'Lolita'

For when the vibe is gothic, ruminant, and uncanny.

Owing largely to Stanley Kubrick’s film, Lolita today is synonymous with a sensual aesthetic characterized by heart-shaped glasses, babydoll dresses and knee socks. It Girls of the early 2000s like Alexa Chung and Lana Del Ray really took to the vibe, and the latter’s entire freshman album is essentially a homage to it. I think for most people, Lolita is defined by this nebulous cultural creep that surrounds it more than by the story itself. And I think for most literary afficionados, Lolita is a modern American Gothic about a pedophile. And it is that, of course. But for me, it’s about being a stranger. To be a stranger is to find things strange, but it’s also to be strange. It is to see your surroundings, your culture, your habitat, your language as if from the outside, as alien and surprising. But it is also to understand that in the eyes of those around you, for whom their surroundings, their culture, their habitat, their language are natural and normal, you are the thing that is unusual, unsettling, and hard to understand. That’s a difficult burden to carry. Nabokov uses the uncomfortable narrative – a ride along with a pedophile as he tells the story of his obsessive love for a child – to evoke that sense of discomfort for the reader in a way that’s quite brilliant.

He builds tension in a (yes) traditionally gothic way and leverages that tension as a means to impart extreme discomfort upon the reader. And boy, does he impart discomfort. Humbert is only as sympathetic as a pedophile can be, but because he in the narrator you are stuck with him as he wrestles with his urges, understanding on some level, although certainly not completely, that he is an abomination. You are also stuck with him as he spirals toward indulging his urges, and as his paranoia about getting caught or losing his prize spirals as well. The book would be completely unreadable for all that discomfort if it weren’t for the startling bursts of humor, largely in the form parentheticals, misspellings, and even the pedophile’s name, Humbert Humbert (HH, Poor Hum, etc.).

And Hum is a totem for strangeness and strangerhood in his pedophilia, naturally, but also in three distinct, normal categories as well: culture, habitat, and, above all, language.

Humbert is a stranger all his life. As a Swiss national, he is a stranger in Paris. As a European, he’s a stranger in America. Interactions peppered across the story, hinted at only briefly, give some clue as to the way Americans either fetishize foreigners or are disgusted by them. Similarly, he sees himself in a dualistic light; alternately as an old, hairy brute and a dark, suave intellectual. The binary is carried through the two distinct cultures handled in the book. Humbert represents European culture, the Old World, and Lolita represents American culture, the New World. Where European culture is dominated by literature, American culture is dominated by film. Where one is possessed by ancient, high art, the other is poppy, novel and unaffected. While American culture comes from European culture, the former doesn’t understand the latter and doesn’t want to, much like the relationship between a teenager and her parents.

Humbert also feels like an observer rather than a participant in – or inhabitant of – the habitat of America, from suburban streets to dusty backroads dotted with cheeseburger-slinging greasy spoons to expanses of pristine mountainous terrain. One of the longest chapters in the book details Humbert’s road trip with Lolita across the country and back again. Nabokov describes in wonderful, beautiful detail all of the natural phenomenon, roadside attractions, diners, motels, oddities and amazements that typify the uniquely American experience of just piling into the car and hitting the road. An American might not think much of it; there would be no need to. But to a European, the vast wildernesses would seem eerily untouched and the enterprising spirit that compels men to charge tourists for the privilege of viewing the so-called mystery spot, or crater, or corn creation on their property would seem, well, entirely foreign. In the end it’s all at once overwhelming and underwhelming for Old Hum, for at the end of their journey he claims to have seen nothing much.

The real exploration of strangeness, and that which gives the novel life, is in Humbert’s language. He often misspells words based on their phonetics (Lo-lee-tah), like he’s chewing on them, and there is a pleasing musical quality to the prose as though it is built around the sounds of words as much their meaning. This is a quality that only a non-native speaker, or someone who studies the language that is the medium for their writing as if they were a non-native speaker, can produce. Nabokov, in all his English works, exhibits it in spades, as he himself is a native Russian speaker and immigrant to America. The whole thing functions on some level as a study of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which posits that native linguistic structures actually affect cognition and thus a person’s perception of reality (a theory which I must say is heartily dismissed by linguists for who I have great respect and admiration, like John McWhorter). Hum’s learned but unnatural grasp of English contributes both to his own strangeness in America and his understanding of America as strange. Nabokov goes further than that though, with Humbert’s lingual otherness extending beyond just English. As a Swiss-Parisian transplant, he liberally sprinkles in bits of French that remain untranslated in the final work, so that a non-French speaking reader has to stumble through them to understand his meaning, or otherwise miss or manifest nuances of meaning creating yet another barrier to understanding him on top of the intellectual elitism, the foreignness of his culture, and, of course, the pedophilia.

The overall effect is evocative, disturbing, breath-taking, and distressing. It’s one of those pieces of art that should be so difficult to get through that it all at once makes a lasting impression and is utterly impossible to revisit, but Nabokov’s elegant treatment produces a work that can easily be picked up again and again.

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