Humbert Humbert tells the story with the pauses, suspense, false leads, ironies and ambiguities of a narrator skilled in the art of keeping the curiosity of the reader constantly aroused. His story is scandalous, but not pornographic or even erotic. There is not the slightest pleasure taken in the description of sexual activities — a sine qua non of pornography — nor is there a hedonistic vision that could justify the excesses of the narrator-character in the name of pleasure. Humbert Humbert is not a libertine or a sensualist: he is scarcely even an obsessive. His story is scandalous, above all, because he feels it and presents it as such, because he keeps talking about his ‘madness’ and his ‘monstrosity’ (these are his words). It is the protagonist’s account of himself that gives his adventure its sense of being unhealthy and morally unacceptable, rather than the age of his victim who, after all, is only a year younger than Shakespeare’s Juliet. And what further aggravates his offence and deprives him of the reader’s sympathy is his unpleasantness and arrogance, the contempt that he seems to feel for all men and women, including those beautiful, semi-pubescent, little creatures that so inflame his desires.
Perhaps even more than the seduction of the young nymph by a cunning man, the most provocative aspect of the novel is the way it reduces all of humanity to laughable puppets. Humbert Humbert’s monologue constantly mocks institutions, professions and everyday routines, from psychoanalysis — one of Nabokov’s pet hates — to education and the family. When filtered through his corrosive pen, all the characters become stupid, pretentious, ridiculous, predictable and boring. It has been said that the novel is, above all, a ferocious critique of middle-class America, a satire of its tasteless motels, its naïve rituals and inconsistent values, a literary abomination that Henry Miller termed the ‘air-conditioned nightmare’. Professor Harry Levin has also argued that Lolita was a metaphor that refers to the feelings of a European who, after having fallen madly in love with the United States, is brutally disappointed by that country’s lack of maturity.
I am not sure that Nabokov invented this story with symbolic intentions. My impression is that within him, as in Borges, there was a sceptic who was scornful of modernity and of life, and who observed both with irony and distance, from a refuge of ideas, books and fantasies, where both writers could remain protected, removed from the world through their prodigious inventive games that diluted reality into a labyrinth of words and phosphorescent images. For both writers, who were so similar in the way they understood culture and approached the task of writing, the distinguished art they created was not a criticism of the existing world but a way of disembodying life, dissolving it into a gleaming mirage of abstractions.
And for anyone who wishes to go beyond the main plot of the novel, and consider its mysteries, try to solve its puzzles, work out its allusions and recognise the parodies and pastiches of its style, Lolita can be read as a baroque and subtle substitute for existence. This is a challenge that the reader can accept or reject. In any event, a purely anecdotal reading is very enjoyable in itself. But anyone who is prepared to read it differently discovers that Lolita is a bottomless well of literary references and linguistic juggling tricks, which form a tight network and are, perhaps, the real story that Nabokov wanted to tell. A story as intricate as that of his novel The Defence (which appeared in Russian in 1930), whose hero is a mad chess player who invents a new defensive game, or that of Pale Fire, a fiction that adopts the appearance of a critical edition of a poem and whose hieroglyphic story emerges, seemingly at variance with the narrator, through the interplay of the verses of the poem and the notes and commentary of its editor.
The search for the hidden treasures of Lolita has given rise to many books and university theses in which the humour and playful spirit with which both Nabokov and Borges transformed their (real or fictitious) erudition into art is almost always sadly lacking.
The linguistic acrobatics of the novel are very difficult to translate. Some, like the quotations in French in the original, just lie there, mischievous and rude. One example of many: the strange hendecasyllable that Humbert Humbert recites when he is preparing to kill the man who snatched Lolita away from him. To what and to whom does this refer: Réveillez-vous Laqueue, il est temps de mourir? Is it an actual literary quotation, or one made up, like so many in the book? Why does the narrator call Clare Quilty Laqueue? Or is he inflicting the name on himself? In an interesting book, Keys to Lolita, Professor Carl L. Proffer has solved the enigma. It is, quite simply, a convoluted obscenity. La queue, a tail, is French slang for a phallus; to die means to ejaculate. So the verse is an allegory that condenses, with its classic rhythm, a premonition of the crime that Humbert Humbert is about to commit, and his reason for the murder (the fact that the phallic Clare Quilty has possessed Lolita).
Sometimes the allusions or premonitions are simple digressions, for Humbert Humbert’s solipsistic amusement, that do not affect the development of the story. But on other occasions they have a meaning that alters the story in significant ways. This is true, for example, of all the bits of information and references regarding the most disturbing character of all, who is not Lolita or the narrator, but the furtive playwright who is fond of the Marquis de Sade, the libertine, drunk, drug-addicted and, according to his own confession, semi-impotent Clare Quilty. His appearance disrupts the novel, sending the story in a hitherto unforeseeable direction, introducing a Dostoevskian theme: that of the double. It is thanks to him that we suspect that the whole story might be a mere schizophrenic invention by Humbert Humbert, who, the reader has been told, has spent several periods in mental asylums. As well as stealing Lolita away and dying, the function of Clare Quilty seems to be to place an alarming question mark over the credibility of the (assumed) narrator.
Who is this strange subject? Before materialising in the reality of the fiction, when he takes Lolita away from the hospital at Elphis-tone, he has already been infiltrating the text as a result of Humbert Humbert’s persecution mania. There is a car that appears and disappears, like a will-o’-the-wisp, a hazy outline, lost in the distance, on a hill, after a game of tennis with the child-woman, and myriad signs that only the meticulous and ever-alert neurosis of the narrator can decipher. And later, when, on the trail of the fugitives, Humbert Humbert begins his extraordinary recapitulation of his travels across the United States — an exercise of sympathetic magic that attempts to revive the two years of happiness lived with Lolita, repeating their journey and the hotels they had stayed in — he discovers at every stage disconcerting traces and messages from Clare Quilty. They reveal an almost omniscient knowledge of the life, culture and obsessions of the narrator and a sort of subliminal complicity between the two. But are we talking about two people? What they have in common far outweighs what separates them. They are more or less the same age and they share the same desires for young girls in general, and Lolita Haze in particular, as well as both being writers (albeit with different degrees of success). But the most remarkable symbiosis can be found in the magic tricks that they perform at a distance, in which Lolita is merely a pretext, the elegant and secret communication that turns life into literature, revolutionising topography and the urban landscape with the magic wand of language, through the invention of small towns and accidents that trigger literary associations and surnames that generate poetic associations according to a very strict code that only they are capable of employing.