Reading Lolita in a Country on the Verge of a Rape Epidemic
Once, when I was nine, home alone with a cousin almost twice my age, it began to rain. We bared our bodies and accepted the rain’s invitation to play. We ran around the compound, muddied our bodies and splashed water everywhere. Play turned dark when my cousin started to plead with me to let him penetrate my butt. It won’t hurt, he said. I said no to his coaxing. The rain stopped, I dressed up, then fell deeply asleep.
When I opened my eyes again, it was evening and the house was full. It was the same cousin who woke me up, telling me how good it had been to work my butt while I slept. He had to be kidding. How had I not awoken? Maybe it really just did not hurt.
Several years have passed, and he is married now, with a child or two. I think about asking for the truth about that afternoon sometimes, but discovering that he had not been kidding that day would be devastating. A sample of the impending disaster occured the year I turned eighteen. I had become an insomniac, preferring to be alert at night, and when I eventually slept, I awoke with my blood under my nails. I had borne the burden of that memory for long and had to sob it to my older brother during a chat one midnight. Only then, after talking about it for the first time, did I start sleeping at night. I would later have to recount the event to a psychiatrist.
I tell this story to contextualise how when I arrived at Vladimir Nabokov’s chef d’oeuvre, Lolita, my worst fear acquired a morbid aesthetic. Aesthetic that came disguised in Nabokov’s lyrical, oscillating sentences, serialised narrative style and permutations of deep, dark, comic poetics. I came to Nabokov simply to give my reading habit a facelift. I had learnt that knowledge of the classics could save even someone as introverted as myself from being a total bore. And where better to start than the banned, carnal, loathed, controversial Lolita, which has endured two movie adaptations and a host of misinterpretations?
In 1963, James Baldwin, writer, activist and then poster boy of the black race weighed in on the empathetic glory of literature: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” In the search for credible ancestors, after binging on Achebe and playing at Soyinka, young Nigerian writers arrive at Baldwin eventually. It happened to Teju Cole — “I am black like him (Baldwin)” — and it is happening to me. The need to establish a genealogy with our forebears is strong and an empathetic artist like Baldwin makes belonging feel quite natural and rewarding. But I should get to the end of Baldwin’s submission first, “It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or whoever had been alive.”
Like Baldwin, Charles Dickens ministered to me. Reading Oliver Twist while growing up the second son of a severe single mother, I fantasised about running from home like Dickens’ titular character did from the orphanage. The miserable Dostoevsky I know from essays by other writers, the most intimate being David Foster Wallace’s Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky. But Nabokov, to whom Dostoevsky is antecedent, is one dead Russian I gravitate towards. Literary critics might agonize over the character of a sentence — the position of a comma, the exclusion of a semi-colon, the vagueness of a verb — and indeed, they should, but empathy, which makes one man’s affliction universal, is the mark of true art.
A 1958 Time review summarised Lolita as “the transcontinental debauch of a twelve-year-old girl by a middle-aged monomaniac.” The nuances of language are as cardinal to criminal law as they are to literature, and Time has had it wrong for sixty years. Debauchery is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, but at the heart of Lolita, is serial (statutory) rape. Although the rapist admits to his crime only once, at the very end of the two hundred and fourteen page apologia, he adjudges: “Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape. . .”
Humbert Humbert is an unusual protagonist, and his eccentricity is colossally accountable for the perversity of the book. Sixty-three years after its publication, Lolita is still receiving both plaudits and backlash. The stereotype around here is that rapists are hideous, perpetually high on drugs and lurking at street corners. But H.H. is a witty middle-aged man with “fine boy” privileges. He is fierce and tender at the same time; the kind of man women adore. His fine face even earns him a place in the house and later, heart of his landlady and mother to his victim. Which brings us to the question I have heard people ask several times, perfunctorily: “Why do people rape?”
It is a hard nut to crack, but I like to think that rape is a crime of power — an illusory tool of supremacy, and punishment. Topping the list of things men (in any race of the world) do not understand, after a liberal woman, is a person who does not understand the stupefying awesomeness of the male organ. We wonder how a mortal could possibly say no to a thing that delivers people to nirvana regularly. A lady on a visit to her friend tells him, that she does not want to have sex, but he proceeds to force himself on her with a promise, “You’ll like this.” I am talking about an experience in an essay published in 2017 by Arts and Africa. The retort “You’ll like this” is confidently ignorant of the independence of the victim’s consciousness from the rapist’s, and for the duration of the act, the rapist is both actor and voyeur. The power play becomes more evident when the abuse is within a gender. In Khaled Hosseini’s Kite Runner, one boy rapes another to underscore his importance and his victim’s lack of it, so to speak, in the hierarchy of their society. In the case of people like H.H., though, the answer to the “why do people rape” question is curt, even if convoluted: a pathological affliction.
Statutory rape is trickier. An already stale apologist argument is the complicity of child-victims. Nabokov’s nymphet has been indicted in her own abuse by readers who think she is corrupt or those who say that her story is “a great love affair.” The ways of prepubescent children are not arithmetic and the abuser knows this. It becomes apparent when you are an adult thinking back on childhood. Watching children at play, I ask myself, “How could they be so dumb?” But then, I remember that a girl who had sat beside me for at least three terms of nursery school had asked me, right after asking what my name was again, how I knew it was my name and I had answered that my parents sang it in my ears until it stuck.
