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the "Freudian voodoo" Nabokov detested ...
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LOLITA, BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV: LAURA PENNY MAKES THE CASE
LAURA PENNY
June 14, 2008
This February, Woolworth's UK incited parental ire with an infelicitously named girl's bedroom set: the Lolita Midsleeper Combi. A spokesperson said, "... the staff had never heard of Lolita. ... We had to look it up on Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now."
That's the kind of dumb that makes headlines. Even if you've never had the exquisite pleasure of reading Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, you know its notorious plot: Middle-aged Humbert Humbert is besotted by his 12-year-old stepdaughter, the "nymphet" Dolores Haze. Lolita is one of those rare titles that has been promoted to a term.
Lolita is not just a love story. It is also a jailhouse confession, a picaresque road trip, a parody of the "Freudian voodoo" Nabokov detested, an intricately plotted murder mystery and an impassioned love letter to the U.S. landscape and language. The prose is exuberant and erudite, cantering and bantering, jam-packed with spot-on mimicry and delectable wordplay, as Nabokov revels in his prodigious adopted vocabulary. Uproariously funny and heart-smashingly sad, Lolita is a virtuoso performance, one that leaves other 20th century novels choking on its gorgeous dust.
Humbert and his Lo share one trait with their creator; all three are aesthetes, living through the lens of art. Hum fancies himself a mad poet, and salts his testimony with literary allusions, often to Poe, a fellow ill-fated nympholept. Lolita, much to her dreadful mother Charlotte's chagrin, acts like a starlet.
Lolita is immersed in pop culture, a consummate consumer, "glad as an ad." While Humbert dandles her on his lap, aflame with polysyllabic ecstasies, she reads the funnies. As they tear from tourist trap to tourist trap, he plies her with movies, magazines, clothes and junk food: "To think that between a Hamburger and a Humburger, she would - invariably, with icy precision - plump for the former. There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child."
Here we see some of the rot that lumbers through Humbert's veins. Humbert is vile, a hunk of "movieland manhood" concealing a cesspool of despoiling lust. Clare Quilty, the playwright who is Humbert's debauched doppelganger and romantic rival, is even worse. But when Hum beseeches Lo, now the worn and pregnant Mrs. Dolly Schiller, to quit her shabby little life and run away with him again, she says she'd sooner return to Q and his more florid perversions. Humbert may look like a celebrity, but Quilty is one.
Why write such a beautiful book about such reprehensible people? Nabokov's reading of Madame Bovary offers us a crucial clue. He quotes a passage in which Flaubert lists clichés from the trashy romantic novels Emma Bovary adores. The subject matter may be vulgar and repulsive, Nabokov writes, but Flaubert's composition is balanced and modulated. He declares, "This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books."
Nabokov argued that the worst kind of reader was one who identified with the characters, a type of reading all too common now, in the age of the me-me-me-moir.
Humbert is a gauntlet hurled at bad readers, a perfectly executed prank. Those who read in search of their boring selves, or insipid values, are totally stymied by Nabokov's meticulous portrait of a vain, selfish "pentapod monster." Want to punch yourself in the brain? Read one-star Amazon reviews for Lolita. Some people hate "pretension" almost as much as pedophilia: words too big, girl too little, bad book, bad man. Adolf Eichmann too found the book "unwholesome."
Whenever the public collapsed Nabokov and Humbert, their inability to understand how art works offended him far more than their absurd allegations of pedophilia. He said, "To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature."
Also a distinguished lepidopterist, Nabokov delighted in the way some butterfly wings imitated leaves, right down to the worm-holes. Similarly, Hum and Lo's "world of total evil" teems with tiny glimmering details, as vivid and variegated as the American wilds he loved to explore. Humbert tells us that he can "see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art." But art as great as Lolita transcends palliation and melancholy, becoming pure joy, the exalted state Nabokov called "aesthetic bliss."
Laura Penny has a PhD in comparative literature. She teaches at Mount Saint Vincent University.
QUOTABLE
You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and half-throttled, I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another's child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine; Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque part où nous ne serons jamais séparés; Ohio? The wilds of Massachusetts? No matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn - even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita.
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