Lolita
| First edition cover First edition cover art | |
| Author | Vladimir Nabokov |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Tragicomedy, Novel |
| Publisher | Olympia Press, Weidenfeld and Nicolson |
Publication date | 1955 |
| Publication place | Russia |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 368 pp (recent paperback edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 1-85715-133-X (recent paperback edition) Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character |
Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first published in 1955 in Paris. The novel is both famous for its innovative style and infamous for its controversial subject: the book's narrator and main character Humbert Humbert becomes sexually obsessed with a pubescent girl, who is 12 years old when most of the novel takes place.
The novel was adapted to film twice, once in 1962 by Stanley Kubrick (Nabokov was involved in the writing) and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne.
Plot summary
Template:Spoiler A divorced scholar in his late thirties, Humbert leaves Europe for the United States and moves into a rented room in the home of Charlotte Haze, after seeing her twelve-year-old daughter Dolores (whom her mother affectionately calls "Lo") sunbathing in the garden. Humbert, who has had a lifelong passion for "nymphets" (sexually alluring pubescent girls) - as a pre-adolescent, he experienced the loss of his childhood sweetheart to typhus - is instantly smitten, and will do anything to be near her. He immediately dubs the girl with the romantic nickname "Lolita," although he is the only character in the book to call her this (her friends and teachers refer to her as "Dolly").
Charlotte, a lonely widow, becomes Humbert's unwitting pawn in his silent quest to seduce Lolita. When Mrs. Haze sends Lolita off to camp, she leaves an ultimatum for Humbert saying that he must marry her (for she has fallen madly in love with him) or move out. Humbert marries Charlotte solely to maintain access to Lolita, intending to use heavy sedatives on both of them so he can sexually molest Lolita without fear of discovery.
Humbert has a table in their home with a locked drawer. He tells Charlotte that it contains "love letters" and that the key is hidden. While Humbert is out of the house and Lolita is away at camp, Charlotte finds the key and opens the drawer. It contains Humbert's diary, which details his lack of interest in Charlotte and impassioned lust for her daughter. Horrified, Charlotte decides to flee with Lolita. Before doing so, she writes three letters -- to Humbert, Lolita, and a strict boarding school to which she apparently intends to send Lolita. Humbert comes home. Charlotte confronts him and runs from the house with the letters, but is struck and killed by a passing car. A child retrieves the letters and gives them to Humbert, who destroys them.
Humbert picks Lolita up from camp and takes her to a motel, where they have sex for the first of many times. They travel around the United States, moving from one motel to another. Eventually they settle down in a New England town, with Humbert posing as Lolita's father. Humbert becomes convinced that Lolita is seeing someone else, so they go on the road again. He is sure that they are being followed. He is right: playwright Clare Quilty, an acquaintance of the Hazes, and himself a pedophile and child pornographer, is tailing the couple. Lo runs away with Quilty, while Humbert remains unaware of his identity.
Humbert embarks on a long quest to find Lolita and her abductor, whom he intends to kill. During this period Humbert has a "normal" love-affair with an alcoholic named Rita. He eventually receives a letter from Lolita, now 17, who tells him that she is now married, pregnant, and in need of money. She asks him to send money to her at the local post office. Humbert tracks down Lolita, who tells him that her husband was not the abductor, and is coaxed by Humbert into revealing that man's identity. At this point Humbert also learns that Quilty was involved in various forms of pornography, including pornography with children. Lolita maintains that she did not want to be in the films, but merely wanted to be near the man she loved-- Quilty. Humbert is visibly shaken upon hearing this news and goes to Quilty's home. He finds Quilty in a state of madness and a waltz of insanity commences with Quilty mistaking Humbert as an angry father, amongst others. Quilty's insanity has him eating a cigarette at one moment, running to play the piano the next, whilst naked, and seemingly uninterested in Humbert and his gun. Humbert, although confused, finishes the job; Quilty is dead. Arrested for murder, Humbert writes his memoirs, then dies in prison of coronary thrombosis. Lolita dies in childbirth while giving birth to a stillborn girl on Christmas Day 1952.
Style and interpretation
The novel is a tragicomedy narrated by Humbert, who riddles the narrative with wordplay and 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, double entendres, 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, and the lesser used "faunlet". 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 vain and cruel wretch" and "a hateful person" (quoted in Levine, 1967).
Humbert is a well-educated, multilingual, literary-minded European émigré. He fancies himself a great artist, but lacks the curiosity that Nabokov considers essential. 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".
Some critics have accepted Humbert's version of events at face value. In 1959, novelist Robertson Davies excused the narrator entirely, writing that the theme of Lolita is "not the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child".
