Lolita
Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first published in 1955. The novel is famous both for its innovative style and for its controversial subject. The novel's narrator and main character, Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged European emigré living in the United States, becomes sexually obsessed with a pubescent girl.
Lolita is also the title of two motion pictures based on the novel. The name has also become a slang term for a sexually attractive or precocious young girl. For more information about these non-literary meanings of the term, see the end of this article.
Plot
Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.
A scholar, Humbert leaves Europe for America and moves into a rented room in the home of Charlotte Haze, after meeting her, and spying her twelve-year-old daughter (Dolores Haze, affectionately shortened to Lo, or Lolita) sunbathing in the garden. Charlotte Haze, a lonely widow, becomes Humbert's unwitting pawn in his silent quest to be near her young daughter. Charlotte soon marries Humbert. Some time later, while searching Humbert's room, she finds his diary, containing Humbert's written confessions of indifference to his new wife and impassioned lust for her daughter. She runs away in disgust and, in fleeing the home, is hit and killed by a passing car.
Humbert begins traveling around the United States, from one motel to another, in the company of Lolita, with whom he is now having a sexual relationship. This relationship ends when a rival adult suitor, Clare Quilty, convinces Lolita to leave Humbert and run away with him.
At the end of the novel, when Humbert Humbert briefly reunites with Lolita, it is only to give her the money she has requested so that she and her new husband can make a fresh start in Alaska. Humbert realizes that he still wants her, not because she was one of the class of young girls he refers to as nymphets, but because he has truly fallen in love with her.
Style and interpretation
The novel is a tragi-comedy narrated by Humbert, who riddles the narrative with his wry observations of American culture. His humor provides an effective counterpoint to the pathos of the tragic plot. The novel's flamboyant style is characterized by word play, multilingual puns, anagrams, and coinages such as nymphet, a word which has since had a life of its own and can be found in most dictionaries.
Humbert is a well-educated, multilingual, literary-minded European emigré, and his clever, humorous narrative style immediately endears him to the reader. Humbert is both lovable and reprehensible, and the combination of sympathy and repulsion that he evokes in the reader is at the core of the book's genius. Humbert fancies himself a great artist, but he lacks something that Nabokov himself characterizes as essential: curiosity. Humbert tells the story of a Lolita that he creates in his mind because he is unable and unwilling to actually listen to the girl and accept her on her own terms. In the words of Richard Rorty, from his famous interpretation of Lolita in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Humbert is a "monster of incuriosity".
Publication and reception
Because of the subject matter, Nabokov had difficulty finding a publisher, eventually resorting to Olympia Press, a publisher of "erotica" in Paris, which published Lolita in 1955. A favorable notice by English author Graham Greene led to widespread critical admiration for the book, and its eventual U.S. publication on August 18, 1958, by G.P. Putnam's Sons. Today, it is considered by many one of the finest novels written in the 20th century.
Literary allusions
- Humbert Humbert's first love, Annabel, is named after the woman in the poem "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe. In fact, their young love is described in phrases borrowed from Poe's poem.
Lolita is the book referred to as "that book by Nabokov" in the song "Don't Stand So Close to Me" by The Police.
The term lolita has come to be used to refer to an adolescent girl considered to be very seductive, especially one younger than the age of consent. In the marketing of pornography, it has been used to refer to any attractive woman who has only recently reached, or is still younger than, the age of consent, or sometimes to refer to women who only appear to be younger than the age of consent. For this reason, it is especially worth noting that Nabokov's Lolita is far from an endorsement of pedophilia, since it dramatizes the tragic consequences of Humbert's obsession with the young heroine. Nabokov himself described Humbert as "a hateful person" (see Humbert Humbert).
In the book itself, "Lolita" is specifically the name of the girl, and "nymphet" is the general term for the type of young girl to whom Humbert is attracted. However, popular culture has preferred to use the girl's name. Popular culture also chooses to make "lolitas" attractive (in film adaptations and pornography) to a much wider audience than the small number of "nympholepts" which Humbert Humbert believes to exist, despite the fact that, in the book, Dolores' looks are described as plain at best.
The case of Amy Fisher, who was dubbed the "Long Island Lolita" in the press in 1992, helped popularize the term among a new generation.
See also
References
- Appel, Alfred Jr. (1991). The Annotated Lolita (revised ed.). New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 0-679-72729-9.
- One of the best guides to the complexities of Lolita. First published by McGraw-Hill in 1970. (Nabokov was able to comment on Appel's earliest annotations, creating a situation which Appel described as being like John Shade revising Charles Kinbote's comments on Shade's poem Pale Fire. Oddly enough, this is exactly the situation Nabokov scholar Brian Boyd proposed to resolve the literary complexities of Nabokov's Pale Fire.)
- The original novel.
