Lolita
Lolita is a novel by
Vladimir Nabokov, first published in 1955. 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. 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.
A 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").
The elder Haze, a lonely widow, becomes Humbert's unwitting pawn in his silent quest to be near her young daughter. 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. Seeing the advantageous nature of this arrangement, and not wishing to lose Lolita, Humbert marries her with the plan of using heavy sedatives on them so he can take advantage of Lolita without fear of discovery.
Before Lolita returns from camp, however, Charlotte finds Humbert's diary, containing written confessions of indifference to his new wife and impassioned lust for her daughter. In disgust, she plans to flee her home with her daughter and to take her beyond Humbert's reach. She writes three letters, and in her mad hurry to mail them she is hit and killed by a passing car. When Humbert retrieves the letters, which are to him, Lolita, and a strict boarding school, he discovers that Charlotte had already begun to forgive him.
Humbert picks Lolita up from camp and begins traveling around the United States, from one motel to another. The two become involved sexually, and they settle down together in a town, with Humbert posing as Lolita's father. Humbert becomes convinced that Lolita is seeing someone else, so they go on the road again, and he is sure that they are being followed. He is right: playwright Clare Quilty, an acquaintance of the Hazes, who first seduced Lolita at camp when she was twelve, is tailing the couple. Lo now runs away with Quilty, while Humbert remains unaware of his identity.
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In the dry years that follow, Humbert has a "normal" love-affair with an alcoholic named Rita. But this period comes to a sudden end when Humbert is contacted by the now 17-year-old Lolita, who needs cash. Humbert finds her married and visibly pregnant. He had intended to kill her husband, but on meeting him realises this is not the character Lolita had been seeing during their travels years ago. He coerces Lolita into revealing the name of the mystery man. He tracks down Quilty and kills him, then dies in prison of
coronary thrombosis. Lolita dies in childbirth.
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."
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."
In a different interpretation, young Lolita stands for the shallow manipulative American culture while Humbert represents the old European culture struggling for its life, being seduced into destruction by the empty American values.
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."
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 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 1985,
The Enchanter, an English translation of a Nabokov novella originally titled
Volshebnik (Ð'олшебник) 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 narrator 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.
*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.
*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.
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 â€" that of a child molester and his victim booking into a hotel as man and daughter â€" in his then unpublished 1939 work
Volshebnik (Ð'олшебник). This not to say, however, that Nabokov could not have drawn on some details of the Florence Horner case in writing
Lolita.German academic Michael Marr's book
The Two Lolitas (ISBN 1844670384) 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 says [
5] 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"
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 discovered.
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." This is somewhat disingenuous, however, as no matter how much more subtle his native Russian was, he had a better grasp of English than most native English speakers.
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, however many lauded it for its more mature approach towards the novel. 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.
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 the marketing of
pornography, it is used to refer to any attractive woman who has only recently reached, or is still younger than, the age of consent, or sometimes to refer to women who only appear to be younger than the age of consent.
The phrase
lolita complex or
lolicon is popular in modern-day
Japan to refer to a prurient interest in actual or (more commonly)
manga or
anime depictions of young girls, usually below the age of thirteen. There is also a style of dress in Japan, often worn by
Visual Kei musicians and their fans, called "Lolita" that is intended to evoke the look of a young girl. Lolita clothing styles range from Elegant Gothic Lolita ("EGL") or
Gothic Lolita to
Sweet Lolita or "Ama Lolita", though it should be noted that the style is in no way intended to be pornographic.
It is especially worth noting that 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". 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. However, commerce has preferred to use the girl's name, and to make "lolitas" attractive (in film adaptations and pornography) to a much wider audience than the small number of "nympholepts" (
pedophiles) which Humbert Humbert believes to exist. In the novel, Dolores Haze is attractive to the aging nympholepts Humbert and Quilty, as well as to her coevals, while her spiteful mother describes her as plain at best.
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. (The line was altered to "just like the old man in that famous book by Nabokov" in the Police's 1986 remake of the song.) 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.
Freedy Johnston's song "Dolores" (from the 1994 "
This Perfect World" album) is based on Lolita.
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 summer of 2000, the French music industry released a song with the title "Moi... Lolita", written and produced by
Mylène Farmer and
Laurent Boutonnat. It tells the story of a young teenage girl, and is sung as a nymphet's autobiography by
Alizée Jacotey.
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.
The band Elefant has written a song called "Lolita," with lyrics based on the story, as has
Suzanne Vega.
Was named the fourth greatest novel of the 20th century by the
Modern Library.
*
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.)
* 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.
*
Pedophilia and child sexual abuse in fiction*
Pedophilia and child sexual abuse in films*
NPR:
50 Years Later, Lolita Still Seduces Readers*
Slate (magazine):
Lolita at 50 - Is Nabokov's masterpiece still shocking?
