The Annotated Lolita (Penguin Modern Classics) [Paperback]

Shakespeare's Juliet was 13-years-old, but Nabokov's Lolita was 12. The so-called "shocking" and "perverse" nature of the sexuality that Nabokov explores is lost if the nymphet is a sexually mature teenager. Incidentally, by the time they are wheeling across the country, Lolita apparently gains sexually maturity, as evidenced from the first sentence of Chapter 33, Part One which reads: "In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four books of comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads...."

Humbert's sexuality is actually a strategy in the evolutionary game. Instead of waiting until the female is sexually mature, the Humbert Humberts of the world pre-select their little darlings so that they are already in position, so to speak, when she reaches sexual maturity. Society, of course, cannot buy this. Its abhorrence is but one of the myriad taboos it concocts to protect itself from the evolutionary mechanism, a mechanism that cares not at all what society thinks, thumbing its nose, so to speak, at all societies and their ephemeral prejudices.

Among the most chilling sentences in the novel are these at the end of Part One after Lolita learns that her mother is dead. Humbert narrates: "At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go."

Also chilling is this from Lolita (half in jest, half in bitter revelation) the morning after their first night together: "You chump...You revolting creature. I was a daisy-fresh girl, and look what you've done to me. I ought to call the police and tell them you raped me. Oh, you dirty, dirty old man."

As a literary artist, Nabokov might be compared with Anthony Burgess. Both are strikingly original stylists and gifted masters of the language, and both had one very popular novel that made them famous (which of course neither thought was his best work), and both have written many erudite and precious volumes. Although I usually find Burgess's style a little too dense for me, his A Clockwork Orange was excellent. Also both Lolita and A Clockwork Orange were made into movies directed by Stanley Kubrick.

While one might imagine that women, especially feminists, would positively despise Lolita, it ain't necessarily so. I know one feminist English prof who teaches it at the university level. Understandably they emphasize the depravity of Humbert and his virtual enslavement of Lolita. But those women who do resist the novel do so because the story reveals a disagreeable fact of human sexuality they would prefer to forget, namely that for most males, youth itself is a supreme value in the old sex game. By the same token most young men do not like to see aging rockers or graying Richard Gere types or fat Hollywood producers walking off with beautiful starlets.

Although Lolita was (and is) ahead of its time, it is necessarily a "fiction" with the central character necessarily an "antihero" for the sake of the prejudices of society. Nonetheless, one of Nabokov's motivations in writing "Lolita" was to show that, however strongly society condemned their love it was a real expression of human sexuality and not a Freudian type "perversion." (Nabokov despised Freud and considered psychoanalysis a "racket.") Unfortunately (but understandably!) he was not able to overcome the taboo himself and come out of the closet. (If indeed he was in the closet.) Additionally, he discovered, I suspect, in writing the novel that not only would society (and his readership) accept only a tragic version of the story, but that inevitably, given the mores of society, such a version was the only one possible. To write the story with a happy ending, with Humbert the proud father paying for the wedding, perhaps, and sending his little love off to middle class banality with some "Dick Schiller" was unthinkable artistically and psychologically. Indeed, it would have been the common place resolution of the usual "family affair."

By the way, Nabokov wrote a precursor of Lolita, a rather longish short story entitled "The Enchanter" which was eventually published in English. "The Enchanter" is interesting but doesn't have the delicious ironic humor or anything like the scope of Lolita.

The edition with annotations by "Alfred Appel Jr." adds to the enjoyment of the novel if you tend to the pedantic. Most of the French phrases are translated. Be aware however that "Alfred Appel Jr." is really Vladimir Nabokov himself in pseudonym!

Liz- 17