Lolita
Lolita, Lolita, Lolita: ★★★★★
The name rings in my head as it does for Humbert Humbert, the protagonist of Nabokov’s perversely exquisite novel. The name bounces off the walls of my head and travels, not through my “loins”, but to the sad and disjointed canals of my heart where aches and pains lay waiting.
I went into my reading of Lolita with an assertive disgust, knowing that the entire book would make me uncomfortable and utterly enraged. But what I didn’t expect was to be consumed by Lolita, just like our revolting narrator is, only in an entirely different way.
I am not enticed by Lolita for predatory sexual interest but because I’m a woman who was once a girl. I’m a woman who knows what being a girl who wants to be a woman who wants to stay a child is like. I’m a woman who likes to read and can appreciate provocative literature because I find things that aren’t provocative but rather uninteresting.
When it comes to the spectrum of opinions surrounding this book, I feel like I’m squarely in the middle. On one side, there are those who find the book grotesque and are unable to look past the abduction, rape, and corruption of a young child through the perspective of said kidnapper, rapist, and corruptor (a fair perspective). On the other side, there are reviews that write, “Was the relationship between H.H. and Lolita passionate or destructive?” and claim the book is the only “realistic love story of our time” (perhaps a fair opinion to some but a rather off-putting opinion in my eyes).
I think the story is intriguing in its grotesqueness which made it a more interesting read for me. This fact made me question my own morals and beliefs. It was a hard fact for me to sit with, that I liked the book. I wanted to pick it up and read it. I wanted to see what happened next. And I felt icky for encouraging the story forward despite that being the only way out.
I’ve also heard people say they felt sympathetic towards Humbert. How sad it is for a man to love a child, knowing it’s wrong but unable to restrain himself? I did not feel sympathetic towards H.H. but I did find myself wanting to understand him. And I found that I was able to do that the further into the text I ventured.
OF COURSE, I don’t support his pedophilia, let’s be clear about that. But I understand how one can become entranced by young girls who are on the precipice of maturation but still safe in their naivety. Of course, H.H. deprives Lolita of this important developmental time. I recognized that H.H. has a strong desire to protect Lolita because he has a first hand understanding of what she should be scared of. People like him. Men like him. And I feel the same sense of responsibility to protect young girls. H.H.’s lust is replaced by an inkling of envy within me. Envy for that time when I was protected from those things.
I felt connected to Lolita because I remember being 12, 13, 14 years old and feeling as though I was older than I was. I had older friends, carried myself differently than peers my age, and I felt I understood things more than the average tween. Looking back, this was all wrong. Perhaps I was focused on different things that other kids my age and perhaps there was media I consumed that made me feel older but I was not older. If an older man had approached me with romantic interest, I would have encouraged it and explored it. But, I would have had no idea what I was doing of course or the repercussions of mine or his actions. This feels obvious but I want to explain that I felt for Lolita because I remember what it was like, entering the world faster than I would have liked to, and wishing I was older than I was. Most of my childhood I spent wishing I was older, more mature, more capable, taken more seriously. And part of me felt jealous of Lolita at the beginning of the book because she was a girl just being a girl. This feeling ended of course when all of that was taken from her.
I’m still struggling to understand why I enjoyed the book. Why has the character Lolita, the idea of Lolita, become such a worldwide phenomenon? Why has she been used in research, analogies, social comparisons in our generation and the generations before us. Why do we romanticize Lolita in TikTok videos, Pinterest collages, our style, our syndromes? Why do we put her on the cover with a lollipop in her mouth or with her clothes drenched and sticking to her prepubescent body? Is romanticizing and glorifying the story the same as creating an “aesthetic” that replicates the look of a young girl? Did men create this aesthetic? Has it forever screwed our perception of what is “sexy”?
Why does the story shock, horrify, upset and entice me? Is that exactly what Nabokov wanted? Is that exactly how it feels to be Humbert Humbert?
finished books: 17
# of books behind: 0
books remaining: 13
