At what point does a reader decide whether a narrator is reliable or unreliable, and what real difference does this decision make. If a narrator is deemed reliable, does the story gain any truth or significance that it had been missing before the determination was made? If the narrator is decidedly unreliable, what other sources are available to bring the reader closer to or passed the deceptions of the narrator? At what point does the narrator’s unreliability begin to reflect on the author?
And if that connection is sustained, should the reader then assume that the author is also unreliable, forever mistrusted and scrutinized? These questions are integral when discussing Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, for within this novel the reader is asked to separate herself from conventional ideas of morality, decency and reality, and place herself within the trust of an unreliable narrator. The unreliability of the narrator should be the key point of interpretation when discussing Lolita, however, this is generally not the case within the classroom.
In my educational career I have studied Lolita in two classroom settings, one as an undergraduate and one as a graduate student. In both of these classes the discussions ignored the science of the unreliable narrator and chose to focus exclusively on the moral implications presented by Humbert Humbert concerning twelve-year old girls. I would have expected such a discussion in the undergraduate setting; the novel’s shock value is high, and for the untrained reader, it is natural to focus on the surface morality of the novel rather than the underlying narrative discourse.
However, when I found myself again discussing Lolita with this same narrow approach in my graduate class, I began to wonder if the majority of readers only focused on Humbert Humbert’s transgressions. Had the rest of the world missed the point? Could no one recognize the genius behind the monster? Is it possible for the average reader to grasp the ironic intentions of the author, or is Lolita forever overshadowed by the reader’s need to judge and dismiss? Too often Lolita is read from only one perspective, the perspective of monstrosity.
Nabokov the pornographer threatened to expose and corrupt others, particularly children, through the publication of a novel about unnatural desire” (Whiting 835). The tendency is for the average reader to become entangled in a moral debate, to take opposition to the seemingly criminal and amoral acts of the narrator, to condemn him for his blatant and grotesque sin. This surface analysis of the text was prevalent at the time of publication, delaying the release of the novel in the United States by three years. “Most reviews of the novel [Lolita] dealt with the narrow issue of its alleged obscenity.
The novel was published three years earlier in France because Nabokov could not find an American publisher ready to risk publishing it” (Tamir-Ghez 65). Critical theory since this time has uncovered multiple layers of interpretation that offer much more meaningful analysis of the novel without labeling it in such pornographic terms. The critical discourse on the subject is emphatically unsympathetic to the accusations of pornography and monstrosity that the novel received upon its first publication. However, in the classroom this shift has not occurred.
Classroom discussions tend to be highly volatile concerning Lolita. In one of my two experiences with this phenomenon, a fellow student became distraught over what she considered to be the “rape” of a Delores (Lolita), and she associated this interpretation with her own personal experiences concerning child abuse. When this student encountered opposition within the class discussion, her emotional state completely dissolved, and she became too emotional to stay in the class. She left in tears, leaving a room full of angry women, poised to argue her point in her absence.
This dramatic reaction completely tainted the rest of the discussion. There was no room left for interpretation beyond the emotional state this student projected onto the class. The result was a dry and simplistic discussion of the novel that helped no one. The mistake this student made, as well as the majority of the class, was that she limited her interpretation within the confines of a socially constructed perception of morality. Her judgments against Humbert Humbert and in favor of Lolita were made before she read the first page of the novel. This is a natural tendency.
We experience this on the local news practically every night. A young girl accuses a teacher of molestation, and the public instantly condemns the teacher with no consideration for circumstance or reliability. The exact same folly is likely when reading Lolita. It is for this reason that I will attempt to explore a deeper reading of Lolita. I propose that, within the classroom, Lolita should be approached from a more critical point of view. Discussions about the novel within the classroom should center on the unreliable narrator coupled with the underlying allegorical reading of the text.
If a classroom can be directed away from the knee-jerk, socio-political reaction to the text, and if they can open their minds to a world where fault does not always lie with the male, then the entire reading experience will be more beneficial to the student. In the following sections I will attempt to provide a template, supported by current critical theory, for future teachers of Lolita in order to avoid the very situation I found myself in when confronted with the reality of classroom politics and the tendency toward vindication.
