Lolita At 50, And Forever Young

And why is this important? Because in Humbert's private mythology, Dolly is the "nymphet" Lolita, a creature whose "true nature is not human, but … demoniac," a changeling without family or history, existing on an "intangible island of entranced time," where neither she nor Humbert will ever grow up. In everyday reality, however, which Humbert, solipsize as he will, can never entirely manage to ignore, she is simply "a North American girlchild named Dolores Haze," who will grow into a woman like her mother—"she of the noble nipple and massive thigh"—and who will take her place in the world of "normal big males consorting with their normal big mates," the world of passing time. Time, not little girls, is Humbert's truest obsession—and the novel's as well.

The book's faux foreword, written by Nabokov impersonating a preposterous academic named "John Ray, Ph.D.," calls it "a case history" which will become "a classic in psychiatric circles." But Nabokov found psychoanalysis grotesque and inhuman—he habitually called Freud "the Viennese witch doctor"—and the "trauma" that sets Humbert on his pedophiliac path is a mockery of psychological realism. (If you care, as a 13-year-old, he was interrupted as he was about to make love to his 13-year-old girlfriend.) "Lolita" lets us watch Humbert's pursuit of his quarry through his eyes, but it offers no useful insights into the mind of a madman—only into the mind of an artist.

"Ray" also argues that the book tends "unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis." This might make an attractive argument should a new dark age descend—on Inauguration Day 2009, say—and the book banners once again put "Lolita" in the cross hairs. But ultimately it won't wash. True, Humbert has his apotheosis, on the second-to-last page of his narrative, when he claims to realize that "the hopelessly poignant thing" about his story isn't his loss of Lolita—as he persists in calling Dolly—but her loss of her own childhood. Nabokov, though, is perfectly ambivalent. As Keats said of Shakespeare, he's possessed of "Negative Capability"—that is, he's "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." This wouldn't get him or his novel off the hook if they came up before the mullahs—of whatever faith. "Lolita" answers to a stern morality, but it's the morality of esthetics, in which, to quote Keats again, beauty is truth and truth beauty. Humbert has ruined a life—two lives, if you count his own—in attempting to defy the passage of time, but in writing his story, he's preserved his victim and himself forever. Or at least as long as language will last. "I am thinking of aurochs and angels," he concludes—and how like Nabokov to pull out of his magician's top hat the name of an extinct European bison, which will send readers to their dictionaries in the middle of his peroration—"the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita." The name of the beloved, then, is the alpha and omega of this immortal novel. Though, of course, it's not her name.

© 2008