Childhood is a massive setup. You are dependent on things, people — your parents, relatives, neighbours — and have not acquired the scepticism required to navigate them safely. In one of his more forthcoming interviews, this one for Playboy magazine, Nabokov renders childhood as a period of consummate falseness: “the imagination of a small child … at once distorts, stylizes or otherwise alters the bizarre things he is told…” This “altering the bizarre things he is told” is how Lolita falls victim to H.H. It is little Lolita, believing that sex is literally child’s play, who volunteers to show humble Humbert the ways of “the world of tough kids”. All he had to do was suggestively send her hobbling about her own crooked, fabulous, spurious mindscape.
And sometimes it is much easier; the groundwork laid by communal ideologies. Verities like this one particular to my origin, “It takes a village to raise a child,” make it achingly easy to commandeer a kid to undress, fondle an organ and keep mum afterwards in the name of discipline.
Nabokov, possessing H.H., assures the reader in the book’s third paragraph that the marriage of good prose to this despondent story is no oversight when he writes, “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” Possessing John Ray Jr., Ph.D. in the mock foreword, he calls it “The Confession of a White Widowed Male.” The author is complacent about the nymphet Lolita — this much was enunciated in a The Paris Review interview which appeared in 1967. Nabokov, possessing Nabokov, said, “It is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert’s sense. He cares, I do not.”
And thus, Lolita’s story was taken from her and handed to her abuser. Or was it? While I am not certain that a story can be hijacked from a fictional character, I do know that a sense of loss (of the narrative) may attach itself to readers who identify with the character. And I do identify with Lolita and feel this loss of narrative. H.H. is humorous, and so is the novel. Lolita is quirky. If Lolita’s story is reclaimed for her, is the novel going to be quirky? I like to think it will be sombre like stories of victimisation are wont to be; a repression and compression of character results from abuse. The one time I heard a story of sexual assault told with laughter and bravado, it was because the victim had managed to flip the script: overpowered the rapist and dealt him a good beating.
But what if the book is what it is: the apologia of a sophisticated, diabolical, intellectual paedophile? A straitjacket exists in the way people engage with fiction, typified by gender. Male writers are perpetually called out — on social media where the bulk of the opinion is these days — for watering down the female experience; men dismiss women that are not Zadie Smith as watery and chick lit and the one that is Zadie Smith is cast with the menfolk. This dichotomy extends to the page where female readers root for heroines and the men, ever egotistical, stay with the male. Betray the brotherhood and risk emasculation.
For example, men are fond of reminding women that Lolita is an allegory and the women counter by stating that the bulk of the book’s acclaim is owed to its surface story. But what is gained or lost if this straitjacket is banished and a person is free to recognise themselves in the nymphet or her dandy daddy or the impotent, pernicious Quilty who ends up collateral damage? More importantly, what happens if your empathy lies with the beastly H.H.?
A contemporary poet has said that art is free to be purposeless; a fallacy if I’m asked. Artists are fond of devolving purpose, functioning like a metaphor, telegraphing attention elsewhere. The artist may have no function in mind for his work — and don’t blame him, he is gung-ho in the process — but in the aftermath of creation, the work will seek out its own purpose. Art is subjective. Its meaning depends on who is asking and so does its purpose. The fate of a work of art is hinged, in part, upon the empathy of its audience. Aesthetics come in second.
The art of fiction is a clear, shiny looking glass. It reflects your image right back at you. But sometimes, it is an x-ray plumbing your hidden parts, revealing truths you didn’t know about yourself. Reading Lolita, one sees how Nabokov, artist to the fingertips, could have been writing simply to shock. More damningly, one sees himself on an existential scale. Cast Humbert to the bottom of the scale and allow Lolita take her place at the top as his polarity. Throw the whole cast of hideous characters in between. Now, who are you on the scale, amigo?
CJ, a man born in 1970, a purebred Nigerian, lived in Lagos where he worked as a supervisor at an expensive private school. Kiksy was three years old, and her mother dropped her off at school every morning at eight. CJ took Kiksy out of class when he got horny — which he did quite regularly — and abused her. He touched her privates and had her touch his, purring, “Your bum bum is delicious. Your bum bum is sweet. I will eat your bum bum.” It took a while but CJ was found out. The story broke, first, on the grapevine, then on the news and soon, CJ was on his way to court.
This story is real although identities have been suppressed. I imagine CJ reading Lolita sometime in his life, (in jail, preferably,) nodding vigorously at H.H.’s philosophies — “The science of nympholepsy is a precise science.” — or smiling at the lecherous poetry — “Now and then it seemed to me that the enchanted prey was about to meet halfway the enchanted hunter. . .” I imagine him wide-eyed as he watched himself descend to H.H. on the existential scale, recognition dawning, conscience tingling and shame ploughing into him. Tomas Tranströmer, poet of the unsayable, transcribed this moment of self-discovery: Two truths approach each other. One comes from inside, the other from outside, / and where they meet we have a chance to catch sight of ourselves.
Adams Adeosun is an alumni of the Goethe-Institut/Saraba/Bakwa magazines’ Nigeria-Cameroon Literary Exchange workshops and Bookartarea’s writing masterclass. His work is published/forthcoming online in Litro UK, Catapult, Arts and Africa, Agbowo, Music in Africa, This is Africa, etc; and in print in Transition, Limbe to Lagos: Nonfiction from Cameroon and Nigeria. He was shortlisted for the Awele Creative Trust award in 2017
