Despite common opinion, this novella isn't a blueprint for, or a precursor to, Nabokov's "Lolita".
Instead, iCRITIQUE:
Two Works From the One Source
Despite common opinion, this novella isn't a blueprint for, or a precursor to, Nabokov's "Lolita".
Instead, it simply shares a source of inspiration, without necessarily adopting or arriving at the same perspective on, or literary approach to, it.
Nabokov thought he had destroyed his only copy of the novella, when he started writing "Lolita". He didn't find a copy, until after he had finished writing the later novel.
What the two works share is a narrative in which an older male marries a widow in order to have a sexual relationship with her adolescent daughter from a previous marriage.
In "Lolita", Humbert Humbert was 37 years old, while Lolita was 12. In "The Enchanter", none of the three principal characters is named, but the male protagonist is 40, while the daughter is 12.
Step-Father as Sorcerer
The girl's mother is already ill when the protagonist meets her, and it doesn't take long for them to get married and, then, for her to die of her illness, notwithstanding the protagonist's plan to murder her.
The daughter doesn't live in Paris with her mother or her new husband. Only after her mother's death does it become possible for step-father and daughter to live under the same roof. His plan is that they go on a holiday in the French Riviera.
They are only there for one night before the novella comes to its conclusion. Hence, Nabokov avoids the need to describe the ongoing sexual relationship and the rise, decline and fall that characterised "Lolita". Here, there is only a rapid, pre-emptive fall.
Paedophilic Aesthetics
The protagonist appears to have had five or six conventional relationships (he calls them "normal affairs") in his lifetime. However, he found them unsatisfactory, and asks, "How can one compare their insipid randomness with my unique flame?" His answer: "It's not a degree of a generic whole, but something totally divorced from the generic, something that is not more valuable but invaluable.". He grants himself "a licence to grow savage", to circumvent the generic norm, which casts this novella as both savage and enchanting.
He proceeds with what he calls a "refined selectivity...:"
"I'm not attracted to every schoolgirl that comes along, far from it - how many one sees, on a grey morning street, that are husky, or skinny, or have a necklace of pimples or wear spectacles - those kinds interest me as little, in the amorous sense, as a lumpy female acquaintance might interest someone else."
This admission suggests that his taste is determined by an aesthetic ideal: other girls or women don't necessarily comply with this ideal. For example, he describes his wife as if he finds her repulsive. She is described as his "monstrous bride", a giantess, a "cumbersome behemoth"... she is -
"a tall, pale, broad-hipped lady, with a hairless wart near a nostril of her bulbous nose: one of those faces you describe without being able to say anything about the lips or the eyes because any mention of them - even this - would be an involuntary contradiction of their utter inconspicuousness..."
He doubts his ability to -
"tackle those broad bones, those multiple caverns, the bulky velvet, the formless anklebones, the repulsively listing conformation of her ponderous pelvis, not to mention the rancid emanations of her wilted skin and the as yet undisclosed miracles of surgery..."
He regards their relationship as "a joke", which he hopes to share with the girl - it's a vehicle within which he plans "to meld the wave of fatherhood with the wave of sexual love".
Unlike Humbert Humbert, there's no suggestion that there is any genuine emotional love. The protagonist's yearning is wholly physical. For him, she is just "that absolutely unique and irreplaceable being". Until now, he has felt "the perpetual ripple of unsatisfied desires, the painful burden of his rolled-up, tucked-away passion - the entire savage, stifling existence that he, and only he, had brought upon himself." He has enchanted nobody but himself. He's a victim of his own fantasy.
At the mother's funeral, a distant relative cautions him:
"...What a pretty girl she is! You'll have to watch her like a hawk - she's already biggish for her age, just wait another three years and the boys will be sticking to her like flies, you'll have no end of worries..."
Meanwhile, he was guffawing to himself, as if he knew he would beat these boys to the prize.
[image] Photo of Vera Nabokov (Credit: Jean Vong)
The Metamorphosis of an Adolescent Girl
Sometimes, the protagonist's revulsion toward the mother, and preference for the daughter, seem to be an aversion for the natural process of aging.
