when he begins to write the manuscript
that,
within the lying tradition of Cide Hamete
Benengeli, he calls Lolita.
Humbert
Humbert tells the story with the pauses, suspense, false leads, ironies
and
ambiguities of a narrator skilled in the art of keeping the curiosity
of the
reader constantly aroused. His story is scandalous, but not
pornographic or
even erotic. There is not the slightest pleasure taken in the
description of
sexual activities - a sine qua non of pornography - nor is there a
hedonistic
vision that could justify the excesses of the narrator-character in the
name of
pleasure. Humbert Humbert is not a libertine or a sensualist: he is
scarcely
even an obsessive. His story is scandalous, above all, because he feels
it and presents
it as such, because he keeps talking about his 'madness' and his
'monstrosity'
(these are his words). It is the protagonist's account of himself that
gives
his adventure its sense of being unhealthy and morally unacceptable,
rather
than the age of his victim who, after all, is only a year younger than
Shakespeare's Juliet. And what further aggravates his offence and
deprives him
of the reader's sympathy is his unpleasantness and arrogance, the
contempt that
he seems to feel for all men and women, including those beautiful,
semi-pubescent, little creatures that so inflame his desires.
Perhaps even
more than the seduction of the young nymph by a cunning man, the most
provocative aspect of the novel is the way it reduces all of humanity
to
laughable puppets. Humbert Humbert's monologue constantly mocks
institutions, professions
and everyday routines, from psychoanalysis - one of Nabokov's pet hates
- to
education and the family. When filtered through his corrosive pen, all
the
characters become stupid, pretentious, ridiculous, predictable and
boring. It
has been said that the novel is, above all, a ferocious critique of
middle-class America, a satire of its tasteless motels, its naive
rituals and
inconsistent values, a literary abomination that Henry Miller termed
the
'air-conditioned nightmare'. Professor Harry Levin
has also argued that Lolita was a metaphor that refers to the feelings
of a
European who, after having fallen madly in love with the United States,
is
brutally disappointed by that country's lack of maturity.
I am not
sure that Nabokov invented this story with symbolic intentions. My
impression
is that within him, as in Borges, there was a sceptic who was scornful
of
modernity and of life, and who observed both with irony and distance,
from a
refuge of ideas, books and fantasies, where both writers could remain
protected, removed from the world through their prodigious inventive
games that
diluted reality into a labyrinth of words and phosphorescent images.
For both
writers, who were so similar in the way they understood culture and
approached
the task of writing, the distinguished art they created was not a
criticism of
the existing world but a way of disembodying life, dissolving it into a
gleaming mirage of abstractions.
And for
anyone who wishes to go beyond the main plot of the novel, and consider
its
mysteries, try to solve its puzzles, work out its allusions and
recognize the
parodies and pastiches of its style, Lolita
can
be read as a baroque and subtle substitute for existence. This is a
challenge that the reader can accept or reject. In any event, a purely
anecdotal reading is very enjoyable in itself. But anyone who is
prepared to
read it differently discovers that Lolita is a bottomless well of
literary
references and linguistic juggling tricks, which form a tight network
and are,
perhaps, the real story that Nabokov wanted to tell. A story as
intricate as
that of his novel The Defence (which appeared in Russian
in 1930),
whose hero is a mad chess player who invents a new defensive game, or
that of Pale Fire, a fiction
that adopts the appearance of a critical edition of a poem and whose
hieroglyphic story emerges, seemingly at variance with the narrator,
through
the interplay of the verses of the poem and the notes and commentary of
its
editor.
The search
for the hidden treasures of Lolita has given rise to many books and
university
theses in which the humor and playful spirit with which both Nabokov
and Borges
transformed their (real or fictitious) erudition into art is almost
always sadly
lacking.
The
linguistic acrobatics of the novel are very difficult to translate.
Some, like
the quotations in French in the original, just lie there, mischievous
and rude.
One example of many: the strange hendecasyllable that Humbert Humbert
recites
when he is preparing to kill the man who snatched Lolita away from him.
To what
and to whom does this refer: Réveillez-vous
Laqueue, il est temps de mourir? Is it an actual literary quotation
or one
made up, like so many in the book? Why does the
narrator call Clare Quilty Laqueue?
Or is he inflicting the name on
himself? In an interesting book, Keys to
Lolita, Professor Carl L.
Proffer has solved the enigma. It is, quite simply, a convoluted
obscenity. La queue, a tail, is French slang for a
phallus; to die means to ejaculate. So the verse is an allegory that
condenses,
with its classic
rhythm, a premonition of the crime that Humbert Humbert is about to
commit, and
his reason for the murder (the fact that the phallic Clare Quilty has
possessed
Lolita).
