I just re-read Lolita.
Nabokov’s most controversial novel is by far his most widely read, and, with the possible exception of Pnin, the best of his I’ve read so far. It’s a twisted love story, a travelog, a noir, a Western, a mystery; it’s the ramblings of a madman. And, not unimportantly, it’s a seemingly effortless frolic in the beauty of the English language (One would expect nothing less from Nabokov.)
Obviously, unsurprisingly, obviously, the prose is absolutely stunning. This is Nabokov we’re talking about here. Every syllable rolls off the tongue like it was the only thing that could possibly have come next; nearly every sentence contains a pun or wordplay, often several. It’s hard to say anything new about this.
“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” And so on, and so on; you get the idea.
Onto its content: Yes, it’s about a lot of things. It’s about a violent, controlling, delusional man who repeatedly sexually abuses his step daughter. This is the core of the narrative, and everything else revolves around it. The travel, the intrigue, the humor, the love Humbert believes himself to feel for Dolores (I don’t think we should doubt him on this point, if we allow that love can be plenty violent and perverse) all have in common this violent relationship.
But what really stuck out to me on a second read was the setting, the ambient backdrop of American consumer culture in the early postwar years.
When Lolita’s mother dies, Humbert kidnaps Lolita and they go on a long, drawn-out cross-country roadtrip with no destination in mind, only that they keep moving. They stay in sundry hotels and motels, resting in mid-century kitsch. This is the world when “America was still a real country,” as today’s rosy-eyed right-nostalgists would put it. Humbert waxes lyrical about the glistening specter of Americana, repeating his leitmotif: “And the stars, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen…”
A desperate loneliness lurks beneath the cheap razzle-dazzle; Humbert knows that his time with Lolita is limited, that either he’ll be caught or she’ll, in due time, grow too old to be a nymphet any longer. Humbert’s American dream has a definite time limit that cannot be overcome by traversing space, by diving headfirst into the Western expanse.
I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood--or the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.
To avoid this fate Humbert showers Lolita with gifts and outings throughout their journey, a sad attempt at bribing (and blackmailing) her to allow him to continue his violence:
In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four books of comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads, two cokes, a manicure set, a travel clock with a luminous dial, a ring with a real topaz, a tennis racket, roller skates with white high shoes, field glasses, a portable radio set, chewing gum, a transparent raincoat, sunglasses, some more garments--swooners, shorts, all kinds of summer frocks. At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.
Humbert’s itemized receipt is a rolling document of the preponderance of consumer products available and, indeed, abundant on a mass scale.
Perhaps Humbert Humbert shows us that beneath the flashy stage lights and shiny new toys there lurks a dark, violent undercurrent running through our manufactured paradise. But we can’t forget that Humbert is a European, so I don’t think it’s quite that easy. In fact, our cosmopolitan maintains that his beloved Lo is the perfect subject for consumerist Americana:
Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth--these were the obvious items in her list of beloved things. The Lord knows how many nickels I fed to the gorgeous music boxes that came with every meal we had! I still hear the nasal voices of those invisibles serenading her, people with names like Sammy and Jo and Eddy and Tony and Peggy and Guy and Patty and Rex, and sentimental song hits, all of them as similar to my ear as her various candies were to my palate. She believed, with a kind of celestial trust, any advertisement or advice that that appeared in Movie Love or Screen Land--Starasil Starves Pimples, or "You better watch out if you're wearing your shirttails outside your jeans, gals, because Jill says you shouldn't." If a roadside sign said: Visit Our Gift Shop--we had to visit it, had to buy its Indian curios, dolls, copper jewelry, cactus candy. The words "novelties and souvenirs" simply entranced her by their trochaic lilt. If some cafe sign proclaimed Icecold Drinks, she was automatically stirred, although all drinks everywhere were ice-cold. She it was to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster. And she attempted--unsuccessfully-to patronize only those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads.
Again Humbert Humbert reads off a laundry list of distractions and attractions; the length of the list is the point. It’s the sensory assault one feels when walking around an overcrowded shopping mall, covered in bright lights, vague wafts of sundry perfume samples, the clutter of commodities running from the floor to the ceiling and back again.
There’s something eerie about it now. Of course there’s always been something eerie about the novel, but I don’t just mean the pedophilia. From what we know, Nabokov worked on what would become Lolita intermittently throughout the 1940s, nearly twenty years before Lolita was published in 1955. Nabokov was writing in the midst of American postwar society, the time of the family wage, suburbanization, and a relatively stable life for many white workers. That world is gone, and it’s not coming back, no matter what right- and left-nostalgists may think.
The hollow of postwar American society, its failed promise, is felt on nearly every page of this text. I wonder how it felt to read it back then, back when this was the dominant culture in need of critique rather than a bygone era of toaster ovens and TV dinners, in-home washing machines, and the bars, and the cars, and the stars, and the Carmen…