Category: Lolita

Iinherent sexuality, what is most evident is the manner in which Lolita has been forced to prematurely age sexually. In a character who describes ‘all caresses except kisses on the mouth or the stark act of love either “romantic slosh” or “abnormal”’, a distinct lack of healthy understanding for the ‘stark act’ of sex is evident, thus rendering Dolores vulnerable to exploitation, both by Humbert and by both the modern and contemporary societies receiving her character. In a manner similar to the previously mentioned ‘Lolita Complex’, the media’s depiction of Lolita as an overtly sexual being conveys a false impression of Lolita as ‘a sexy little number, a sassy ingénue, a bewitching adolescent siren’ . Rachel Aarons of the New Yorker addresses this evident discrepancy between media portrayals in contract with the themes of the novel; she writes that ‘the sexualised vision of Lolita perpetuated by popular culture has very little to do with the text of Nabokov’s novel, in which Lolita is not a teen-aged seductress but a sexually abused twelve-year-old girl’ . In agreement with this, it is therefore that in spite of common perception of Humbert as a victim of Lolita’s sexuality, Humbert is the ultimate source of wrongdoing, and, as a result, the amount of sympathy felt by the reader is minimal.

In ‘Notes’, meanwhile, sexuality is an element prominent in both Barbara and Sheba; however, noticeably more so in Barbara. In contrast with Dolores, the elements of sexuality that surround Barbara place emphasis on a lack thereof, with both her age and appearance contributing towards this lack which increasingly seems to border on desperate deprivation as the novel progresses. Whilst Barbara’s obsession with Sheba appears to indicate an intense desire for power, it may be argued that it stems from an underlying sexual desire within Barbara. Heller utilises touch as a recurring motif in ‘Notes on a Scandal’, with Barbara’s distinct lack of physical contact with others serving as an indication of her loneliness and isolation. This, therefore, makes the strange scene in which Barbara ‘ran the tips of my fingers up and down from elbow to wrist’ all the more poignant, and Barbara’s description of how she ‘had never touched Sheba so intimately before’ alongside how Sheba’s ‘mouth fell open’ alludes at Barbara’s potential desire for the establishment of a relationship more intimate with Sheba. With common critical reference to Barbara as ‘frigid’, the character’s sexual deprivation is evident, and the reader is consequently more inclined to feel sympathy for her as a result of her isolation.

In conclusion, sympathy is courted by both Heller in ‘Notes on a Scandal’, and Nabokov in ‘Lolita’ in the authors’ manipulation of their readers. . Nabokov’s exploration of both the sexual and emotional relationship between a grown man and his ‘pubescent sweetheart’ is one which is largely romanticised, and as a result Nabokov enlists the reader in a journey of complicity in Humbert’s wrongdoings as the protagonist’s distinctively dreamy narrative tone drives the novel. However, in spite of Humbert Humbert’s attempted manipulation of the reader, the character’s desire for sex is the ultimate driving force of his despicable actions. It is therefore that, although his evil is often masked, feelings of sympathy for Humbert Humbert are minimal, particularly when compared to Heller’s Sheba Hart in ‘Notes on a Scandal’. Whilst Sheba’s relationship with schoolboy Steven Connolly is undoubtedly predatory in nature, there is an inclination in the reader to sympathise with her character as a consequence of the loneliness within her marriage and the lack of contentment that drives her. Furthermore, the predator-prey relationship established between Humbert and Lolita is almost reflected in the relationship shared between Barbara and Sheba. Sheba’s position within the relationship is evidently that of a victim, and as the novel progresses the reader is inclined to feel more sympathy for her as a result.