In contrast, he seems to want to preserve an image of the daughter as the girl she was when they first met:
"As he imagined the coming years, he continued to envisage her as an adolescent - such was the carnal postulate. However, catching himself on this premise, he realised without difficulty that, even if the putative passage of time contradicted, for the moment, a permanent foundation for his feelings, the gradual progression of successive delights would assure natural renewals of his pact with happiness, which took into account, as well, the adaptability of living love...
"Against the light of that happiness, no matter what age she attained... her present image would always transpire through her metamorphoses, nourishing their translucent strata from its internal fountainhead. And this very process would allow him, with no loss of diminishment, to savour each unblemished stage of her transformations.
"Besides, she herself, delineated and elongated into womanhood, would never again be free to dissociate, in her consciousness and her memory, her own development from that of their love, her childhood recollections from her recollections of male tenderness.
"Consequently, past, present, and future would appear to her as a single radiance whose source had emanated, as she had herself, from him, from her lover."
If the daughter can't be preserved as an adolescent girl, then the protagonist believes he can at least witness (and imprint himself on) her metamorphosis, as if she were transforming from an egg to a caterpillar, and then from a chrysalis to a butterfly.
Butterflies and Beauty
You have to wonder whether Nabokov's interest in butterflies reflects his fascination with metamorphosis or their aesthetic beauty.
While the portrait of the protagonist is more obviously hostile than that of Humbert in "Lolita", this novella is as perfectly written and satisfying as the later novel. I highly recommend it, although some readers might take offence at some of the content, if not the fate of the protagonist....more
One was the circularity of the narrative. Another was the identity of the narrator. The third was the presence of twins, at least metaphorically. The fourth: a youthful love affair. The last was the role of memory (as opposed to the imagination) in fiction.
Literarily Lost on the Wrong Train
The novel has seven chapters, the first of which describes Pnin's disorienting train trip supposedly on the way from Waindell College towards a lecture to the Cremona Women's Club, while the last of which concludes by stating that the character, James Cockerell, is going to tell you, the narrator, "the story of Pnin rising to address the Cremona Women's Club and discovering he has brought the wrong lecture", which is round about what happens in the first chapter (except that Pnin actually has three different papers with him).
While Cockerell (the Head of the English Department) is not a totally reliable source of biographical detail, he is known for his entertaining and convincing impersonations of Pnin.
The Narrator's Placement of First Person Pronouns
Bit by bit, throughout each of the seven chapters, we're exposed to a narrator who is ostensibly an omniscient third person narrator, but who occasionally reveals his existence (by the placement of pronouns) as a first person narrator, though not necessarily the protagonist, Professor Timofey Pavlovich Pnin, himself.
I originally suspected that the narrator was Dr. Hagen (the Head of the German Department), although it is generally accepted that it is actually his twin, the author and "fascinating lecturer", Vladimir Nabokov, both of whom want to renew his academic position in the Russian Department at Waindell.
Pnin might be a fish out of water, in regard to both the language and the location of America.
Pnin's physical description and mannerisms reminded me somewhat of the cartoon character, Mr. Magoo:
"Ideally bald, sun-tanned, and clean-shaven, he began rather impressively with that great brown dome of his, tortoise-shell glasses (masking an infantile absence of eyebrows), apish upper lip, thick neck, and strong-man torso in a tightish tweed coat, but ended, somewhat disappointingly, in a pair of spindly legs (now flanneled and crossed) and frail-looking, almost feminine feet."
[image] Pnin as Mr. Magoo (without his tortoise-shell glasses)
Pnin is an object of fun who is often scorned or belittled by those around him, who lack respect or fondness for him. This perspective recalls Nabokov's comments about Cervantes' cruelty towards
The novel displays far more empathy with Pnin, even though (or because) it supposedly reflects the perspective of a narrator in his close peer group.
This empathy is especially evident in the party scene in chapter six, which seems to have birthed party scenes written by William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon and Michael Chabon.
