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July 22, 2023

Faced with the blank page and the self-imposed task of writing a review that will properly convey my awe at Nabokov’s accomplishment, I can imagine his mocking smile at my presumptuous attempt to cram in a few sentences the numerous layers of a book that’s a real piece of work. But I just reread it, this time in its annotated edition, and I’ll dare try, knowing that, although I couldn’t possibly add anything new to everything that has already been said, my two cents will, at least, pay yet another enchanted reader’s respect to the Master.

‘Enchanted�� is an appropriate word, not only because the author freely uses it, but because it also evokes the fairy-tale aspect of the story. A fairy tale doesn’t exist in any other reality except its own, and that’s how this book asks to be approached. It’s a universe all on its own, and if we choose to participate in its ‘reality��, we should do it on its own terms. Like any storyteller, Nabokov asks us to suspend moral judgement and reality-check (we didn’t question our childhood’s dragons and fairies, did we?) and trust his vision in guiding us through dark mazes to the bright exit of a profoundly humane ending.

Although the author insists in his Afterword that he has “no moral in tow��, “Lolita�� is an amoral story with a moral finale - if we agree that the conscious expansion of one’s privately constructed universe to include other beings as real and autonomous entities (and not just props to a solo play) is, indeed, an act of morality.

As the author-approved annotator of this edition remarks, As Lolita turns from a girl into a woman, so Humbert Humbert’s lust becomes love. His sense of a “safely solipsized�� Lolita is replaced by his awareness that she was his “own creation�� with “no will, no consciousness �� indeed no life of her own��, that he did not know her, and that their sexual intimacy only isolated him more completely from the helpless girl. These “metamorphoses�� enable H.H to transform a “crime�� into a redeeming work of art and the reader watches the chrysalis come to life.

Incidentally, that butterfly on the cover is no coincidence. After 200 pages of A. Appel’s analysis, I think that it’s the only appropriate cover for this book �� all those featuring adolescent girls, lips, thighs and heart-shaped glassed eyes are just commercial tricks. But, ok, a book has to sell, and the general public’s worst assumptions and conventions are more effectively challenged by voyeurism than the promise of intellectual bliss��

Same as the beautiful insect traverses the distance between nymph and butterfly, so does H.H. and the book itself traverses the distance separating love from lovemaking, private mirage from a reality large enough to make room for another one, that of the loved person.
Metamorphosis and Solipsism are key words in this novel. The attempt to transcend solipsism is one of Nabokov’s major themes. If, like me, you aren’t sure what the term means,

“Lolita�� is a tragedy bristling with comedy. It’s parody and satire.
Here’s an example: after Lolita abandons him, H.H. hires an imbecilic private detective to help him find her. The worthless information he brings back provide a non-solution that parodies the reader’s need for a solution that either literature or life will ever reveal, in the largest sense. Still, as much as Nabokov satirizes said need, he also recognizes it as an author’s own. His story, and any story, is ultimately no more than an attempt to impose some kind of order and pattern on the absurdity and unpredictability of life. Why, he turns even that into a character; his name is McFate!

Dr Appel says: If the artist does indeed embody in himself and formulate in his work the fears and needs and desires of the race, then a “story�� about his mastery of form, his triumph in art is but a heightened emblem of all of our own efforts to confront, order and structure the chaos of life, and to endure, if not master, the demons within and around us.

“Lolita�� is a game.
A game between author and reader. Author and his characters. Between the characters themselves, and their readers�� expectations and quest for meaning. Between the author and his fellow writers, both those he admired and respected and those he couldn’t stomach. The gusto of Humbert’s narration, his punning language, his abundant delight in digressions, parodies and games, all attest to a comic vision that overrides the sadness and terror of everyday life.

When I first read the book, some years ago, I went away not only enchanted (that word again!) by the outrageously beautiful prose but also content that I had extracted the underlying meaning. “Lolita�� was about trauma. About the way H.H. tried to heal the wound left by the sudden death of his childhood love. About the loss of youth’s promise and how he can only find that promise in nymphets in general, and in the girl named Lolita (the girl he ‘imprisoned�� like a butterfly caught in the net), in particular. So obvious, I thought. Right from the first page H.H. wonders: “Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child.��
Now here’s how the notes of the annotator shattered my conclusion to pieces: in note no 6 (that early!) it is stated that H.H.’s “point of fact�� mocks the “scientific�� certitude of psychiatrists who have turned intensely private myths and symbols �� in short, fictions �� into hard fact. The H.H. who is the subject of a case study immediately undercuts the persuasiveness of his own specific “trauma�� by projecting it in fragments of another man’s verse (Edgar Alan Poe’s “Annabel Lee��).
So much for winning Nabokov at his own game��

Nevertheless, it was a welcome defeat; it only whetted my appetite for the riches in store in this second reading. Now that I’ve seen the full scope of the book I cannot unsee it however much it is (sadly) once more attacked, in this neo-conservative day and age of ours. It was hard work going back and forth to an abundance of explanations and references, but not only do I not regret it, I’m thankful to Alfred Appel for his painstaking analysis that revealed a whole new novel to me. It is only appropriate to close this amateur write up with his words:

A first reading of “Lolita�� rarely affords a limpid, multiform view, and for many reasons, the initially disarming and distractive quality of its ostensible subject being foremost. But the uniquely exhilarating experience of rereading it on its own terms derives from the discovery of a whole new book in place of the old, and the recognition that its habit of metamorphosis has happily described the course of one’s own perceptions.

P.S. Dr. Appel urges the reader to find the Yale Spoken Arts LP 902 and listen to Nabokov’s bravura reading of chapter 35. To my surprise and delight the recording exists on Spotify! It was indeed a unique experience to go through the chapter while listening to the author’s voice reading it with gusto.




May 29, 2023

Eight years after my first reading of 'Lolita' I'm keeping a promise to myself and return to the gorgeous text. This time I'll go through it equipped with the notes of Alfred Appel, Professor of English and American Culture. A Nabokovian scholar who was himself a student of the Grand Master at Cornell.

My appreciation during that first reading was instictive rather than informed; this time I aim for the "aesthetic bliss" Nabokov proposes as the sole approach to Literature.
Literature of his caliber, I should add...

There are gentle souls who would pronounce 'Lolita' meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray's assertion, 'Lolita' has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.

Vladimir Nabokov: On a Book Entitled Lolita