[issybird]

I have read the foregoing discussion with great interest and it’s with some trepidation that I add my own 2¢, especially since I’m going to admit that reading about molestation turned out not to upset me in this instance. Humbert was a monster and Lolita was destroyed; I accepted that as the basis of the story. I thought at first it was the entirely mesmerizing prose that somehow put a gloss on it, but when I read the comments here I realized that no matter how beautiful the prose I wouldn’t be able to read with any pleasure at all a story of torture. My theory is that torture narrated by the perpetrator would necessarily involve feeding on the victim’s agony and fear, whereas in the case of Humbert it was necessary for him to believe and relate a story of love and romance. Lolita was the opaque center; only very rarely did Humbert allow her feelings to show. Had the story been truly pornographic and focused on their sexual congress, it would have been a very different matter. I’m not saying Nabokov was trying to make rape and molestation palatable, just readable—and frankly, not to appeal to perverted prurient tastes. In that respect, Humbert really was the antithesis of Quilty; as a practical matter, of course, the two were identical in their evil.

I loved how Nabokov was able to borrow from so many themes and genres and shift effortlessly among them. On one level, Lolita was a variation on the great American roadtrip. I’d like to reference crich’s insight about Nazism and add that during the first trip, when a 12-year old girl missed an entire year of school as they moved from motel to motel, at least some must have realized or suspected what was going on, but looked the other way, despite Humbert’s frenzied efforts each morning to hide the evidence.

The more I thought about the roadtrip aspect, I realized that although it’s not classed as such, Lolita is a perverted twist on the picaresque. Tale told by a societal outcast (who doesn’t seem to work), a corrupt society, aimless wandering with no plot, really what was missing was the sense of the absurd and we got that in Humbert’s showdown with Quilty, which is why (contrary to Hamlet’s take) it worked for me. It also, especially in the wrestling match, showed that neither had the (moral) upper hand. The difference from the true picaresque, of course, is that Humbert wasn’t essentially good or a force for good, but evil.

I read an annotated version and while I mostly ignored the notes as they interrupted the flow, it did point out a theme I would have missed otherwise, that of anti-Semitism. Humbert was regularly assumed to be Jewish. Oh, the irony, that people would have held him in contempt as a Jew as they overlooked his essential depravity. Just as one example, when Humbert wanted to revisit The Enchanted Hunters and requested a room under the name of Hamburg, he was turned down. The notepaper heading included the phrase “Near churches”, code in mid-century America, the annotation notes, for “No Jews.” This would have entirely escaped me.

The book is fabulous, with Nabokov’s masterly use of a narrator who is simultaneously seen as reliable regarding facts and unreliable regarding interpretation, the stunning prose, the snapshot of American life in the late 40s, the skewering of society; I honestly do not understand people willing to dismiss it as gross without experiencing it. I’m so very glad that by hook or by crook, we managed to get it nominated and chosen. I already know that it will be my book of the year for 2013.