Humbert Humbert’s Reliability as a Narrator Let us first look at the evidence presented by Humbert Humbert. Humbert is guilty; there is no question. He admits his guilt openly and on numerous occasions to the reader. “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” (Nabokov 2). Throughout the novel Humbert addresses the reader as “the jury,” assuming his role as a criminal on trial. Humbert is all too aware of the crimes he has committed, never once failing to remind the jury that they are unforgivable.
He knows that to his public Lolita will appear as a twelve-year-old girl, innocent, abused and corrupted. It is the nature of justice to associate innocence with youth, but to Humbert, Lolita is not a little girl. She is a legend, an apparition, a mythical entity with awesome powers of manipulation and deviousness. Humbert has encountered nymphs before; in fact he has traveled the world searching for them, all in hopes of replacing his one true love, a love he found on the beaches of the Riviera when he was a boy. The beginning of Humbert’s obsession occurred with a young girl named Annabel.
Annabel was a young beauty, full of spirit and curiosity. She chose Humbert (and Humbert laments that he has no idea why) as her first lover, though both were too young to know what “lover” meant. Annabel cast a spell over Humbert as a boy, kissing him, revealing her legs and thighs to him, bating him with a piece of ribbon taken from her undergarment. “All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other. there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do” (Nabokov 12).
But Humbert’s affair with Annabel was destined to be as short-lived as it was intense: “I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded batherscame out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she [Annabel] died of typhus in Corfu” (Nabokov 13). Had Annabel not perished so young, perhaps the couple could have shared a healthy, normal affair, but Annabel’s untimely death instead scarred Humbert. He fixated on that young love into his own adulthood, never understanding the broader themes of compassion and appropriateness.
He is obsessed by his memory of Annabel Leigh to the point that his entire life becomes an attempt to make his immortal’ moment with her in the past eternally present, to possess her forever” (Winston 423). To Humbert love was synonymous with possession. Had he been able to possess Annabel that day on the beach, he would have been able to move passed thinking of love as solely a possessive state. But because he was denied the opportunity, he embarked on a quest to find Annabel again, beyond death. Annabel’s death bore a myth into Humbert’s psyche.
For him love could only be found in a similar package. This package held a young girl, a nymphet, as defined by Humbert himself. And though a nymphet is not exclusively defined by her age, she is bound to the precept of youth and to the precept of early death. A nymphet would never last forever to Humbert, for like his dear Annabel, any nymphet would cease to exist after a short time. Discussion about Annabel and how Humbert came to compare all girls with Annabel is an excellent approach toward the topic of narrative unreliability.
Initially this approach will spark anger because it will appear as if the reader should be sympathetic toward Humbert, and that idea is generally not a popular one. But by discussing the origins of Humbert’s addiction, one will be able to move smoothly beyond the socially constructed norms of right and wrong and into the concept of Lolita as a mythical representation rather than a reality. This mythical interpretation of Lolita’s character is as follows. According to Humbert a nymphet was not a little girl at all; a nymphet was an apparition, mythical, outside of the human condition.
She was only packaged within a young girl’s body, and deceptively so. For a nymphet could use the mask of an innocent girl to her advantage for nearly anything she desired. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as nymphets. (Nabokov 16) It is critical at this point to recognize that Humbert distinguishes between the “nymphet” and a human girl.
For Humbert these are two very separate entities. Humbert would never interfere with normal girl, for she would hold no fascination with him: Between those age limits are all schoolgirls nymphets? Of course not. Neither are good looks a criterion; and vulgarity, or at least what a given community terms so, does not necessarily impair certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm that separates the dependent on the spatial world of synchronous phenomena. (Nabokov 17)
Young girls did not excite Humbert. But the nymphet is a different creature, operating outside of the human condition. For Humbert, the nymphet was a powerful, mythical entity, capable of mischief that fell decidedly outside of normal conventions of right and wrong. Humbert, after losing Annabel, became an expert in identifying the nymphet. He studied them, followed them and in some cases indulged in the pleasures they offered. Humbert offers to the reader an illustration of his rare talent in identifying the nymphet in Chapter 2 of Lolita:
A normal man given a group photograph of school girls or Girl Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-coluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine. (Nabokov 17) Because Humbert does not consider the nymphet to be a human girl, he reflects that discrepancy back upon himself. His knack for identifying the elusive creatures makes him an “artist and a madman.
