What I’m Reading: Lolita.

Just a few surface level thoughts about whatever book I am currently reading. These posts are not intended to be particularly groundbreaking or incisive, I would just like to let my mind wander and perhaps stumble on something of an interesting discussion.

Vladimir Nabokov is my new favourite author.

I picked up Pale Fire back in August after reading an interesting paper on its relation to hypertext. I was examining variations in form, and reading Pale Fire seemed like the next logical step. I have finished Pale Fire, but it’s important to draw a distinction: I have finished the novel(s) but I have not completed it; no one ever completes Pale Fire. I’d like to talk about Nabokov’s hypertext in another post, perhaps a more focussed one. But right now, I’m simply looking to sit down for book club.

This past month, I have been reading Lolita. I was in Foyles one afternoon and decided that I wanted to buy a book; remembering my fascination with Pale Fire, I thought about the possibility of picking up another Nabokov novel for some pleasure reading. Naturally, I chose the book that had been sat on my list for about 12–15 months — ever since my trip to the Stanley Kubrick exhibition at the London Design Museum — Lolita.

The turn of phrase ‘pleasure reading’ is a great segue for a discussion of my thoughts on the book. I’m not sure how comfortably I can use ‘pleasure’ in regards to my reading of Lolita; I certainly enjoy reading the book, it is beautifully crafted prose, equal parts subtle and verbose. And I certainly enjoy the morbid company of our odious narrator, Humbert. I enjoy Lolita in the same way that I enjoy reading through Raymond Carver’s dark suburbia, there is a certain fascination that you can find in the voyeurism of something deeply wrong and uncomfortable; it’s the same fascination that forces cars on the motorway to invariably slow down when they pass an accident — they can’t not look.

And that’s not to say that I think Lolita is simply trivialising scandal and abuse and taboo: I don’t point at Humbert and laugh at his tragedy, I don’t sit and smile because I know he will get his judgement for his violation of Dolores Shade, I do not offer condolences to the narrator, and neither do I have any particular sympathies for his captive. The experience of reading Lolita for me has been wholly strange. Voyeurism certainly feels like the right word; I haven’t formed attachments to any of the cast of wholly flawed and unlikeable characters — I simply view the world through Humbert’s eyes.

Humbert is the quintessential untrustworthy narrator, he would make Nick Carraway blush. This is why you can read the whole novel through his eyes and not align yourself with him — Humbert tells us what an odious despicable character he is, he tells us that his account is somewhat biased, he tells us that he is writing from the confines of the penetentiary facility — we know where this story ends up. In this way, Lolita preempts Pale Fire expertly: it is a story of interiority versus exteriority, it is a narrative of possibility; for with every assertion, image, and vignette that Humbert conjures up for us, we must question its validity and subjectivity.

The story of Lolita takes place outside the realm of the text. This may be a rather trite observation given its fictionality, but we can never know the real story of Lolita. Critics have aligned themselves at all angles, covering all possibilities: Humbert is to be believed at face value and sympathised with, Humbert is to be seen as a violent solipsist, or Humbert is nothing more than an eloquent predator. Even Nabokov describes the narrator as a “vain and cruel wretch”. What we see in Lolita then is the problematisation of the narrative process, of the memoir, and of the transcribing of reality.

If I were to do work on Lolita, I would certainly be interested in its relationship to confessional poetry for this very reason. When we move past the shock and the taboo of Lolita, we simply see the tensions between reality as lived and reality as transcribed. Writers are liars.

But sometimes everything I write

with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.

Yet why not say what happened?

Robert Lowell (1977)