Lolita is 70 and Still A Problem

I have a problem with Nabokov's Lolita; one that will baffle the federal government. Actually, I have several problems. First, I would have pushed Lolita under the car, and made off with the mother. The title character is dull, vapid, and, of course, childish. If she is representative of America, then we are a truly screwed people. Second, I think Humbert Humbert is an idiot; a nasty bit of work, but an idiot. See my preceding comment about the mother. If he represents Europe, then we need to be leery of Europe. Lastly, I cannot escape the feeling that Nabokov wanted to create a sensation.

Against all that, Nabokov wrote brilliantly.

The Los Angeles Review of Books published an essay on Lolita, In Its Purest Form, by Clare Messud does much to explicate my problems - everyone's problems-with Lolita. It is worth reading in full. I do leave you with this one paragraph:

As a character comments in Nabokov’s early novel Bend Sinister (1947), “curiosity […] is insubordination in its purest form.” Such insubordination is, and perhaps not only in a Nabokovian universe, the beginning of hope: it’s a refusal to accept the limitations of the known; it’s an openness to the real, to whatever that may be and however uncomfortable we may find it. When we read Lolita with our eyes open, we experience perforce multiple emotions, often simultaneously. We can’t help but recognize this known world, our familiar fallen humanity—terrible, hilarious, beautiful, absurd, monstrous and tragic. Who doesn’t wish to shape the world according to our fantasy? And yet, Nabokov suggests, each of us must learn the evil consequences of such desire. Humbert, at 70, remains unspeakable but as meaningfully speaking as ever. His story and Lolita’s fate resonate beyond topical trash, beyond the hollow problematic, in an overdetermined ecstasis (in its original Greek sense: standing outside oneself). Painfully, paradoxically, in this powerfully uncomfortable place, curiosity proves at once our key to the sublime and our moral compass.

sch 4/22