It is not sickness that drives him to pursue these supernatural creatures, but rather it is an innate brilliance that only he possesses. This distinction explains Humbert’s plea to the jury to pity him his crime, for he was under a spell of inspiration and artistry. His quest was to uncover the nymph hidden in the scores and scores of normal girls. His ability to identify her was his art, and anything beyond that initial identification lay in the hands of the nymph, as “she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power” (Nabokov 17).
It is quite easy to place blame on Humbert; in fact he begs for the conviction, but I believe that for the purposes of a classroom discussion, the possibility that the blame does not squarely fall on him should be explored. The first question is why does the reader feel the need to place blame at all? If Humbert (the unreliable narrator) openly admits his guilt in the court of public opinion, then what purpose is filled by continuing to cast stones of blame? There is no question as to his guilt. The jury is there to sentence; the conviction has already occurred.
Humbert convicted himself. Reading Lolita in such a way is counter-productive. Nabokov’s genius is not meant to be wasted on such a one-dimensional interpretation of the text. Rather the reader should strive to look beyond guilt, past anger and disgust and find the symbolic nature of Humbert’s predicament. Lolita is no more innocent than Humbert. She fulfills her role as a nymphet diabolically, fearless of retribution, eerily forgetful of her previous life as a young girl. It is Lolita that first seduces Humbert.
Though Humbert craftily plants himself within her web, he does not make any advances toward her. Lolita initiates the affair between the two, and she does so in such a way that Humbert could no more fight her off than he could fight off a tiger. It is Lolita who first kisses Humbert, though she disguises it as a farewell kiss, shrouded in innocence. She knows that she has ensnared Humbert’s affections: A moment later I heard my sweetheart running up the stairs. My heart expanded with such force that it almost blotted me out.
I hitched up the pants of my pajamas, flung the door open: and simultaneously Lolita arrived, in her Sunday frock, stampling, panting, and then she was in my arms, her innocent mouth melting under the ferocious pressure of dark male jaws, my palpitating darling! The next instant I heard her – alive, unraped – clatter downstairs. The motion of fate was resumed. (Nabokov 66) The idea that Lolita is actually the instigator of the affair will raise much discussion. The discussion this assumption fosters will hopefully prepare the classroom for a more radical interpretation of the novel beyond the socially constructed morality I spoke of earlier.
Though it is unnatural to assume a twelve-year old girl could possibly instigate such an affair, the acceptance of that very possibility speaks to what I believe to be Nabokov’s intent. In the following section I will explain how, by disenfranchising Lolita as an innocent, Nabokov succeeds in making a broader statement about American pop culture and its influence on the individual’s state of mind. Reading Lolita as Symbolic Perhaps if the reader can separate herself from the boundaries and assumptions of present-day society and analyze Lolita as a symbol rather than a girl, a deeper meaning of the text will become apparent.
Vladimir Nabokov was not a native American. He was born Russian, and wrote numerous novels in other languages before moving and subsequently writing in America: I am an American writer, born in Russia and educated in England where I studied French Literature, before spending fifteen years in Germany’ Thus Vladimir Nabokov described the circuitous process, begun twenty four years earlier, of evolving a new American identity and adapting it to his European past. (Haegert 777) This foreign heritage gave Nabokov a unique perspective on the rapidly changing society, a perspective that was lost on those who were immersed in it.
Post World War II America exhibited a nature of speed and consumption. “The late modern poetry of the early fifties was a transaction occurring in two-dimensional space between hard covers. By the mid-fifties, queues formed for Elvis Presley and Fats Domino” (Lhamon 100). Consumerism in the States exploded with the television making its way into middle-class homes. The literary scene was immersed in the fantastical poetry of Ginsberg and Kerouac. The collective imagination of American society centered on a need for expansion, eloquently captured in Ginsberg’s “Howl.
America was moving forward at a rapid pace, young people broke out across the nation, traveling and taking in the quickly progressive culture that seemed to exude from the cramped and limited years of war. In a sense America was in a state of awakening. “The year Lolita appeared in Paris, 1955, was the year McDonald’s raised its golden arches in America, the year Playboy first printed nude photos” (Lhamon 18). America had crossed the threshold between the old war mentality and the shiny, bought-and-paid-for future. But there were consequences for this new and expanding philosophy. America became gluttonous.