The relationship between Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert (H.H) and Dolores Haze (Lolita) has provoked nothing short of critical outcry due to its taboo and ethically questionable nature. Although Nabokov advised readers to avoid searching for connections between his works and his personal life, the ‘nymphic fixations’ experienced in Nabokov’s previous works, such as Lilith (1938) contributed to the development of a public opinion in regards to his psyche. The psychological lens of literary criticism adopts numerous of Sigmund Freud’s principles from his work which can be applied when analysing the behaviour of Nabokov’s characters. Psychological critics view literary works as ‘dreams’, comprised of repressed and theatrical content to entertain the reader. By applying the psychological lens of literary criticism, H.H’s behaviour and adolescent ‘traumas’ can be dissected to exhibit how Nabokov’s own subconscious desires, fears and sexual repressions prevent most, if not all, romantic love from being genuine. Psychoanalytic approaches, such as Oedipal’s rivalry and the theory of libidinal development, allow for the reader to recognize that the ‘romantic love’ narrated within Lolita is the manifestation of Nabokov’s internal turmoil ‘bleeding’ into the text. Critics have attempted to justify H.H’s erotic attraction towards Lolita by claiming that it was reciprocated; however, H.H libidinal suppressions and the fact that Lolita is twenty-four years his junior render such explanations fruitless. Though Lolita is the title character, the major focus of the psychological lens is directly shining upon Nabokov’s protagonist H.H. rather than on Lolita. Lolita, however, is the necessary and primal catalyst for the manifestation of H.H’s stunted psychosexual urges. Lolita, as a character, can be viewed specifically through the psychological lens as events that occurred during her infancy have led to her precocious sexual desires. Lolita, as a whole work, denigrates romantic love. By invoking Freudian symbolism, love viewed solely as romantic is not a truth to be derived from Nabokov’s work.

Ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato represent the precursors to modern day psychology and psychoanalysis. Their theories in regards to the human psuchẽ (psyche) provided the necessary knowledge on top of which subsequent, distinguished psychologists constructed their hypotheses. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is widely credited to Signmund Freud, as numerous contributions antecedent to his were later discredited or valued as not being noteworthy. Freud’s theories of the Psychic Apparatus and Oedipus Complex are all of exceptional pertinence to the complex dynamics present in the novel Lolita. The Psychic Apparatus has three fundamental components that interact with one another to create an “energic economy”. In order to appease the “Pleasure Principle”, internally contained energy is released to prevent further sexual tension from being created. Said agents are defined as “Id”, “Ego” and “Superego”. The “Id” is classified as the compulsive and instinctual section of the psyche, unconscious to its host or the external world. Seeing as its central purpose is to please an individual’s most fundamental survival desires, it is present at birth and cannot be restrained. The “Ego” is defined as “that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world” (Sigmund Freud, The ego and the id). The “Ego” seeks to find just as much pleasure as the “Id”, but implements an element of rationality and premeditation in order to reach said pleasure in a civilized manner. It matures between the ages of eighteen months and three years, meaning that the child has been exposed to the concept of right and wrong. The “Superego” is the component of the human psyche that strives for ‘ethical perfection’ and has the sole purpose of suppressing the aggressive tendencies of the “Id” and immoral wishes of the “Ego”. It involves implementing mechanisms such as repression and Identification in order to temporarily inhibit the Id and Ego from disrupting a person’s life. Michael Karson, a professor of psychology at the University of Denver, delineates the “Superego” as the psychological component that regulates the “relationship between one’s conduct and one’s verbal façade”. An individual who does not successfully develop the correct agent at the appropriate psycosexual stage experiences a stunted, if not completely halted, psychological development. Another Freudian theory that branches from the psychosexual stages of development is that of the Oedipus Complex. It acquired its name from the mythical Greek king Oedipus of Thebes, who fulfilled a prophecy stating that he would kill his father and marry his mother. The Oedipus Complex illustrates the desire a child feels towards his or her opposite sex parent, as well as the jealousy experienced by the child towards his or her same sex parent as they fight for the opposite sex parent’s affections. Although the anger is typically repressed, a child that does not successfully develop to identify with the same sex parent is unable to move past the phallic stage of psycosexual development. This will lead to the child experiencing psychological burdens, such as hostility towards the same sex parent and attraction towards the opposite sex parent, that will be expressed through violent, sexually driven events. The psychoanalytic dream interpretation technique, pioneered by Freud, depicts dreams as manifestations of repressed desires. During one’s slumber, the veil separating the “Id” and the “Superego” subsides, allowing for typically repressed thoughts to approach consciousness. Both a dream’s latent and manifested content aid in the greater understanding of a person’s drives as they are brought to light without wreaking havoc on the life of the individual. Dreams serve as a medium for one’s primal and often questionable desires to be fulfilled psychologically, without the actual expenditure of energy or physical activity. The “Superego” and “Ego” implement Sublimation as promptly as an individual returns to consciousness, in order to convert one’s impulses to acceptable actions and behaviours.

