Telling Through Omission: Nabokov’s Lolita

Cover image: Cambridge nightclub whose name includes two nicknames of Dolores Haze other than Lolita. Nabokov would die for a minor linguistic coincidence (does this one even qualify as a pun??) and so would I.

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This flat university spring, I reread Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. When I bring this up, people tend to go, ‘That’s the book about the pedophile, right?’ Well – yes, but there’s much more –

Obligatory summary paragraph of Lolita’s plot:

Lolita is told from the perspective of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged academic who likes little girls. He rents a room from single mother Charlotte Haze, because he falls in love with her 12 year-old daughter Dolores, whom he nicknames Lolita in his fantasies. He marries Charlotte just to keep Dolores in his life. When Charlotte dies in an accident, Humbert takes Dolores on a road trip across America, where he starts sexual relations with her and tries to isolate her from society. After much planning and contrivance, Dolores escapes, and Humbert loses all trace of her until he receives a letter from Dolores asking for money. Humbert visits her, and finds that Dolores, now 17, is married and expecting a baby, and living in poverty. Humbert confesses his undying love, pays up, and finds out the name of the man who helped Dolores escape. Wracked with remorse for ruining Dolores’ life, Humbert hunts down the man and kills him. In the book’s prologue, the reader finds out that Dolores dies in childbirth and Humbert dies in prison.

It should be quite clear that Humbert is nothing but a predator and a criminal. Lolita isn’t even the child’s real name, it’s Humbert’s name for his private eroticised image of Dolores. As the novel wears on, it becomes increasingly clear that neither Humbert nor the reader knows Dolores as a person. Humbert interprets everything she does through his desire for Lolita: her innocent displays of prepubescent sexuality are taken as consent to an adult relationship with Humbert, her tears of suffering are an augmentation to his lust, her outright hatred of him the quirks of a wayward lover.

Nabokov said that his first inspiration for Lolita came when he read a news article about a chimp in a Paris zoo: it was taught to draw, and the first thing it drew was bars to its own cage. This perfectly describes Humbert’s status as an unreliable narrator: he warps everything he sees through his web of lust, paranoia, and self-absorption. He frames himself as the romantic hero, charming and sympathetic, victim to the charms of nymph-children; if you believe him, you’ve fallen for it.

– This is the thing: Lolita isn’t just Humbert’s story, it’s also Dolores’. I’ve heard people say that Dolores lacks character and agency and narrative presence but that’s because Humbert’s narrative actively marginalises her as he tries to justify their ‘romance’. But Dolores is there, between the chinks of Humbert’s narrative, and she is in plain sight as soon as you refuse to let Humbert’s verbosity and arrogance hold you in thrall.

We see just enough of Dolores’ narrative to join up the dots. We glimpse the intensity of her helplessness and frustration, but also her protecting her friends from Humbert’s predatory eye, her plotting her final escape. The second half of the novel holds relatively little plot progression for Humbert, as he ferries himself and Dolores between motels, paranoia, and a brief stint in New England; but it’s here, literally reading between Humbert’s lines, that we see Dolores try to make the most of her stunted life. Part of Dolores’ tragedy is her suffering; another part is that she never gets to become the teenager and woman that she could have been without Humbert.

With one text, Nabokov has told the story from two antithetical perspectives, both that of the predator and the victim.

As a writer, Nabokov is very conscious of the inherent subjectivity of narratives, and of using points-of-view as deliberate narrative devices. The heights of Nabokov’s ability to expound multiple narratives in the same text comes from his 1962 novel Pale Fire, which is framed as the commentary to a long poem, but is really a single text telling at least three different truths, story-within-a-story taking place on overlapping planes of reality. Like in Lolita, the narrator is deeply committed to the truth of his own narrative, but patterns of allusion and omission allow the reader to infer further layers of ‘what’s really going on’.

In fact, much of Lolita, both its style and substance, make more sense when set alongside Nabokov’s other works. Nabokov is a writer with very persistent aesthetic and thematic concerns, so looking at some of his other novels helps to elucidate an individual novel. There are a lot of parallels, even when we look at just three – Lolita (1955) alongside Pale Fire (1962) and Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) – and some of them do help to contextualise why Nabokov wrote Humbert the way he did.

For context, what are Pale Fire and Ada about? Both rather resist this question: on the plot level, Pale Fire is about a delusional man who stalks and emotionally manipulates his neighbour, and Ada is a love triangle between three siblings with a fantasy setting; but on a thematic and more essential level, Pale Fire is about the yearning for a lost homeland, and Ada is about the nature of time. Like Lolita, both Pale Fire and Ada are narrated by highly unsavoury men, and revolve around their respective objects of obsession.

For a start, I think this cross-comparison sheds a lot of light on the morality of Lolita, at least enough for me to make up some retort when people tell me that if I like Nabokov, I must really like moral ambiguity. – Moral ambiguity is interesting sometimes, but that’s not why Nabokov’s such a good writer. For me what makes Nabokov special is his artistry in layering language, imagery, and perspectives, and it just so happens that he practices his art in the sandbox of highly unsavoury subject matter. Both Pale Fire and Ada arguably lean more into the grotesque than Lolita does, from the grossness of human bodies, to psychological ugliness, to fucked up social practices. Nabokov seemingly baulks at nothing, and it’s oddly relieving: he writes so freely and joyously about all manners of transgressions that he is clearly doing it for the sake of doing it, to shock and to entertain. If writing Lolita makes him a pedophile, Pale Fire and Ada make him an escaped psych-ward patient with a belief in alternate realities, the dream to create an empire of luxury brothels, and lifelong obsession with his sister – which various sources of biographical knowledge suggests he is not.