The television encouraged people to buy things they didn’t need, idolize actors and actresses from Hollywood, obsess over clothing and beauty products. America made a turn toward superficiality, and such a shallow existence did not go unnoticed by Nabokov: Behind all the familiar oppositions of the book – the conflict between Lolita as daemonic temptress and Lolita as prepubescent brat, the conflicts between art and nature and between imagination and reality – loom the greatest and most potent of American polarities: the legendary conflict between New World possibilities and Old World sensibilities.
Haegert 779) Lolita embodied all of these annoying, shallow characteristics. Coating her sly, mischievous, nymphetic heart was a layer of superficiality. She was a slave for a lollipop or a magazine full of her favorite movie stars, and these images tainted her mind. What drives me insane is the twofold nature of this nymphet – of every nymphet, perhaps; this mixture in my Lolita of tender dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity, stemming from the snub-nosed cuteness of ads and magazine pictures. (Nabokov 44) Lolita is interchangeable with the society that made her.
She is consumerism. She personifies the thoughtless nature of the middle-class American who blindly shops for things the television has told her that she needs. Her intellect is no deeper than the last moving picture she watched. Lolita has surrendered her humanity to the altar of capitalism, consumerism. Taking this consideration to heart, a classroom can see a different reasoning behind Humbert’s crimes. If Lolita is symbolic of American culture, and Humbert is representative of “Old England,” then the ties between the two are inevitable.
Humbert could no more deny his love for this new, exciting development than could the outside world watch America grow into this modern, ever-moving entity, and not want to be a part of it. Furthermore, Humbert (representing Old England) exhibits characteristics quite similar to his native country. Humbert’s desire to possess Lolita harks to England’s predisposition for colonization. Humbert wants to conquer Lolita. He recognizes her flagrant independence, and her optimistic freedom awakens a desire for control from within Humbert’s being.
The parallels between the two characters (Humbert and Lolita) and the two countries (England and America) are not coincidence. Nabokov articulately laid the trap for such an observation by personifying the complicated history between America and Britain in such a volatile and grotesquely inhumane relationship between an old man and a young girl. A closer analysis of the way American pop culture affects Lolita lies in her motivation to seduce Humbert as she does. The television, the movies, the magazines, all the pop icons that Lolita surrounds herself with distorts her sense of judgment.
She falls victim to the idea that nothing is too risque; nothing warrants consequence. She seduces Humbert because in some ways he resembles the pictures of Hollywood actors that she collects and hangs on her walls. To Lolita, Humbert is the unattainable star she’s gazes upon from afar, come home to live with her and her mother. How could a girl pass up such an opportunity to pounce and consume such a delectable fantasy? Lolita’s need to satisfy her fantasies coupled with her disregard for convention drives her to seduce old Humbert with little thought for consequence.
Lolita’s pop world allowed her indifference” (Lhamon 18). But Nabokov’s story does not end with the seduction or the affair. As predicted by Humbert in the beginning of the novel, the life span of a nymphet is terribly short: I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita. She would be thirteen on January 1. In two years or so she would cease being a nymphet and would turn into a young girl,’ and then, into a college girl’ – that horror of horrors. (Nabokov 64) Inevitably Lolita would leave Humbert, the question was how and why she would do it.
It is at this point in the discussion where the class must consider how Humbert kept Lolita for as long as he did. He certainly knew that Lolita would not stay with him because of any genuine affection. Humbert thought he knew what would keep her happy: money, sweets, movies, magazines, or anything that would occupy her mind for a minute or two. But Humbert was sadly mistaken. Though Lolita was easily sidetracked by shiny, new things, they did not hold her attention for long, and before Humbert could rethink his strategy, Lolita had already begun planning her escape from him.
Humbert also made the mistake of assuming that Lolita was dependent on him. Because Lolita’s mother was dead, and Humbert her legal guardian, Humbert assumed that she would have an understanding and respect for the authority that guardianship procured. This was a fatal error on the part of Humbert. “Humbert played his hand when he overestimated Lolita’s dependencyLolita and the innocent America for which she stands have their own cultures absolutely forbidden’ even to the loving voyeur” (Lhamon 18).