Renowned psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875-1961) had contrasting opinions to Freud in regard to the concept of unconsciousness. Freud defined unconsciousness as a particular stage of the psyche compromising of “feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories” detached from our cognitive understanding. Jung, on the other hand, proposed the theory of Collective Unconsciousness, in which all humans experience, to a certain degree, primal instincts and archetypes that are genetically inherited from a universal ancestor. Although repressed by one’s conscience

Every now and again it’s probably healthy to crack open the glass, remove a certain world masterpiece from the display case, and in re-reading it recall that—unlike Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, two other novels once deemed obscene by the tribunes of moral upkeep— Lolita is a disgusting book. Furthermore, the day will never come when it is not a disgusting book. By comparison, in fact, it can make Lawrence and Joyce look like a pair of old village bluenoses. For all its arduous recourse to the c-word, Lady Chatterley’s Lover places its faith in the sexually fulfilled marriage, a ho-hum piety in the age of divorce. For all its scatological frankness, Ulysses tells the touching story of a surrogate father finding his surrogate son. Lolita, meanwhile, tells the story of a stepfather serially defiling his adolescent stepdaughter. Public taste was meant to catch up to Lady Chatterley screwing her gamekeeper, to Leopold Bloom sitting on his jakes. Public taste was never meant to catch up to Humbert Humbert.

“I want my learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to replay,” Humbert asks us early on, by way of setting up his description of his first taste of sexual bliss with Lolita, the pre-pubescent daughter of his landlady. (Humbert will eventually marry the landlady; the landlady will eventually die; Humbert will eventually abscond with Lolita. For now, though, he is only their boarder, a debonair European with certain hidden proclivities.) “So let us get started. I have a difficult job before me.” This is Nabokov winking out at us. By difficult job, Humbert means: I want to conjure this scene up, with all its strange anatomical circumnavigations, as carefully as possible, to demonstrate to the reader that I am not wholly a monster. (He also means: I had to ejaculate, without letting Lolita know.) By difficult job, Nabokov means: I will indulge Humbert in all his strange circumlocutions, to demonstrate to the reader what a total monster he is. In this respect, Nabokov and Humbert have opposing aims; but in the telling, they become as one. All the comically baroque pleonasms help Humbert shield from himself how repulsively he has acted. They allow Nabokov, meanwhile, to describe a rapine act of frottage without becoming explicitly pornographic. Here is some of what follows: “She was musical and apple-sweet. Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I stroked them; there she lolled on in the right-hand corner, almost asprawl, Lola, the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet, against the pile of old magazines heaped on my left on the sofa—and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty—between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock …”

Lolita turns 50 this year, and having stayed so perverse, it remains fresh as ever. To fully appreciate its perversity, though, one must first appreciate that it is not obscene. Your run-of-the-mill obscene masterwork—Tropic of Cancer, say—demands that you, enlightened reader, work your way past the sex and excrement to recognize how beautiful it is. But with Lolita, you must work past its beauty to recognize how shocking it is. And for all its beauty, for all its immense ingenuity and humor, one easily forgets how shocking Lolita is. To wit: Later in the narrative, Humbert has settled with Lolita in a small town called Beardsley and set up a semblance of a normal suburban life. Humbert is called into Lolita’s private school for a parent-teacher conference, where he is told that she is “antagonistic, dissatisfied, cagey” and “obsessed with sexual thoughts for which she finds no outlet.” In essence, Humbert is being offered an inventory of the damage he has wrought on his stepdaughter, but all he can do is sneer inwardly at the messenger, a psychobabbling crone named Pratt, and then … and then … well, what happens next is so shocking, and yet so calmly and economically detailed, it had somehow absented itself from my memory of the novel. Humbert finds Lolita sitting in a study hall with a sepia print of Reynolds’ ‘The Age of Innocence’ above the chalkboard, and several rows of clumsy-looking pupil desks. At one of these, my Lolita was reading … and there was another girl with a very naked, porcelain-white neck and wonderful platinum hair, who sat in front reading too, absolutely lost to the world and interminably winding a soft curl around one finger, and I sat beside Dolly [Lolita] just behind that neck and that hair, and unbuttoned my overcoat and for sixty-five cents plus the permission to participate in the school play, had Dolly put her inky, chalky, red-knuckled hand under the desk. Oh, stupid and reckless of me, no doubt, but after the torture I had been subjected to, I simply had to take advantage of a combination that I knew would never occur again.