Each chapter is a discrete story, which was actually written and published separately in the "New Yorker", then assembled into one novel.
The narrator comments on discreteness in general:
"I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveller's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego."
The Duplication of One (An)other
The concept of a twin arises in relation to Professor Thomas Wynn, Head of Ornithology, who at times "graded, as it were, into somebody else, whom Pnin did not know by name but whom he classified, with a bright foreigner's fondness for puns as 'Twynn' (or, in Pninian, 'Tvin')." The narrator refers to Wynn as having a "double" or "duplication":
"Pnin and I had long since accepted the disturbing but seldom discussed fact that on any given college staff one could find not only a person who was uncommonly like one's dentist or the local postmaster, but also a person who had a twin within the same professional group. I know, indeed, of a case of triplets at a comparatively small college..."
Memories of Mira
The "youthful love affair" involves Mira Belochkin, a Jewish girl who had died in Buchenwald. As in "Lolita" (which was written contemporaneously), fate took away Pnin's first love, compromising his ability to form a conventional relationship forever after.
Rememoration
The narrator suggests that the novel has been an exercise in "rememoration":
"In the rememoration of old relationships, later impressions often tend to be dimmer than earlier ones."
In the case of "Pnin", the work is not so much a work of recalled memory, but a work of fabrication or the imagination, and, inevitably, in the case of Nabokov, a work of play.
As has become customary, the author (or their narrator) has made it all up.
Over the course of his writing career, Vladimir Nabokov would often return down the rabbit hole of his imaginCRITIQUE:
The Continuum of the Rabbit Hole
Over the course of his writing career, Vladimir Nabokov would often return down the rabbit hole of his imagination to find styles, ideas, thoughts and expressions that he had used in past fiction or stored there for use in future fiction.
Notwithstanding Nabokov's apparent scorn for the art form, "The Real Life" is just such a novel. It purports to be a biography of the narrator's half-brother, Sebastian (a novelist), but could, in fact, be a fiction about the narrator, or even Nabokov, himself (the narrator is known only as "V","V. Sirin" being a nom de plume Nabokov used early in his career).
The Shaping of a Certain Lie
Despite his own diligent research (some of which required a private detective, in order to verify and "animate the past"), V warns us against unreliable narrators:
"Don't be too certain of learning the past from the lips of the present. Beware of the most honest broker. Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale.
"Who is speaking of Sebastian Knight?...And where is the third party? Rotting peacefully in the cemetery of St Damier. Laughing alive in five volumes [of his own writing]."
The Embedding of Nina Lecerf
Madame Nina Lecerf, a femme fatale who might have been Sebastian's last secret lover (albeit in a desperately unhappy relationship), and who proves adept at concealment, at least of her own identity and past, claims:
"I think writing a book about people you know is much more honest than making a hash of them and then presenting it as your own invention."
In response to V's pointed and persistent questioning, she declares:
"I am telling you what I know, and not what you'd like to know."
"I'll be disappointed in your book if it all ends in bed."
At times, Madame Lecerf seems to be the type of woman who would end up in bed in one of Graham Greene's entertainments. Indeed, V admits that he, too, considered the possibility of a tryst (even if Sebastian mightn't have).
[image]
The Narcissism of the Reader/ Biographer/ Critic
As "Pale Fire" would subsequently do with respect to Charles Kinbote, "The Real Life" aims to correct the biographer/ critic, Mr Goodman's, erroneous factuality and misguided interpretation of Sebastian's life and literary works:
"Mr Goodman's method is as simple as his philosophy. His sole object is to show 'poor Knight' as the product and victim of what he calls 'our time' -- 'Post-war unrest', 'Post-war Generation' are to Mr Goodman magic words opening every door. There is, however, a certain kind of 'open sesame', which seems less a charm than a skeleton-key...
"But he is quite wrong in thinking that he found something once the lock had been forced. Not that I wish to suggest that Mr Goodman thinks. He could not if he tried. His book concerns itself only with such ideas as have been shown (commercially) to attract mediocre minds...