Most writers, however, have given less credit to Humbert and more to Nabokov's powers as an ironist. Martin Amis, in his essay on Stalinism, Koba the Dread, proposes that Lolita is an elaborate metaphor for the totalitarianism which destroyed the Russia of Nabokov's childhood (though Nabokov states in his Afterword that he "[detests] symbols and allegories"). Amis interprets it as a story of tyranny told from the point of view of the tyrant. "All of Nabokov's books are about tyranny," he says, "even Lolita. Perhaps Lolita most of all".
In 2003, Iranian expatriate Azar Nafisi published the memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran about an illicit women's reading group. In this book the psychological and political interpretations of Lolita are united, since as female intellectuals in Iran, Nafisi and her students were denied both public liberty and private sexual selfhood. Although rejecting a too-easy identification of Lolita's captivity with that of her students ("...we were not Lolita, the Ayatollah was not Humbert...") Nafisi writes of her students' strong emotional connection with the book: "what linked us so closely was this perverse intimacy of victim and jailer" and "like Lolita we tried to escape and create our own little pockets of freedom".
For Nafisi the essence of the novel is Humbert's solipsism and his erasure of Lolita's independent identity. She writes: "Lolita was given to us as Humbert's creature [...] To reinvent her, Humbert must take from Lolita her own real history and replace it with his own [...] Yet she does have a past. Despite Humbert's attempts to orphan Lolita by robbing her of her history, that past is still given to us in glimpses".
One of the novel's early champions, Lionel Trilling, warned in 1958 of the moral difficulty in interpreting a book with so eloquent and so self-deceived a narrator: "we find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents [...] we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting".
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 September 15, 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. In 1998, it was named the fourth greatest novel of the 20th century by the Modern Library. Now this novel is avalable in all major languages, adaptations and film scripts.
The Enchanter
In 1985, The Enchanter, an English translation of a Nabokov novella originally titled Volshebnik (Волшебник) was published posthumously. Volshebnik was written in Russian, while Nabokov was living in France in 1939. It can be seen as an early version of Lolita but with significant differences: the action takes place in central Europe, and the protagonist is unable to consummate his passion with his step-daughter, leading to his suicide. It lacks the scope and wordplay of Lolita but is essential reading for anyone interested in the genesis of the book.
Allusions/references to other works
- Humbert Humbert's first love, Annabel Leigh, 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. Nabokov originally intended Lolita to be called The Kingdom by the Sea [1], drawing on the rhyme with Annabel Lee that was used in the first verse of Poe's work. The conclusion of the first chapter – "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns." – is also a reference to the poem. ("With a love that the winged seraphs in heaven / Coveted her and me.")
- Humbert Humbert's double name recalls Poe's "William Wilson", a tale in which the main character is haunted by his doppelgänger, paralleling to the presence of Humbert's own doppelgänger, Clare Quilty. Humbert is not, however, his real name, but a chosen pseudonym (and perhaps a reference to binomial nomenclature).
- Humbert Humbert's field of expertise is French literature (one of his jobs is writing a series of educational works which compare French writers to English writers), and as such there are several references to French literature, including the authors Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, François Rabelais, Charles Baudelaire, Prosper Mérimée and Pierre de Ronsard.
- In chapter 13, Humbert Humbert quotes "to hold thee lightly on a gentle knee and print on thy soft cheek a parent's kiss" from Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.
- In chapter 35, Humbert's "death sentence" on Clare Quilty parodies the rhythm and use of anaphora in T. S. Eliot's poem Ash Wednesday.
- The line "I cannot get out, said the starling" from Humbert's poem is taken from a passage in Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, "The Passport, the Hotel De Paris."
Possible real-life prototype
According to Alexander Dolinin [2], the prototype of Lolita was 11-year-old Florence Horner, kidnapped in 1948 by a 50-year-old pedophile mechanic, Frank La Salle, who had caught her stealing a five-cent notebook. La Salle travelled with her over various states for 21 months and is believed to have had sex with her. He claimed that he was an FBI agent and threatened to “turn her in” for the theft and to send her to "a place for girls like you." The Horner case was not widely reported, but Dolinin adduces various similarities in events and descriptions.
The problem with this suggestion is that Nabokov had already used the same basic idea – that of a child molester and his victim booking into a hotel as man and daughter – in his then unpublished 1939 work Volshebnik (Волшебник). This not to say, however, that Nabokov could not have drawn on some details of the Florence Horner case in writing Lolita.
