Reading Nabokov's Lolita

It is difficult to sum up my feelings after reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. I will attempt nonetheless. It is after all a novel that is difficult to conceive, tough to write and impossible to be written like the way it was written by my dear Vladimir. What a piece of art the novel has turned out to be. I remember to have read a book called ‘On the Sublime’ somewhere during my under-graduate days and found the world sublime ridiculously abstract and gratuitously meaningful. I was wrong. I am wrong. Lolita is a sublime piece of art. It’s a novel that combines, much like Keats’ best poems and Shakespeare’s best plays, beauty with something unexplainable, something indescribable, something eternal like the universe with all its suns and moons and sky.

It is, sadly, a misunderstood book, for those who haven’t read it and for those who have heard about it. Lolita, they say, is a story of a paedophile and a pervert – in short- a sex story- a porn stuff. Most of the people in the world who can read, read porn, and they have not read it. Lolita is not porn. Lolita is a book of a lifetime.

Story of Lolita is sad, funny, unpretentious and unapologetic. It is a confession of middle-aged man Humbert Humbert, a pseudonym of a pseudonym of a pseudonym, of his obsession with 12-year old ‘nymphet’ Dolorous Haze, his very own Lolita. His obsession is sexual and partly a fulfilment of his memory of his childhood sweetheart who had died before their love could bloom. Humbert is a pervert and Humbert is a poet. Humbert is a bastard and Humbert is a critique of the popular American pop culture that fills the young mind with crap. Humbert is a "detestable, abominable, criminal fraud" and Humbert is, well, just Humbert.

The first sexual act between him and his nymphet is initiated by Lolita who has already experienced something like this in her summer camp. Her mother and his wife safely dead both go on to live an unrestrained life. The following days become a rollercoaster for Humbert. A life from ‘pure joy’ to ‘unrestrained jealousy’, hopping from one hotel to another Humbert goes on to celebrate and condemn the affectations of a growing up girl. The years roll on and finally Lolita escapes, well not to safety, but to one of her short lived teenage revelry. And when Humbert finally meets her after two years she is a 17-year old heavily pregnant wife. Subsequently Humbert goes off to murder Clare Quilty. A hilarious account of the crime inflates the entire reason behind the revenge.

Lolita is Humbert’s confession. Written in an elaborate language, full of pun and quote and aphorism, fusing the coming and poetic, this confession gives rise to exceptional ambiguity. How far can we trust the narrator? He is a mad man who has had numerous visits to mental asylum and takes unrestrained delight in fooling the psychiatrists. This mad narrator is clever enough to pose as an intellectual and pass insightful comments about the society. This pathological narrator, who may not allow any character to exist beyond his own imagination, gives in to tenderness and guilt when he tells us that his paedophilic love for Lolita, his Dolly, might have ruined her personality and subsequently her understanding of being ‘normal’.

Nabokov employs all the stock narrative technique, from contrived co-incidences and role play by the characters to designed clues that may or may not lead a reader to any definite point. There is no specific reason or logic behind the entire narrative and there are infinite reasons why Nabokov wrote this novel. The last lines of Lolita are ‘I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita’. Is it to serve art that Nabokov has written this book? May be (may be is a good word while trying to deal with this book) for the shake of art itself.

Lolita is one of the finest literary achievements, in the league of Roberto Bolano’s Savage Detective, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children, just to name a few. While the three books I mention here have completely different themes and occasions (considering the fact that art is a product of occasion), Nabokov’s Lolita is an indifferent product. The common element among these is their extraordinary literary merit. All these break barriers (including the traditionally possible employment) of the language. Even in their translated form Marquez and Bolano’s works can stand on their own in their narrative technique. Rushdie and Nabokov, writing in their adopted language, fork new path, vast and intricate, and we are glad to lose ourselves on that path.

I call Lolita an indifferent product because while reading it I have always been on the verge of discovering some new land, on the cusp of sighting some profundity but that land has always eluded me, so far. I need to re-read it time and again. "While I keep everything on the brink of parody," Nabokov explained somewhere, "there must be on the other hand an abyss of seriousness, and I must make my way along this narrow ridge between my own truth and the caricature of it." This brink of parody is to be treaded carefully so that we do not fall into that abyss of seriousness. Reading Lolita gives you the sense of that kind of pleasure.