"His slapdash and very misleading book...paints in a few ill-chosen sentences a ridiculously wrong picture of Sebastian Knight's childhood..."
"No wonder this solemn biographer is out of tune with his hero at every point in the story."
"[Though]...Mr. Goodman's book 'The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight' has enjoyed a very good Press...[he] knew all along that his book was rubbish."
What is missing from Goodman's study is any fidelity to the text itself...All is self-indulgence of the reader/ biographer/ critic. Not to mention that it needs more cowbell.
The Ignition of a Controversy
You could say much the same thing about selfie-obsessed reviews that discuss "The Real Life" in terms of mirrors that ostensibly sit beneath the surface of the page (as far as I can recall, the word "mirror" only appears twice or three times in the novel, once as a metaphor [or simile] for narcissism - "they convey the impression that they are mirrored Narcissus-like in clear water").
In much the same way as Goodman errs, these (dearest of good) readers seem to believe that a mirror is a magic skeleton key that opens the lock of the door to every one of Nabokov's novels. They don't recognise that mirrors appear haphazardly in his fiction, and, when they do, they have different connotations. Nabokov's novels differ from each other as much as they might resemble each other.
The "mirror" in the poem "Pale Fire" (where it is more appropriate to use the word) is actually a windowpane, not a mirror, even if it's reflective of the azure sky (more than the butterfly).
Not afraid to ignite a controversy (even amongst his own readers), throughout "The Real Life", Nabokov is more concerned with the narcissism of readers or critics, who look into a book, only to find an image of themselves or of their own making (even if they're not content with the veracity of the image, believing, as they do, that they're more attractive than their image).
V writes of some women "who see everyday things merely as familiar mirrors of their own femininity". Presumably, men fall victim to the same folly.
It's a wonder that such readers, like their slapdash and misleading reviews, aren't "slain by the false azure of the windowpane" and turned into a "smudge of ashen fluff", the fate of the butterfly in the "Pale Fire" poem.
Hopeless Gropings Among the Author's Drawers
Nabokov would write elsewhere that readers themselves are [flawed] mirror images of the author:
"For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist."
These mirror images are subjective, misleading phantom images of the author. Readers make up or invent their own version or image of the novel they think the author was trying to write. Likewise, reviews are readers' attempts to see themselves in somebody else's work of the imagination. They are, in fact, poorly disguised acts of narcissism.
V describes them as "the leaden sluggishness of dream endeavour" and "hopeless gropings among dissolving things".
The novel's meaning and beauty dissolve under the onslaught of the self-obsessed reader.
The Darlings of Oblivion
Equally narcissistic are those nicholites, pontificators, copyists and acolytes whose practice is little more than to pronounce or declare postmodernist, lost and buried fiction "masterpieces" (the implicit promise of the pontificator being that they would know a masterpiece if they saw one), even if these fictions have done little to advance literature beyond the experiments of the modernists.
As Sebastian says in one of his books, "Little things like that are the darlings of oblivion..."
The Cult of Narcissism
This novel is an author's attack on the cult and culture of narcissism, whatever the variety - academic, intellectual, anti-intellectual, or social media.
Posting reviews or "doing your own research" online is theoretically capable of being something more than expressing or vindicating your own preconceived opinion on a public platform. Surely, it can reveal something more substantive than a hunger for likes.
You have to wonder whether these mediocre minds of the interweb actually think (in the sense V uses in relation to Goodman) or read anything other than what they have posted themselves.
Nabokov asserts and defends the primacy of (at least his own) fiction against such readerly and critical mediocrity.
In his eyes, just as we must beware of unreliable narrators, we must be wary of unreliable readers/ reviewers/ critics.
The Alliterative Life
Meanwhile, stylistically, Nabokov anticipates the famous alliteration on the first page of "Lolita".
In his memoir, "Lost Property" (the title of which is evocative enough), Sebastian Knight writes:
"Life with you was lovely - and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink 'v' in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering 'l'.
"Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die, now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too. And perhaps we are.