Heinz von Eschwege's "Lolita"
German academic Michael Marr's book The Two Lolitas (ISBN 1-84467-038-4) describes his recent discovery of a 1916 German short story titled "Lolita" about a middle-aged man travelling abroad who takes a room as a lodger and instantly becomes obsessed with the preteen girl (also named Lolita) who lives in the same house. Marr has speculated that Nabokov may have had cryptomnesia (a "hidden memory" of the story that Nabokov was unaware of) while he was composing Lolita during the 1950s. Marr says that until 1937 Nabokov lived in the same section of Berlin as the author, Heinz von Eschwege (pen name: Heinz von Lichberg), and was most likely familiar with his work, which was widely available in Germany during Nabokov's time there [3], [4]. The Philadelphia Inquirer, in the article "Lolita at 50: Did Nabokov take literary liberties?" says that, according to Marr, accusations of plagiarism should not apply and quotes him as saying: "Literature has always been a huge crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast... Nothing of what we admire in Lolita is already to be found in the tale; the former is in no way deducible from the latter."
Nabokov's afterword
In 1956, Nabokov penned an afterword to Lolita ("On a Book Entitled Lolita") that was included in every subsequent edition of the book.
In the afterword, Nabokov wrote that "the initial shiver of inspiration" for Lolita "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 charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.” Neither the article nor the drawing has been recovered.
In response to an American critic who characterized Lolita as the record of Nabokov's "love affair with the romantic novel", Nabokov wrote that "the substitution of 'English language' for 'romantic novel' would make this elegant formula more correct.”
Nabokov concluded the afterword with a reference to his beloved first language, which he abandoned as a writer once he moved to the United States in 1940: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English."
Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
Lolita has been filmed twice: the first adaptation was made in 1962 by Stanley Kubrick, and starred James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers and, as Lolita, Sue Lyon; and a second adaptation in 1997 by Adrian Lyne, starring Jeremy Irons, Dominique Swain, and Melanie Griffith. Nabokov was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on the earlier film's adapted screenplay, although little of this work reached the screen. The more recent version was given mixed reviews by critics. It was delayed for over a year because of its controversiality.
The book was adapted into a musical in the early 1970s by librettist/lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer John Barry under the title Lolita My Love. Critics were surprised at how sensitively the story was translated into what can be a crass medium, but the show nonetheless closed on the road before it opened in New York.
In 1982, Edward Albee adapted the book into a nonmusical play. It was savaged by critics, Frank Rich notably attributing the temporary death of Albee's career to it.
Influence on Language
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 Strong Opinions, Nabokov opines that he is "probably responsible" for parents not naming their children "Lolita" anymore. Indeed, the town of Lolita, Texas nearly changed its name after the novel gained notoriety.
In the book itself, "Lolita" is specifically Humbert's nickname for Dolores, and "nymphet" is the general term for the type of young girl to whom Humbert is attracted.
Allusions/references from other works
The Police's 1980 song "Don't Stand So Close to Me" refers to "just like the old man in that book by Nabokov," which in context is clearly Lolita. The song is about a teacher having a relationship with a young student. Perhaps to fit the meter of the song, or perhaps because of an error on the part of Sting, the song's writer, Nabokov's name is mispronounced, placing the stress on the first syllable.
A number of other songs have been based on the novel. Freedy Johnston's song "Dolores" from the 1994 This Perfect World album refers to Lolita. Suzanne Vega included a song called "Lolita" on her 1996 album Nine Objects of Desire, as did the band Elefant on their 2006 album The Black Magic Show and Prince in 2006's 3121. In the summer of 2000, French singer Alizée Jacotey released a song with the title "Moi...Lolita", written and produced by Mylène Farmer and Laurent Boutonnat.
The case of Amy Fisher, dubbed the "Long Island Lolita", helped popularize the term among a new generation. Screenwriter Alan Ball considered writing a play based on the Fisher case, but the story soon got away from him and mutated into the screenplay which became American Beauty (1999). The narrator's name, Lester Burnham, is an anagram of "Humbert learns"; the name of the girl he lusts after, Angela Hayes, is also a play on Dolores Haze.
In the 2005 film Broken Flowers starring Bill Murray and directed by Jim Jarmusch, Alexis Dziena has a brief appearance as an overtly sexual teenage girl named Lolita. The central character Don (played by Murray) remarks about the ironic choice of name to Lolita and her mother, an old flame of his. Later in the film he meets a young woman called Sun Green; in the novel, Soleil Vert is mentioned as the name of Lolita's perfume.
References
- Nabokov Library
- 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.)
- Levine, Peter (1967) "Lolita and Aristotle's Ethics" in Philosophy and Literature Volume 19, Number 1, April 1995, pp. 32-47
- Nabokov, Vladimir (1955). Lolita. New York: Vintage International. ISBN 0-679-72316-1.
- The original novel.
- "Zembla"
- A resource of the Arts & Humanities Library of the Pennsylvania State University Libraries, home of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society and its publication The Nabokovian.