Sometimes
the allusions or premonitions are simple digressions, for Humbert
Humbert's
solipsistic amusement, that do not affect the development of the story.
But on
other occasions they have a meaning that alters the story in
significant ways.
This is true, for example, of all the bits of information and
references
regarding the most disturbing character of all, who is not Lolita or
the
narrator, but the furtive playwright who is fond of the Marquis de
Sade, the
libertine, drunk,
drug-addicted and, according to his own confession, semi impotent Clare
Quilty.
His appearance disrupts the novel, sending the story in
a hitherto unforeseeable direction, introducing a Dostoevskian theme:
that of
the double. It is thanks to him that we suspect that the
whole story might be a mere schizophrenic invention by Humbert Humbert,
who,
the reader has been told, has spent several periods in mental asylums.
As well
as stealing Lolita away and dying, the
function of Clare Quilty seems to be to place an alarming question mark
over
the credibility of the (assumed) narrator.
Who is this
strange subject? Before materializing in the reality of the fiction,
when he
takes Lolita away from the hospital at Elphistone, he has already been
infiltrating the text as a result of Humbert Humbert's
persecution mania. There is a car that appears and disappears, like a
will-o'-the-wisp, a hazy outline, lost in the distance, on a hill,
after a game of tennis with the child-woman, and myriad signs that only
the
meticulous and ever-alert neurosis of the narrator can decipher. And
later,
when, on the trail of the fugitives, Humbert Humbert
begins his extraordinary recapitulation of his travels across the
United States
- an exercise of sympathetic magic that attempts to revive the two
years of
happiness lived with Lolita, repeating their journey and
the hotels they had stayed in - he discovers at every stage
disconcerting
traces and messages from Clare Quilty. They reveal an almost omniscient
knowledge of the life, culture and obsessions
of the narrator and a sort of subliminal complicity between the two.
But are we
talking about two people? What they have in common far outweighs what
separates
them. They are more or less the same age and they share the same
desires for young girls
in general, and Lolita Haze in particular, as well as both being
writers
(albeit with different degrees of success). But the most
remarkable symbiosis can be found in the magic tricks that they perform
at a
distance, in which Lolita is merely a pretext, the elegant and secret
communication that turns life into literature, revolutionizing
topography and the urban landscape with the magic wand of language,
through the
invention of small towns and accidents that trigger literary
associations and
surnames that generate poetic associations according to a very strict
code that
only they are capable of employing.
The
culminating moment in the novel is not Humbert Humbert's first night of
love -
that is kept to a minimum and is almost a hidden detail - but
the delayed and choreographed killing of Clare Quilty. In this
extraordinarily intense, virtuoso description, which is a mixture of
humor,
drama, strange details and enigmatic allusions, every certainty that we
had
built around the fictive reality of those pages begins
to teeter, suddenly riddled by doubt. What is happening here? Are we
witnessing
the conversation between the killer and his victim
or rather the nightmarish doubling of the narrator? It is a possibility
that is
implied in the text: that, at the end of this process of psychic and
moral
disintegration, defeated by nostalgia and remorse,
Humbert Humbert breaks, stricto sensu, into two halves, the lucid and
recriminatory consciousness that observed and judged his own
actions, and his defeated, abject body, the seat of that passion that
he
surrendered to without, however, surrendering to pleasure and
indulgence. Is it
not himself, that part that he detests about himself,
that Humbert Humbert kills in this phantasmagoric scene, in which the
novel, in
a dialectical leap, seems to desert the conventional realism of its
previous
setting in favor of the fantastic?
In all
Nabokov's novels - but, above all, in Pale
Fire - the structure is so clever and subtle that it ends up
carrying
everything else before it. In Lolita this intelligence and deftness of
construction are also strong
enough to deplete the story of life and liberty. But in this novel, the
content
stands up for itself and resists the assault of the form, because what
it talks
about is deeply rooted in the most important of human experiences:
desire,
fantasy obeying instinct. And his characters manage to live
provisionally
without becoming, as in other novels - or like Borges's characters -
the
shadows of a superior intellect.
Yes,
thirty years on, Dolores Haze, Dolly, Lo, Lolita, is still fresh,
ambiguous,
prohibited, tempting, moistening the lips and quickening the pulse of
men who,
like Humbert Humbert, love with their head and dream with their heart.
London,
January 1987
Vargas Llosa
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