A Tangle of Thorns: Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’
“Ladies and gentleman of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”
Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian writer born at the close of the 19th century, undoubtedly penned one of the most beautifully written and equally horrific English language novels of all time. Reading Lolita is like eating Knipschildt’s La Madeline au Truffe dark chocolate with a 2009 Balthazar Bordeaux from Chateau Margaux while the sun sets over the Mediterranean and warms the sand beneath you. Vivid enough? Your senses are completely overloaded. His magical turn of phrase, synesthetic detail, and intense imagery work to harpoon the heart of the reader. It is bewitching. Indeed, he plays with language like a game of chess, flirting with the intricacies and complexities, weaving patterns through our minds and forcing us to entangle our own emotions within the story. Nabokov was even an acclaimed chess composer, and Humbert Humbert, his tortured protagonist, finds some solace in the elegant game.
“In my chess sessions with Gaston I saw the board as a square pool of limpid water with rare shells and stratagems rosily visible upon the smooth tessellated bottom, which to my confused adversary was all ooze and squid-cloud.”
First and foremost, Lolita is a work of art, a poignant celebration of language itself. Though there may be no moral, as he insists in the afterword, presumably to torture us, the novel is so emotionally arresting because it forces us to make a connection between the romantic, primeval force of love and the dark territory of pedophilia. It is a mind-boggling exploration of human desire.
“Deprived of a shaping and sustaining purpose, the skeleton of her day sagged and collapsed . . . Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roofs, there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-gray cloud fusing with the distant amorous mist.”
A masterful foreword penned by the inspired invention of Dr John Ray sets up the premise of the story by introducing it as the memoir of the disturbed academic, Humbert Humbert, who recently died in jail. By doing this we can continue reading with the comforting knowledge that he is eventually caught. We really have two Humbert Humberts to deal with, the one living out the events and the one recounting them to us years later. This lends a reserved and thoughtful tone to the narrative, so that some of the most shocking moments are delivered so matter-of-factly that they seem, well, clinical.
Humbert is obsessed with his disturbing concept of “nymphets”, young girls with a certain innocence, grace and vulnerability. He even fantasizes about ruling over a sort of Lord of the Flies type island of nymphets he can presumably exploit to his heart’s content. But, ay, there’s the rub. The thing about Humbert is that he is a man of fantasies. He considers himself not a lunatic, a criminal, or a psychopath, but a troubled academic tortured by his poetic dreams.
These dreams suddenly and fortuitously come true when chance sees him become the tenant of the glamorous and desperate widow, Charlotte Haze, and she just happens to have a daughter: Lolita. Through almost no effort on his part, Charlotte falls for him and they are married before you can say, “hang on a wee minute.” He now has the opportunity to get to her little girl. The most shocking moment of the novel, and one of any novel I have literally ever read, is when Charlotte finds his diary and discovers his secret. She rushes out the house to deliver a handful of urgent letters in such a state of hysteria and despair that she doesn’t notice the car hurtling towards her. She is killed instantly, and Humbert becomes Lolita’s guardian. The rapidity and cold delivery of this event makes it all the more frightening. This is a tragedy related in a monotone.
Humbert continually references Dante’s eternal love for Beatrice in The Divine Comedy, which began when the latter was only eight years old, younger even than Lolita, but he seems to forget that Dante was the same age as Beatrice, not three decades her senior. After their first encounter Dante famously wrote, “La Vita Nuova: Ecce Deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi: Behold, a deity stronger than I; who coming, shall rule over me.” Perhaps this is the comparison, because this is precisely what happens to Humbert. Lolita is an utterly omnipotent deity in total control of his heart, the thing is, she’s completely oblivious. I mean, of course she is, she’s like twelve or whatever, for Christ’s sake. Even so, a more fitting comparison would be Sade’s Justine, the notorious also twelve-year old pauper who is subjected to a horrific decade of sexual abuse. Written by the even more notorious Marquis de Sade, the book has been banned and censored countless times, and its author spent half his life behind bars as well as his name becoming the origin of ‘sadism’. Some legacy. After Charlotte’s death in Lolita, it is here that Humbert moves into the realm of crime, tearing the helpless and now utterly vulnerable girl from her old life and embarking on a nomadic road trip across the US as he fulfills his fantasies.
“Obvious Arizona, pueblo dwellings, aboriginal pictographs, a dinosaur track in a desert canyon, printed there thirty million years ago, when I was a child.”
This gives rise to some truly beautiful exploration of the American countryside, of the raw majesty of the land. It seems to contrast so poignantly with Humbert’s worshipful idolisation of his Lolita, who submits to his sexual fantasies but remains utterly unengaged emotionally. Her cold and childlike indifference, stubbornness, and desire to rebel just makes it all so much more horrific. She is like a shell.
“We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night – every night, every night – the moment I feigned sleep.”
But because the novel begins with that morose condemnation of the following pages, with the account of Humbert’s early demise behind bars, we know the reign of terror must end, that the abuse must end. The poet within him is tortured to the point of insanity, and when Lolita finally gives him the slip, disappearing one day into the sunset, it almost sends him plummeting over the edge. Almost. “Solitude was corrupting me.”