Pale Fire and Ada show Nabokov’s ability at taking seriously things lightly, and somehow using the ugly to build up the beautiful. There’s much less gaiety and absurdity in Lolita, but the underlying impulse is similar. When questioned on why he wrote Lolita, Nabokov always answers that it was an aesthetic challenge – how to write convincingly from a monster’s point-of-view. Nabokov is, on the whole, very reserved when interviewers ask him about Lolita: he dodges questions he doesn’t want to answer, doesn’t comment on predation as a social or moral issue, but when he does it’s with the stance that the absolute heinousness of Humbert’s crime is beyond obvious. I say Nabokov takes serious things lightly, but really it’s more accurate to say that, as an artist, he doesn’t find any of his subject matter too serious to be included in art-for-art’s-sake, and that he was incredibly comfortable in separating his engagement with artistry from engagement with the real-world issue.

Pale Fire and Ada are also perhaps more obvious than Lolita in showing how Nabokov constructs the narrative voice. Nabokov is always writing in character, and the narrative is foremost a tool to characterise the narrator: gaps or trends in the narrative encourage readers’ doubts and suspicions, just like how we judge narratives in real life based on their provenance. As the narrative in Pale Fire, gradually disintegrates, and both Van (the narrator) and Ada doubt Van’s narrative in Ada, the reader sifts through the characters’ biases to piece together the novel’s ‘actual plot’ in their mind. Reading Nabokov is hard work, it’s like putting together a big puzzle from small hard-won pieces, but that’s why it’s so rewarding and just so good.

On the face of it, Lolita is much more straightforward: a single narrator – spewing erudition and candour – is telling a single chronological story. But that’s what makes it more subtle and insidious than Pale Fire or Ada: the fact of narrative-as-self-presentation hasn’t changed, nor has the fact that apparent candour and erudition do not entail a trustworthy person. This is obvious when spelled out, but it’s easy for the unwary to be taken in by Humbert’s spell.

This is probably why the dominant reading of Lolita as a pop-cultural artefact completely takes the perspective of Humbert, with Humbert as the romantic hero and Dolores (wholly inflated with the fantom sex object Lolita) as the sexually precocious teenager who seduces older men. This is the reading adopted by both film adaptations of Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, 1962; Adrian Lyne, 1997), and most references to Lolita in pop music (Katy Perry ‘I study Lolita religiously [sexy breath]’; Lana Del Rey ‘Light of your life, fire of your loins / Tell me you own me, give me them coins’; or Del Rey’s song ‘Lolita’, about a teenage girl being involved with both older men and her age group at the same time), and in aspects of lolita fashion. There’s probably some (mediocre) argument to be made about how it’s empowering to read Dolores as in full control of her sexuality, but considering the source material is about Dolores’ abuse and disempowerment, Lolita seems like the wrong text for this purpose. (There’s also the issue of whether teenagers can even engage with adult sexuality in any informed and empowered way at all, but that’s a different kettle of fish.)

In interviews, Nabokov openly expresses distaste towards sympathetic readings of Humbert’s character (e.g. ’[Humbert is a] vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear “touching”’, 1967 interview with Herbert Gold), and readings of Lolita as wish-fulfilment pornography (Pierre Berton: ‘… many people think [Lolita] is a book about sex, right?’ Nabokov: ‘That is because they think in clichés’, 1958 interview with Pierre Berton and Lionel Trilling). When I mentioned to a friend that I was writing about Lolita, she said, ‘Humbert is so clearly abominable in the book, but people are still taken in by him – it scares me how many people get taken in by people like that in real life.’ – Our pre-conditioned trust in the voice of a rich educated man, and our society’s habit of sexualising of teenage girls, come together to make the reading of Lolita-as-romance feel so much more ‘natural’ than the more thoughtful and more intended reading of Lolita-as-abuse.

One of the things that struck me from reading interviews with Nabokov (Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Robert Galla, 2017) was how readily and happily the interviewers adopted Humbert’s word ‘nymphet’. ‘Nymphets’ are Humbert’s word for young girls that arouse him, and he attributes to them some ‘demoniac’ origin in order to explain the unearthly rapture they produce in him. In other words, it’s a rationalisation from a sexual predator to deflect blame and agency. But middle-aged male interviewers repeatedly ask Nabokov whether he is proud to have introduced a new word to the English lexicon, and so offhandedly write about the ‘wild, comic, and touching affair between a middle-aged man and a young “nymphet”’ (Douglas M Davis, 1964). Isn’t it chilling how naturally they understand and use the word, as if thanking it for finally labelling a concept that we didn’t know we needed?

I trawled through the 28 Nabokov profiles and interviews in Galla’s collection partly to see what Nabokov himself thought of Lolita. He has a few unwavering claims – that he is not Humbert Humbert, that the sympathetic character in Lolita is Dolores, that the tragedy of the book is Humbert ruining Dolores’ life, that Lolita is not an allegory for anything, and that he wrote it as an aesthetic exercise – but otherwise is fairly inscrutable. Whenever interviewers ask him a more substantive question about how to interpret Lolita, he swerves away blithely (for example, when Pierre Berton (1958) asks if Lolita was a satire, Nabokov starts to talk about fruit salads, which is apparently the etymology of the word ‘satire’).

I initially found his silence on ‘the meaning of Lolita’ rather disappointing – after all I can’t now quote Nabokov saying that Lolita is definitely intended as a story about abuse. But then, it isn’t Nabokov’s job to tell me how to interpret Lolita. Isn’t he, by my own admission, a writer whose works demand critical thinking from readers, and great because of it? If I’ve engaged enough with Lolita in enough depth to want to write about it, surely I should have enough faith in my interpretation to talk about it without finding written endorsement from the author? Lolita speaks for itself, and it strikes me as a double narrative where, in spite of Humbert’s point of view, Dolores’ story still shines through.