Love as a Disease -- Lolita

What hasn't been said about Lolita? I'd really like to come up with a review that breaks new ground but in the 55+ years since its publication and two film versions, the characters are icons and everyone over nymphet age knows the plot. So instead, I will stick to those things we are looking in this year's list of lust, passion and love, going back to align it against Paz' criteria.

Passion cannot be one-sided. It must have reciprocity, equal longing, matched satisfaction. Lolita gets nothing from Humbert, save movie magazines, junk food and faddish clothes. She is not having sex as a teenage prostitute, to collect things instead of money; she is rather earning her allowance for a chore that she finds unavoidable and a nuisance. Near the end of the book, Humbert realizes that "it had become gradually clear to my conventional Lolita during our singular and bestial cohabitation that even the most miserable of family lives was better than the parody of incest, which in the long run, was the best I could offer the waif." The "passion" that separates Humbert and Lolita from society is not love but his attempt to silence her, avoid people that might know and thereby be discovered as breaking the law.

Humbert's love is not his salvation, it is his recurring undoing, a sick structure between his bouts of institutionalization. Paz describes love as not being idolatry, but Humbert still worships the premenstrual female body, yet not as a goddess, for his ego makes of himself a god. Lolita is the acolyte to his self-worship.

Most of the love stories on this year's list show a period when the lovers are separated and how that enflames and enriches their romance. When Lolita goes to camp, Humbert spends his time contriving how to prevent further separations. But when Lolita finally runs off from her hospital bed to be like the stars in her gossip pages, Humbert essentially closes the chapter on her, going so far as to find a trashy, willing substitute.

Paz also expects love stories to display the tension between predestination and choice, between fate and freedom and the easy switch off between object and subject. As for the first two spectrum, Lolita has no choice, no freedom but neither does Humbert given his innate pedophilia. Always on the look out for the girl with the "right" features, Lolita was in the wrong place at the wrong time. On the other hand, she does garner some power during their couple of years running from the law, as Humbert realizes how abject he is before her.

So, while being about a certain type of lust, Lolita does not read like a love story. That being said, I loved the book. It was much, much more clever and witty than I expected given the subject. Nabokov writes a comic apologia, a satiric defense of Humbert's action. In the afterword, Nabokov references ancient European literature where "deliberate lewdness was not inconsistent with flashes of comedy" and that more recent attempts at such subjects renders the "term pornography ... with mediocrity ... commercialism ... (where) style, structure, imagery should never distract the reader from his tepid lust ." And more apparently when Humbert becomes the voice for Nabokov's intention for character development: "Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds ... and we expect ... (them) to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them ... Any deviation in the fates we hve ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical." It is Nabokov's talent that has us surprised at Humbert, even at Lolita. We are never "comfortable" in being able to pro forma expect their behaviors."

Humbert never garners the reader's respect and maybe even not understanding, but Nabokov collects the honors and makes the reader think about how the structure of a novel can be extended out of the norm and how the most unattractive of protagonist's can enlighten.