Anthony said:
Irvine, a great post about Lolita. There was a discussion ages ago about the book in FYM (at least I think it was), where a bunch of us had a discussion about it. Call me trite and sentimental, but I've always felt it to be a perfect love story - a novel about unrequited love. Do you think HH loved Lolita, or was he just a dirty old man? I feel that his first love (Annabel, was it) was a ploy from Nabokov to make his character just remotely sympathetic. I have never studied it, I just love Nabokov! (Despair is also an incredible read, did you ever read that one?) Conrad is great too, and yes, it is astounding that the two didn't even have English as a first language, but still, their use of language was and still is, unsurpassed.
it's impossible to really "know" any of the characters in the novel, especially HH, because it's a mea culpa. he's saying, i'm sorry, please listen to me, i am not a monster. it's reasonable to think that everything he says is a lie, and that it's an elaborate defense -- albeit an ecstatically beautiful defense -- of his rather reprehensible actions. i think this adds to the "point" of the book -- what i think Nabokov does, through HH, is overflow a story with words to the point where simplistic notions of judgment are impossible, even though these are situations that beg for condemnation. it's a book that champions uncertainty and ambiguity; it battles the reduction of people to clinical thought and categorical understanding.
Nabokov hated psychotherapy. always keep that in mind. he once said that, "there is only one key on the typewriter that separates 'Therapist' from 'The Rapist'."
HH knows that within the sphere of the novel, the narrator becomes a voice of creation, stitching nouns, verbs, and adjectives together in order to fashion a highly controlled universe. however, HH knows that this universe does not exist without the legitimizing attention and engagement of a presence beyodn the text, and that readers create their own meaning. HH knows this, and he's to proud to let you off the hook easily -- he's not a pedophile, he thinks, and dammit, he's going to tell you why. he's going to tell you why, exactly why, he is *not* Quilty (who he views as an actual pedophile).
what HH does, i think, is effectively solipsize (is that even a word? i'm trying to turn solipsistic into a verb) every character, so they exist only as extensions of himself and his longing for lolita. he does this especially with charlotte -- he diassembles her, verbally, reduces her, in order to assert control over here. he tries to do this with Lolita, but (beautifully) because she is an adolescent and growing and changing the way adolescents do, she cannot stay the perfect child he falls in love with -- she slips from his grasp.
i thought it was less about love, and more about obsession -- obsession is less multi-diemnsional than love, and works better as an explanation for an adult's relationship with a pubescent child. i don't think HH loves lolita -- though he would protest -- i think he's in love with an image of her, that perfect moment when the three of them are in the garden and she's nearly sitting in his lap. it's that moment, that fleeting second, that he's in love with, not the person, thus i think obsession is a better word.
you'll notice that Humbert, though he's telling the story, can't control Lo or Charlotte -- they die, and through death, the reader understands their humanity independent of Humbert's storytelling.
anyway ... it's an astonishing book. in my mind, it sits right next to _Great Gatsby_ as the great American novels of the 20th century (though it was written by a Russian ... that would be a very interesting dissertation -- just how and why Conrad and Nabokov, a Pole and a Russian, stand stylistically head and shoulders above their British and American contemporaries).