Not only did Lolita entirely disregard Humbert’s assumed authority over her day-to-day life, but she also pursued her next lover before she and Humbert spent their first night together. Lolita did not desire Humbert the way that Humbert desired her. She saw Humbert as a means to an end, a convenient driver that would entertain her on her way to Quilty. Quilty, a pornographer had none of Humbert’s attributes. He was not good looking; he was not charming or particularly intelligent. Rather he was dangerous and unknown, and that was precisely what Lolita was looking for.
Humbert’s fascination with possessing his nymph left him open for betrayal. He was so blinded by her dazzling charm and innocence that he did not even recognize that her heart was promised to another, much more sinister man. “It now came in a relaxed flow. He [Quilty] was the only man she had ever been crazy about” (Nabokov 272). What should a classroom make of Lolita’s tendency for deception, and should the class continue to blame Humbert? Is Humbert any more at fault for blindly following his mythical fantasy than Lolita is for innocently seducing an older, obviously damaged, man?
The tendency here is to blame Humbert, to call him a monster, to label him a pedophile, and inevitably a classroom discussion on the matter will lend itself to this crass assumption. I don’t believe that course of action justifies anything. Had Humbert not stolen Lolita away from her mother, Lolita would have found her way to Quilty on her own, and then whose fault would her fall be blamed on? No. The real story, the real meaning of the text can only be found once the reader puts aside the need to blame. Just as America broke free and became independent from the Old World, so did Lolita break free from Humbert’s grasp.
The separation was not clean, or painless, just as the American Revolution was dirty and subversive, but the end result was the same. American broke free from its Old World sensibilities, and England had no other recourse but to look on admiringly at what was once its child: Humbert’s ambivalent search for his’ lost Lolita in the last third of the book enacts an emigre’s quest for a truer vision of his host environment – an America no longer seen as a nubile nymphet in need of European refinement, but as an estimable independent spirit requiring (and deserving) a national identity of her own.
Haegert 780) America’s growth in the fifties offered much temptation to its population, and this growth also fostered extensive curiosity from the outside world. But the changes that were taking place inside our borders were not meant for exhibitionism. America had her eye on another prize, a society of beautiful people, expensive clothing, a car in every garage and a television in every living room. America did not shift for the world, just as Lolita did not perform for Humbert. Each were plowing their own road deliberately into unknown territory for little more than the excitement exploration offered.
The attention that they received was purely coincidental, though neither Lolita nor the America she represented were above using the extra attention to their advantage. Nabokov was quite aware of how his incestuous allegory would be received by the public. Even Humbert Humbert was aware of the combustible nature of the subject matter. In hopes of intercepting the inevitable roar of discontent from the public at large against a book seemingly about pedophilia, Nabokov attempted to give the reader hints to his actual intent.
Late in the novel Humbert laments to his readers (this time distinguishing them from the members of the jury) saying: Mid-twentieth century ideas concerning child-parent relationship have been considerably tainted by the scholastic rigmarole and standardized symbols of the psychoanalytic racket, but I hope I am addressing myself to unbiased readers. (Nabokov 285) Nabokov’s plea for the unbiased reader illuminates his desire for his readers to avoid a shallow and easy interpretation of his love story.
He is imploring his reader to resist falling into the conventional rhetoric of the day and asking them to consider the story outside the realm of public opinion and judgment. Such a request is not easily met. Regrettably it is difficult for a modern classroom (as well as a 1950’s reader) to separate emotion and judgment from a story that on the surface seems to abdicate child abuse and molestation, but in reading any piece of literature as complex and layered as this one, is it not the responsibility of the reader to seek out and attempt to understand the author’s intent?
Is it in the reader’s best interest to read Lolita only for its monstrosities? I must insist that the reader look closer than that. My intentions in this discussion of Lolita focus on three aspects of the novel: the reliability of the narrator, the symbolic interpretation of the text, and the intention of the author. By using this framework within the classroom setting, the tendency for claiming a moral high ground on the basis of child abuse tends to fade away.
However, it is important to point out that the question of monstrosity and morality does not disappear when the discussion focuses on these particular issues. In all three cases the moral argument is still present. However, by limiting the amount of focus placed solely on the moral aspect, the classroom can gain access to the multiple layers of interpretation the novel lends itself toward. I believe that such an approach will greatly enrich any student’s experience with this particular text.