"You see, the greater our happiness was, the hazier its edges grew, as if its outlines were melting, and now it has dissolved altogether. I have not stopped loving you; but something is dead in me, and I cannot see you in the mist...
"This is all poetry. I am lying to you. Lily-livered. There can be nothing more cowardly than a poet beating about the bush. I think you have guessed how things stand: the damned formula of 'another woman'. I am desperately unhappy with her - here is one thing which is true."
Nabokov would later substitute l's and t's for l's and v's, even if there was a t (for tongue) in "velvet".
Working on Our Knight Moves
I haven't searched out all of the chess references in this novel (apart from the obvious connotation of Sebastian's surname, as well as the name of his first love interest, Clare Bishop), but it's worth mentioning that "the signature under each [of Sebastian Knight's] poem(s) was a little black chess-knight drawn in ink."
A character who V calls "Black" holds a black knight chess piece in his hand during their conversation.
Playing Numbers
Nabokov often likes to play with numbers.
Sebastian writes in "Lost Property" that "The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition."
Later, he elaborates on the significance of the number one:
"There is only one real number: One. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity."
In "The Real Life", Nabokov postulates that, in love, we two are (both) one, and we are all one. We all constitute a singularity, narcissists excepted.
The title of Nabokov's 1932 novel alerts us to two of its concerns.
Firstly, its principal characters dwell in a darknessCRITIQUE:
Darkness and Laughter
The title of Nabokov's 1932 novel alerts us to two of its concerns.
Firstly, its principal characters dwell in a darkness of their own making. Secondly, other characters, if not necessarily Nabokov himself, mock and laugh at them and their follies.
The darkness results from the moral culpability of the two major characters, Albinus and Margot, who first meet in the darkness of a cinema.
Albinus is a literary and art critic who seems to be in his late forties, possibly 50 years of age. He's married to Elizabeth and has an eight year old daughter. He's well-off financially (having inherited a considerable fortune from his father), and owns a number of homes in Berlin as well as an estate in the country.
Longing for a Thrill
Still, his lifestyle doesn't content him. Elizabeth "failed to give him the thrill for which he had grown weary with longing."
He sees 17 year old Margot at work as an usher in a cinema, and is quickly besotted by "that creature gliding about in the dark". He decides to woo her and make her his mistress.
[image] Tippi Hedren in "The Birds"
"A Nightmare Creature With a Nightmare Mate"
Margot views Albinus as a passport to monetary and social success, as well as an acting career.
There never seems to be any passion or lust, let alone love, in their relationship. She's reluctant to end her concurrent relationship with the artist, Axel Rex, at least until Albinus has divorced Elizabeth and married her, thus legitimating their illicit relationship. Margot and Axel are equally aspirational, calculating and conniving in their relationships, betraying not just Albinus, but each other.
Margot is like a "nightmare creature...being tickled by its nightmare mate." Axel remains a thorn in the side of Albinus and Margot. In Albinus, however, "she could not hope for a repetition of the ecstasy of her first love affair." Albinus, on the other hand, is blinded by the dark hole of his credulous longing.
Fairy Tale Manner
The novel commences in a fairy tale manner:
"Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster."
Nabokov continues:
"This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling."
Thus, it's clear that Nabokov thought his novel would have a popular appeal and that his characters would provoke much laughter as they made fools of themselves.
A Snake and a Slattern
Margot is frequently described as a snake. Even Albinus refers to her as a "little slattern" and a "wicked little girl".
In the second half of the novel, various characters express their views on Margot parenthetically:
"('A lovely creature, unquestionably,' thought Lampert, 'but there is something snakelike about her.')"
"('And moreover,' reflected Lampert irrelevantly, 'this little slut is going to be the ruin of him.')"
A childhood friend imagines:
"She's going to the dogs...Ought to marry some good, simple man. I wouldn't take her, though. A fellow would never know where he was..."
