Lolita's Loose Ends: Nabokov and the Boundless Novel - Vladimir Nabokov

Early reviews of Lolita (1958), from both admirers and detractors, concocted the perfect mixture for an American best-seller: with praise for the novel's writerly achievement and comedy mixed with condemnation of its "highbrow pornography" (Boyd 364), the popular groundswell that greeted "Hurricane Lolita" was almost inevitable. The novel and subsequent Stanley Kubrick film, with their pedophile narrator and his nymphet prey, soon entered the national mythology. And as the more recent film adaptation demonstrates, this story possesses a seemingly inexhaustible power to incite controversy. Because of this immediate and continual controversy, few readers have encountered the novel without some preconceptions about its salacious content. Merely cracking such a scandalous book cedes immense liberties to the author who then spirits us into a world where the principal character violates fundamental taboos, criminal laws, and social mores with more evident glee than disgust. Even the earliest, naive readers found a dmonitions enough in the "foreword" by fictional psychologist "John Ray, Jr., Ph.D.," who amply enumerates his disgust for the author of the "Confession" to follow: "No doubt, he is horrible," Ray writes,

he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy....A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. (5)

Those inclined to skip prefatory remarks discover within three short paragraphs that the narrator's obsession is a diminutive ("four feet ten"), school-aged "girl-child" and Humbert himself, a "murderer." The reader, like Humbert on his cross-country tour and like Nabokov in creating such a fiction, enters a world where the most egregious offenses have already been conceded and "everything [is] allowed" (268).

In this environment marked by severe initial crimes and admissions, Humbert's less severe transgressions, his everyday incivilities, become more humorous than damning as he comments devilishly on the superficial faults of people around him, fiddles with ridiculously "wrong" verbs, and dismisses one pompous and overzealous dentist with these words:

"On second thoughts, I shall have it all done by Dr. Molnar. His price is higher, but he is of course a much better dentist than you." I do not know if any of my readers will ever have a chance to say that. It is a delicious dream feeling. (291)

Humbert couples this disregard for taboos and the niceties of social interaction with an abuse of poetic license, the excesses of prose that become a badge of his outlaw status: "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style" (9), he writes. He defends these literary transgressions with the same excuses--his psychological instability, Lolita's irresistibility, and the relativity of tastes and mores--that he hopes will mitigate his crimes. With Lolita he feels "lost in an artist's dream" as he attempts to "fix" her unadulterated form in words and, while touring the American landscape, to evoke the "delicate beauty ever present in the margin" (152). The author's concluding remarks, "On a Book Entitled Lolita," affixed to every edition but the first, identifies the novel as a purely artistic enterprise designed to produce a state of "aesthetic bliss" (314). In response to an American critic who characterized it as the product of a "love affair with the romantic novel," Nabokov writes that "the subst itution of 'English language' for 'romantic novel' would make this elegant formula more correct" (316). Like Pale Fire (1962), Lolita begins with an immoderate conceit that allows its author and reader to explore the extravagant, pleasurable, and disturbing fringes of the language.

But as Kauffman points out, Nabokov's commentary on Lolita has become as essential to the fiction as John Ray's more explicitly fictional foreword (131). Ray introduces the novel with promises of a "moral apotheosis" (5), and "an impersonation of Vladimir Nabokov" (311) polishes it off with an equally monologic elevation of art over morality. Cloaked in the language of psychological analysis and moral panic, Ray's foreword pontificates about the peculiar pathology that motivates Humbert Humbert. It anticipates a reaction against Humbert's most extreme misdeeds, relegating them to the realm of the pathological, and emphasizing the usefulness of his case for educators hoping to raise "a better generation in a safer world" (6). And with Humbert's crimes against Lolita already laid out before the reader, the concluding remarks by "Nabokov" foreground style, implying that "only words" (32) have been Dolores Haze's proxy all along, that in a novel where everything is subsumed by linguistic concerns, the narrator a nd author are guilty only of word crimes. Both the foreword and the afterword invite the reader to ignore the important implications of the story they purport to explain, as Dolores Haze becomes a footnote to a case study in sexual deviance or a conceit for aesthetic pursuits. Lolita has become an enduring cultural phenomenon, "Exhibit A" in debates about literature's ethical duties and the pleasures of pure art; and although decades have passed since its initial publication, John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., and "Nabokov" continue to have the last word.