What we must remember is that he is not being driven by lust or sadism or rage or greed or any other immoral and dangerous desire, but by something even more destructive: love. He spends not days, not months, but years searching for her, pouring over the most minute of details to try to trace her path through a seemingly endless line of inns and hotels.
“We all admire the spangled acrobat with classical grace meticulously walking his tight rope in the talcum light; but how much rarer art there is in the sagging rope expert wearing scarecrow clothes and impersonating a grotesque drunk! I should know.”
Finally, one day, the moment does arrive when he works it all out and tracks her down to a distant town where she lives in poverty with her husband. She is now pregnant, and only a shadow of the girl he loved. But he does nothing. After a final but unsuccessful plea to convince her to come away with him, he simply leaves, utterly incapable of harming her in any way due to how deeply he loves her. It is her only protection. The force that destroyed her life ultimately saves it.
“My car is limping, Dolores Haze,
And the last long lap is the hardest,
And I shall be dumped where the weed decays,
And the rest is rust and stardust.”
Humbert leaves. But he does not disappear to live out the remainder of his tragic life in freedom, nope. Instead he turns up at the home of the man who helped Lolita run away from him. Incidentally, this man also abused her (honestly this book is a trip) but suffers a truly horrific death, in which Humbert riddles his fat body with bullet after bullet in a gory struggle so drawn-out and brutal it becomes darkly comic. This inevitably leads to Humbert’s arrest, the writing of his memoirs, and his death. Such a death, before his actual trial, may seem unjust, it may seem like he has escaped his rightful fate, the punishment for his heinous crimes, but he supposedly went through such colossal suffering and torment at Lolita’s hands that no jail sentence could have brought him more, “One mercifully hopes there are water nymphs in the Styx.” Humbert Humbert’s life was, in his eyes, a tragedy of the greatest proportions.
“I have but followed nature. I am nature’s faithful hound. Why then this horror that I cannot shake off?”
Naturally, Lolita became notorious as soon it was published in 1959, and Nabokov was fully aware it would be, “I have to tread carefully. I have to speak in a whisper.” However, this book could hardly be further from erotica: “I am not concerned with so-called ‘sex’ at all. Anybody can imagine those elements of animality. A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once and for all the perilous magic of nymphets.”
No, it is presented as a story about a man in love, the tale as old as time (not that I’m drawing a comparison between Lolita and Belle or anything). Humbert is not simply a sadistic pervert, indeed, he urges the reader throughout the novel to hear him out, to see beyond social convention and the sanctimonious laws of society. At one point when I was literally glaring at the page, the episode in which he first considers fully taking advantage of Lolita, he writes, “Oh, do not scowl at me, reader”. GET OUT OF MY HEAD, NABOKOV. Then comes the pleading insistence that we do not cast the book aside. It is surreal.
Nabokov, as much as his complex poet-pervert creation, is reaching through the decades and speaking directly to us. It is a powerful feat of persuasion and I for one was somehow persuaded:
“Please, reader: no matter your exasperation with the tenderhearted, morbidly sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these essential pages! Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let’s even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.”
It is inspired writing, the most poetic and lyrical I have ever read. Probably only Shakespeare is more lyrical, out of what I have devoured so far. Evelyn Waugh comes close to Nabokov’s rich imagery and diction in Brideshead Revisited but Lolita reigns supreme all in its own league, challenging even the most intense of the literary playing fields, where the likes of the Brontës, Milton, Austen, Marquez, Tartt, and George Eliot all knock about.
“I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. No matter how many times we reopen ‘King Lear,’ never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert’s father’s timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them.”
It truly is arresting. “Cold spiders of panic crawled down my back” . . . What is it about Nabokov’s writing? I have asked myself this many times and keep coming back to chess. Humbert’s arrival in the US is perhaps the first pawn being moved, Charlotte’s death the first check, his arrest, the final checkmate, and the opponents, well, the opponents can only be his heart and his head. The movements slot together like clockwork. Throughout the entire novel a ferocious internal battle rages within him between his insatiable desire and his cold, academic reason. And who wins? In a way, neither. Desire triumphs in the sense that he essentially kidnaps Lolita and she is utterly at his mercy, but his sense of morality, something that he does seem to possess, battles him every step of the way. Between the guilt and the crippling remorse, not once is his conscience at peace.
“Three or four miles out of Wace, I turned into the shadow of a picnic ground where the morning had dumped its litter of light on an empty table; Lo looked up with a semi-smile of surprise and without a word I delivered a tremendous backhand cut that caught her smack on her hot hard little cheekbone. And then the remorse, the poignant sweetness of sobbing atonement, groveling love, the hopelessness of sensual reconciliation.”
The whole concept of Lolita is so horrific, so twisted, so naturally repulsive to us, that it can cloud the sheer beauty of the writing. The words are the real nerves of the book, each delivering a sharp spike of feeling, whether it is horror, mirth, revulsion, or shock. It’s the most sensuous and powerful exploration of human desire I have ever read. And this, I think, was what Nabokov was playing on. Beauty and horror. A big f*** you to the snobs.
“I insist upon proving that I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel. The gentle and dreamy regions through which I crept were the patrimonies of poets – not crime’s prowling ground.”