[image] Film Poster for Tony Richardson's Film of the Novel
Nabokov as Film Noir
The ending of the novel, which I'm reluctant to reveal (for spoiler reasons), suggests that Alfred Hitchcock, if not Tony Richardson (or could have made a good suspense film out of it. Perhaps, then, the story might be best enjoyed in the darkness of a cinema, with or without an usher.
They entered the novel at night, by stealth, and took up position on the sixth floor of the Book DepositorOne, or An Other Story about Humbert Humbert
They entered the novel at night, by stealth, and took up position on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building. Then they waited for the morning to come.
Only one of them was armed. The others had come along to lend moral support. They had never been involved in a character assassination before. If the truth be told, they were a little nervous. They surveyed the roofs and windows of the adjacent buildings. They were pretty sure nobody was watching. Nobody was there to watch. Everybody was downstairs, lining the streets, waiting for the Mardi Gras floats to pass, happy, cheering the contestants they liked, remaining silent or jeering the ones they didn’t.
The one opened his case, took out the parts of his rifle, and assembled it with practised precision. The last item to be put in place was the telescopic lens. He lifted the rifle to his shoulder and looked through the lens. The first thing he saw was the streetscape below. Then he scrolled to the right until he saw the T-junction around which Humbert and Dolores would come.
He didn’t have to wait long. Three minutes. Perhaps it would have taken another two minutes for their open limousine to reach the point where it was closest and the line of vision was clearest. The one had rehearsed everything the previous weekend.
Twenty seconds later, one of them whispered, "Now! Now!" The tension had been too much. Without removing his eye from the lens, the one smiled. It was a signal that the others took for permission to relax. The one knew what he was doing. He had done it before. He would do it again, although they didn’t know that at the time.
Another forty seconds later, the one dropped the rifle from his shoulder. One of the others asked, "What are you doing?" The one didn’t answer. With a single deft action, he removed the silencer. He placed his left elbow on the window ledge, lifted the rifle and pushed the barrel between the drawn curtains.
He only waited ten seconds more. He found Humbert’s head through the lens, then thought better of it, even though he had planned his course of action methodically. He lowered the rifle a fraction and fired the first shot into Humbert’s heart. If Humbert’s perverse story was to be believed, that was its lifeblood, its source, its origin. It was a direct hit. Humbert didn’t explode. In this way, at least, it was all a bit disappointing for the one’s audience. His head nodded forward, then slumped backwards, though Humbert still seemed to be alive, wondering what had happened, what did his author have in store for him? Surely, it wasn’t� going to end like this, with a bang?
The blood pumped wildly out of Humbert’s heart, though it was mainly invisible to this audience, held in by his vest, barely staining his pressed white business shirt.
Humbert’s head tilted forward slightly, as the life fled his limp body. The one could still see his face. His next shot tore into Humbert’s left eye. The third shot was aimed for his right eye. Up to this moment, nobody on the street could tell anything untoward had happened. Even the sound of the rifle shots had been less than expected, drowned out by the carnival music and crowd noise.
With the third shot, Humbert’s head finally did explode, propelling a slurry of brain and blood and bone fragments, willy nilly, over Dolores and her pretty pink floral dress. She took off her heart-shaped glasses and looked up, until she seemed to detect the windows in the Book Depository Building. Only she ever appeared to see the one and the others who were peeking tentatively through the windows on the one’s left, so as not to be in his way. She kept her silence though.
There were still forty seconds remaining. The one didn’t wait to witness the commotion. He could watch it on TV as soon as he got back to his hotel room.
He had three bullets left. He turned and faced the door of the apartment. He looked at his watch. Twenty seconds, ten seconds, five seconds. The door smashed open, even though it was unlocked and could have been pushed open.
"What have you done?" The man was alone, older than the one expected, paunchier. He could imagine his sly, intellectualized grin as he sat at his desk, composing his lecherous words in the comfort of his deceitful monogamous relationship.
"How dare you!" Was it a challenge? Was it a question that the one genuinely wanted to be answered? No response came. Nabokov simply continued his approach towards the one.