Accustomed to receiving Lolita as evidence of towering genius, we hide a question in plain sight: Why did Nabokov choose to inhabit Humbert Humbert, a pitiable half-mad émigré suffering from acute nympholepsy, in the first place? One clue is hidden in the last part of that last sentence: I simply had to take advantage of a combination that I knew would never occur again. Humbert means: Look, I had to avail myself of that hand-job, because when might the opportunity ever recur? But Nabokov, again winking at us, means: I love the exquisite particularity of that specific instant. The only psychiatrist Nabokov could tolerate was Havelock Ellis, for whom “the individuality of each case is respected and catalogued in the same way that butterflies are carefully classified,” as one of Nabokov’s biographers has explained. (Nabokov was a famous lepidopterist.) Conversely, Nabokov detested “Freudian voodooism,” as he once put it, because he saw in Freud an attempt by psychiatry to corner, appropriate, and submit to generalized principles people’s inner lives. And submitting one’s inner life—the unique hazard of one’s personality, the camera obscura of one’s own personal store of memories—to a set of deterministic explanations was for Nabokov an indignity on par with the expropriations of the Bolsheviks.

To inhabit a pedophile—and not just a pedophile, but a European pedophile, on an American soil Nabokov had himself grown to love!—was to torture in extremis his faith in the sanctity of the exquisite inner life. We are clearly meant to regard Humbert as a moral abomination, and even Humbert eventually concedes (it is one of the book’s most beautiful and unforgettable passages) that in exploiting Lolita he has gratuitously destroyed another human being. And yet, how close to absolute Nabokov makes Humbert’s claim to his own thoughts and feelings! There are two competing accounts in Lolita for why Humbert is a pervert. The first is a bit of personal mythopoeics put forward by Humbert himself, who believes his (entirely natural) love for a young girl named Annabel when he was a young boy, and its brutally abrupt interruption, explains the origin of his adult nympholepsy. Later, Humbert tells us of having once bribed a nurse to show him his psychiatric files, in which he discovered he has been labeled “homosexual.” The first explanation is poetic, beautiful, intensely rendered, utterly self-serving, and probably untrue. The second explanation is clinical, dispassionate, probably true, but so neglectful of the intensity of Humbert’s own consciousness as to be repulsive to Nabokov.

Nabokov overcame the worst affliction of all, from a writer’s point of view: a happy childhood. He was an eldest child who chose to pretend he was an only child. Testimony from acquaintances relates how loath he was even to casually discuss siblings, and one can read dozens of pages of Speak, Memory without ever sensing he had to share his parents’ affections. (“There was a sunny quality about the way he talked of his own family,” one of his Wellesley students has recalled, “One had the feeling of the much-loved little princeling. Clean linen and hot milk and never a scolding.”) That utter primacy, of the little princeling basking in the eyes of his justly revering parents, seems never to have left Nabokov, but as a genius, he understood it both as his burden, and as his unique portal to aesthetic discovery.

Lolita is most commonly remembered as one man’s living poem to his own daemonic perversity, and as such, is overpraised by its adherents for its technical virtuosity and hilarity, and misconstrued by its detractors as little more than a frost-encrusted monument to Nabokov’s own monumental arrogance. Its real genius is too easily missed. It lies in what Nabokov called the “nerves of the novel,” the “secret points, the subliminal coordinates by means of which the book is plotted.” In these, Nabokov has hinted at the life that exceeds the perimeter of Humbert’s encompassing obsession—at the inner lives of those others whom he so casually dismisses or destroys. It cost Nabokov, by his own admission, “a month of work” to write one sentence in which Humbert gets his hair cut by a barber who has never stopped mourning his dead son—a fact that scarcely dents Humbert’s exquisite consciousness.