Lolita

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is, as the title suggests, a story about someone called Lolita. Indeed, the novel’s first and last words are ‘Lolita’, pressing upon the reader the inescapable obsession of the narrator, and the name ‘Lolita’ has become an adjective in popular culture denoting a sexually precotious young girl.  First published in 1955, Lolita traces Humbert’s (the narrator) increasing appetite for romantic and sexual attachements to young girls, or ‘nymphets’ as he terms them, first with Annabel when she is the same age as him, and then with Lolita, who becomes his step-daughter.  Thus, the novel marks three vulnerable childhoods: Annabel who dies young, Humbert with his heightened sexuality at a young age, and Lolita who falls prey to Humbert’s attention.

However, the notion of lost childhood and innocence in Lolita is ambiguous. Nabokov presents his heroine (can you be one at 12 or 13? Shakespeare’s Juliet is), in an everchanging light: on one hand the reader immediately feels an urge to protect Lolita from Humbert and what is arguably, child abuse, yet at other times, can feel irritated by her adolescant behaviour. Lolita is littered with references to 1950s American teen culture bubblegum, clothes, comics, milkshakes, juke boxes, summer camps all of which serve to remind the reader of the normal interests and activities of young girls, although Lolita’s own experiments in the sexual world of her peers, far removed from her relationship with Humbert, invite questions regarding the degree of her innocence.  The ambiguous presentation of Lolita, ultimately biased by narrator’s passionate obsession, and yet carefully presented by Nabokov, creates a compelling account of the last stages of childhood, whereby the tragic sense of loss is conjured by the reader, rather than the daring narrator who himself provides a charmingly funny account of his disturbing adventures.
 

'Lolita is comedy, subversive yet divine ... You read Lolita sprawling limply in your chair, ravished, overcome, nodding scandalized assent' Martin Amis, Observer

1
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born a my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

2
I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube on his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter if two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges

3
Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of memory; on where you skilfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: honey-coloured skin, thin arms,brown bobbed hair, long lashes,big bright mouth”); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).