Lusting after "Lolita"

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Morally speaking, this baby snatcher is a monster and he knows it. But Humbert is also a monster in the sense that every scorned lover is a monster of ugliness in his own eyes. We have all been that poor shambling creature at one time or another. This is the self that we see reflected in him, when we realize, with varying degrees of alarm, that we identify with Humbert. Nabokov's filigreed description of a universal emotion through a transgressive metaphor -- a shared experience through a freak one -- is one of the things that makes "Lolita" such extraordinary reading. Literature, in fact. As pornography, it is a notorious failure.

Most of the criticism of "Lolita" has come from outside its readership. The novel has lived a curiously shifting life in the realm of popular perception. It was predictably scandalous in the 1950s. People who had never read (nay, heard of) "that book by Nabokov" soon bandied about the name of its heroine, using it to describe any desirable female under 20. This impression was shored up by Sue Lyons' portrayal in the 1962 Stanley Kubrick film. Of course, that fully formed, lush blond teeny-bopper -- a girl any red-blooded man would admire -- had nothing in common with the radiant, coltish, brown-haired child who caught Humbert's eye.

In the wake of the sexual revolution, Lolita suffered another transformation: She was fatuously "liberated" into the reading public. Paperback editions with tedious "erotic" artwork began appearing that purported to release poor Lo from her censorious bonds. It was all about sexual repression now. What was wrong with sexy teens, after all? Lolita was pulled into the current of discourse that flowed through the '70s soft-porn mags, and dragged herself coughing and spluttering onto the bank and into the pedophilia debates of the 1980s, which still rage on today.

It was in this tense cultural climate that I decided to read the novel again, and it was with an anxiously beating heart that I carried it off to bed. The literary love of my life faced challenges from the child-abuse storm, from the dampening theories of English departments where I studied and from time itself. Would I return to this childhood scene to find it dwarfed and faded beyond recognition, like so many other landscapes? Against all literary cynicism I held up the single yardstick of "Lolita," with its tears and shivery pleasures. My love was put to the test, as was Humbert's when he tracked down his girl in Coalmont, "a town in remotest Northwest." Humbert's butterfly had flown, his thin brown girleen disappeared into a pregnant lady in glasses, slippers and a house dress. Mrs. Richard F. Schiller was a nymphet no longer, far from it. Yet he had never wanted her more. Now that I was more of a Charlotte and less of a Lo, it's true that Humbert had changed too. The gap between author and narrator had widened for me. Humbert was more of a brute, less of a true lover. I pitied him, but I pitied the women too. And the story was sadder, and better for all that. It was funnier too.

As Anthony Lane observed of Humbert and his fictional wonderland in the New Yorker, "Lolita" is "more than the sum of his lusts." Lolita flits beyond Humbert's grasp, and her namesake escapes the reductive reach of criticism. The best writing is always more. In the prism of meaning that refracts through the book, this is surely a key point: Nabokov describes child molestation because it is ugly. How much more astounding, then, that "Lolita" is a beautiful book. It is a major display of virtuosity, our ravishment at the hands of Lolita.

Carol's present missed the mark. "Lolita" didn't shield me from the perverts, but neither did it send me leaping into their cars. It had little effect on my relationship with men. Instead, it transformed my relationship with literature. I fell in love with books. Today, as I puff up the pillows and prepare to read it once more, Adrian Lyne's movie version is still unreleased in North American theaters. Endorsed by Dmitri Nabokov, the film is having a mixed reception in England. Filmmaking is an expensive, risky, unwieldy enterprise. But if this movie leads people to one of the most bewitching novels of this century, it will have been money well spent.

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