With the same efficiency with which he had dispatched Humbert, the one fired the remaining three bullets into the author. They were all aimed for the heart. Nabokov fell backwards onto the floor. He grimaced in pain as his hand reached for his bloody red chest and he realised his time had finally come.
The one noticed Nabokov’s eyelids start to descend. He put his rifle down and knelt beside Nabokov. With his left thumb and forefinger, he separated Nabokov’s eyelids and stared into his eyes, watching as all sign of life escaped them. Eventually, the author was dead. It was time for each of them to turn their back on the novel now, safe, and come back to reality. Life for the one, for the others, could resume as intended, as normal. The one had righted another wrong....more
I thought I’d be on a sure bet, but if you assess the polarization by GR ratingPolarised Lenses
No novel polarizes opinion like “Lolita�.
True or false?
I thought I’d be on a sure bet, but if you assess the polarization by GR ratings details, this statement is wrong.
Its average rating is about 3.8. 86% of readers like it (a rating of three, four or five). 34% rate it five, 29% four, while only 5% rate it one.
I was going to contrast it with “American Psycho�. How’s this:
Its average rating is about 3.77. 86% of readers like it. 30% rate it five, 34% four, while only 5% rate it one. (The main difference is that the four and five star ratings are more or less reversed.)
What about “Ulysses�?
Its average rating is about 3.77. 82% of readers like it. 36% rate it five, 24% four, while 8% rate it one.
So I’ll recast my proposition: those who love “Lolita� adore it, those who hate it, vehemently hate it.
Usually for moral, rather than aesthetic, reasons.
The question is: why?
American Factoid
I thought “Chasing Lolita� might have the answers.
It came recommended by Paul Bryant, a GR friend who is knowledgeable about these things.
Paul’s and my opinions about “Lolita� and “American Psycho� (but not “Ulysses�) diverge.
However, I assumed that, if Paul liked “Chasing Lolita�, it must at least argue the case for and against “Lolita� as well as Paul is able to.
Instead, I found it to be a second-rate, almost pseudo-intellectual enterprise.
Admittedly, I learned a few facts that I didn’t know (Vickers usually refers to them as “factoids�), although I probably would have known them, if I had already read the works in his very limited bibliography.
Aesthetic Reaction
My biggest gripe is that you can’t detect a subtle reading of the novel, whether pro or con.
It doesn’t reflect an aesthetic response to the work as literature.
It wants to capture the sense of scandal in the public response to it, whether or not people had read it (or seen any of the films based on it).
It is mediocre and tabloid in tone. It is the work of a hack, a hired gun. (I was going to say “workmanlike�, but that would insult the working class.)
Maybe Vickers can smell a controversy, but he reveals no passion of his own, and he doesn’t do justice to the passions of others.
He plays it safe. He doesn’t want to alienate anyone. The most important thing for him is that you buy the book, regardless of which side of the fence you sit on, regardless of whether you intend to read it, as long as you give him your money.
Ultimately, by trying to please everybody, Vickers pleases nobody.
He’s like the first person to write a biography of a writer. It’s good that somebody bothered, but usually it doesn’t take long for somebody or something more distinguished to arrive.
All Chase and No Catch
What annoys me most is the way the book has been presented to us.
The title “Chasing Lolita� is racy, as if he or we are “pursuing� the character herself, not “investigating� her innermost secrets (which it fails to do anyway).
The book plays on the reader’s prurience, without satisfying either erotic or intellectual curiosity.
The less said about it, the better.
Take Me to Your Lolita
I think there are three general responses to “Lolita� as a literary work.
One, which is mine, is that every aspect of human behavior is a legitimate subject matter of art.
To write about something, does not imply endorsement of the moral stance, nor does it imply that the author has some first-hand experience (i.e., the suggestion that Nabokov himself must have been a paedophile).
The other two responses reflect the way you feel about the character, Lolita.
You can see her as an innocent victim of a paedophile, and sympathise with her, so much so that you think her story should never have been told.
She is a symptom of the premature sexualisation of children, and the whole issue of children’s sexuality and awareness of sexual behavior must be swept under the carpet, even in a novel intended for mature adults.
