September 2020. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
1955, Penguin Books, 315 pages. Written in English, read in English.
First, we should acknowledge the elephant in the room. Two of them, in fact. One— yes, this is a novel in which the protagonist is a pederast. And not only is this the premise of the novel — an older man trying, and succeeding to a certain extent, to seduce a twelve year old child , and in the process of escaping across the United States manages to ruin both of their lives — but Nabokov is able to pull the greatest trick a novelist can pull, and makes us, the readers, side with the offender, or at least allow ourselves to be carried through the narrative by his point of view, as this is the only point of view we are getting. This, Nabokov’s greatest trick, is also part of the responsibility of the second elephant — the reason this novel is still part of the ultimate literary canon, a persistent resident in any list of the greatest books of the 20th century, is that from a pure literary perspective, it’s a wonderful book. Every word conveyed in it has been selected carefully, like gems included in a masterpiece jewel. The novel appears to have been trimmed to its final size so that each word has the ultimate meaning, each word carries an equal weight to drive the narrative, the idea, further. This was one of a handful of books in my reading history in which I had to go back and read paragraphs not because I’ve blanked out in the middle, but because I wanted to see how Nabokov managed to navigate through it and convey the idea in such an original way.
And yet, one finds that one is wincingly reading the novel. Because the idea is not something that I, at least, can fully accept. And even considering that the story is told from the point of view of Humbert Humbert himself, and even considering that it is partly a confession, but also partly an attempt to win some compassion in the eyes of the reader and a possible jury — wouldn’t one feel more comfortable reading it if both protagonists were fourteen, as Shakespeare has chosen four hundred and fifty years earlier? Wouldn’t one feel more comfortable if the subject matter was entirely different? The literary genius would have been there anyway, wouldn’t it? Maybe not — as the author needs a challenge, so as not to be bored, and subsequently not to become boring. Nabokov tries to explain it twice — once disguised as a scholar who has been tasked with editing a manuscript he receives — a confession that Humbert Humbert writes, from jail, for a crime which we don’t know about yet; the second time in his own name, or, as he puts it, “an impersonation of Vladimir Nabokov talking about his own book.”
His reason for writing the book, he writes, is the same reason he had for writing any book in his career — to get rid of the book resting in his head. There’s an idea, the idea has to come out and meet the world, and understand what the world has to think about it. The world abhors the idea — four publishing houses refused to print the book, according to Nabokov in his afterward, the fifth was a publishing house with a history of rescuing future masterpieces from the puritan minds of their contemporaries. So we, civilization, get to keep our mores, while we still get to read a literary masterpiece and be challenged with an idea that is universally condemned and make up our minds again about its validity from a different point of view; and Nabokov gets to be rid of a book so he can continue and bless us with his genius.
The October selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn.
