Finished Lolita
It doesn’t quite sustain each third of the narrative (before Charlotte’s death, between Charlotte’s death and Lolita’s escape, the pursuit of Quilty)—the last third is sketchy and not very interesting…So, no, I don’t think Lolita is a great novel, but I also don’t think, as an example of artistic experiementation, that it can be avoided by anyone truly interested in the history and nature of the novel.
I enjoyed Part One the most, found it the most engaging, moving, and moving (as in momentum). Cetainly, the opening of Lolita is powerful, emotionally and musically:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
It’s hard to miss Nabokov’s love of language. I read somewhere (can’t remember where) that he was very particular about his choice of words, selecting them with almost mathematical precision. He’s fond of alliteration (tip tongue taking trip three tap teeth ta). His writing begs to be read aloud (you can listen to Jeremy Irons reading the opening, or James Mason’s version, which I prefer; you’ll find more audio here, here, here, and here).
I find it interesting that Nabokov claims as his inspiration a drawing sketched by an ape (in his afterward to the book, penned in 1956):
As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever chacoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.
(I find this story more interesting than the theory that Nabokov took “literary liberties”).
It’s difficult to imagine today, in the age of iPod porn, how controversial the subject matter must have been in 1955 when Lolita was first published, a year before I was born. I have to think that even by the prevailing standards of the day, Lolita was a disappointment to anyone who opened the book expecting pornography. The object of his affection obsession aside, Lolita is a love story—a psychological document, if you will, of one possessed by misdirected desire. It’s a tale of addiction. It’s a sketch drawn by an ape of “the bars of the poor creature’s cage.” But the story isn’t what Lolita is about. It’s about that first paragraph—and all the paragraphs following—, the pleasures of prose, of art. Nabokov says as much himself in the afterward:
There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and…Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books.
Nabakov wrote Lolita (at least part of it) during summers crisscrossing the country with his wife, hunting butterflies and jotting passages on index cards while sitting in his car, windows rolled up to mute the passing traffic. And beginning in Part Two, he tells us at length about his road trip. The description is masterful, but as the pages pile up it begins to read like a laundry list of roadside attractions, dusty destinations and detours. After many pages, passages like this:
Not for the first time, and not for the last, had I stared in such dull discomfort of mind at those stationary trivialities that look almost surprised, like staring rustics, to find themselves in the stranded traveller’s field of vision: that green grabage can, those very black, very whitewalled tires for sale, those bright cans of motor oil, that red icebox with assorted drinks, the four, five, seven discarded bottles within the incomplete crossword puzzle of their wooden cells, that bug patiently walking up the inside of the window of the office. Radio music was coming from its open door, and because the rhythm was not synchronized with the heave and flutter and other gestures of wind-animated vegetation, one had the impression of an old scenic film living its own life while piano or fiddle followed a line of music quite outside the shivering flower, the swaying branch.
Notice again the repetition of “s”—stared such stationary surprised staring stranded sale seven shivering swaying—and “f”—four five flutter film fiddle followed—words.
And passages like this, near the end, just before Humbert Humbert consumates his revenge (something about this image I find particularly haunting):
While searching for night lodgings, I passed a drive-in. In a selenian glow, truly mystical in its contrast with the moonless and massive night, on a gigantic screen slanting away among dark drowsy fields, a thin phantom raised a gun, both he and his arm reduced to tremulous dishwater by the oblique angle of that receding world,—and the next moment a row of trees shut off the gesticulation.
It’s easy to overlook searching selenian screen slanting shut or mystical moonless massive moment or dark drowsy, but try changing any of these words and reading the passage aloud again; something will be missing.
I had to read Lolita with the dictionary by my side, finally giving up after failing to discover many of the words in OS X’s Oxford American Dictionaries (like selenian, matitudinal, flavid and tombal). I wrote them down on index cards, noting page numbers. The language, though beautiful, is somewhat dated. I would recommend reading The Annotated Lolita
So, is Lolita a great novel? It adds up to something less than the sum of its parts, in my opinion, shaped like a mountain with a crater in the middle, never quite coming up the other side. I closed the book feeling sad. But line by line—there are moments when Lolita soars.
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