Alternatively, while not approving Humbert Humbert in any way, you can treat her as a sexually precocious brat who deserves no sympathy.
For those who have never read the novel, the last interpretation seems to be the one that prevails.
The very word “Lolita� has become shorthand for adolescent girls who “prey� on men’s libidos, as if the men are somehow innocent and vulnerable and not in control of their sexuality.
“It wasn’t my fault, she made me do it.�
She’s jailbait of the most cynical and calculating kind.
As if all girls aren’t equally deserving of protection from men who would prey on them, for the very reason that they are children.
Humbert’s Story
Part of Nabokov’s genius is that “Lolita� is actually Humbert’s story, and he tells it his way.
The Lolita that we get to know is his creation, although in reality both Humbert and Lolita are obviously Nabokov’s creations.
However, we the audience see Lolita with Humbert’s eyes.
This puts us in an uncomfortable position.
Do we empathise with Humbert, because we see things from his point of view?
Are we compromised or criminally implicated as accessories, because we see and do what he does?
Do we take his honesty for granted, because he is the first person narrator who is effectively us?
Do we distance and protect ourselves from these moral dilemmas by treating him as an unreliable narrator?
These are the sorts of question I was hoping Vickers would at least ask.
Lolita’s Story
The converse of the way Nabokov tells Humbert’s story is that we can’t know Lolita’s story.
She doesn’t speak a lot. To the extent that she does, Humbert summarises or paraphrases her.
We don’t know what words are on her lips or in her mind. We don’t know what she thinks about her plight. We witness her solely as object, and not as subject.
We don’t know how much to sympathise with her, even though a natural temptation is to relate to her as the victim.
On the other hand, there is a temptation for both Lolita and reader to empathise with Humbert in a perverse version of Stockholm Syndrome.
Ultimately, the whole form and content of the story conspires against the person, the child that is Lolita.
She is the one person in the novel who is most deserving of sympathy, yet she is the one who has been most demonized in popular culture.
The Premature Sexualisation of Children
What I find most disgusting is the people for whom Lolita is a cause (the crusade against premature sexualisation of children), yet at heart there is no personal sympathy for this one example.
It’s as if Lolita had to fall, had to suffer, so that others might be saved. She is a lost cause, better focus on the plight of others. We can talk her down, as if she were a real tart, and we can use her name to demonize others. It’s OK, she’s only a fictional character anyway, as if real girls aren’t hurt, when they in turn get labeled “Lolita�.
While I don’t condone the sexual abuse of children, I feel quite strongly that other aspects of premature sexualisation are equally deserving of condemnation, e.g., placing three and four year old girls in beauty pageants and grooming them for a lifetime of the presentation of self as an object of beauty, rather than as a fully-rounded person of intelligence, social functionality, energy and charm.
As long as girls and women present themselves solely as objects of beauty and adornment, there will be men who cannot react to them in any other way.
Humbert’s Aesthetics
This social definition of beauty and sexual attraction is what really interests me about the novel.
It’s very easy to judge Humbert solely as a paedophile and to assume that his sex drive is solely dictated by the desire to possess and defile a girl’s childhood and innocence.
I think society has to make a genuine scientific attempt to understand the motivation of Humbert, if not paedophiles generally, as an objective sexual aesthetic that just happens to be taboo in our society in this age.
Humbert describes his love of Lolita in terms of aesthetics, as well as an attempt to relive his unconsummated early childhood relationship with Annabel Leigh.
It is too glib to treat Humbert as disingenuous and an unreliable narrator.
That just avoids the real issue.
So much of our culture is concerned with the polarity between youth and age, innocence and experience, naivety and wisdom, ugliness and beauty.
These dichotomies are the immediate context of sexuality, yet we understand so little about them.
As a result, we are condemned to perpetuate ignorance and guilt and lack of personal, social and sexual fulfillment.
Not only is it important that science investigate this subject matter, it’s vital that art be able to portray and explore motivations and options (whether transgressive or not) openly and honestly and creatively. ...more
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