Lolita was met initially as a success de scandale, rejected by each of the five American publishers that Nabokov approached,
and although it has since become extremely popular with the later generations, the “controversy over its provocative subject has never fully abated” (Ellen Pifer, Intro to Lolita, a casebook). David Rampton writes that his “incredulity at initial reactions to Lolita now seems a trifle disingenuous – given its subject matter, how could people not have been shocked.” Critics and readers alike who carry forth this point of view have completely misunderstood Nabokov’s intensions with writing the book. The very fact that he had to step out and assert that his book was not designed for the purpose of arousing sexual desire, but is rather “erotic for what it doesn’t say,” must have made him feel either his work failed to do what it was meant to, or that his audience simply wasn’t “getting” it. In short, Lolita is a tour de force, a pure work of art. The choice of subject material, that is the pedophilic love of a forty year old man for a twelve year old, is important only insofar as it demonstrates art can be created from absolutely any source, as long as the artist has enough talent to manipulate its presentation. To truly understand and appreciate Lolita is to grasp the virtuosic skills at characterization behind the work, that Nabokov can make the
reader despise Humbert Humber just as easily as shed tears for his pain and remorse, and remain at a constant wonder at the multitudinous hues of Lolita’s character. Nabokov makes this clear in the very first paragraph, unlocking a world where characters are as chameleonic as their name, switching between vulnerable, coquettish, petulant, to match the ever changing Lo, Lola, Dolly, Dolores or Lolita, using prose as an instrument with which to dazzle the reader to lose sight of what is right and wrong, real or illusion.
In a sense, the entire
novel is also a discourse on the art of persuasion, which happens on both the literate sense that Nabokov is attempting to convince the reader through the contents of what they are about to read, that it is in fact, art and not perversion, which operates simultaneously to Humbert Humbert’s appeal to the “ladies and gentlemen” of the jury to exonerate his guilt. One of the biggest tactics that Humbert Humbert uses is to provide a psychological rationale in the form of his preadolescent brush with love and sexuality with Annabel. His question of causation, of whether or not it was then, that the “rift” in his life began, or if that was only “the first evidence of an inherent singularity.” Nabokov juxtaposes this little episode, with its childish charm invoking the “fragility of baby animals” and the “quaint aspirations of adulthood,” with sensuous descriptions which are just as explicit as the ones to follow, such as “giving her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of his passion,” yet still remaining largely in the boundaries of what is acceptable simply based on their ages. He tests the waters in the safety of a swimming pool before moving into the ocean. Humbert Humbert’s approach to the relationship he has with Lolita in essentially the same way. He is not attracted to Annabel initially because “they had had the same dreams….found strange affinities” but because of her “opalescent knee” and “biscuity odor,” the same aspects of physicality that he later finds irresistible in Lolita, who literally appears to him as “the same child – the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair…. the twenty-five years I had lived since then…vanished.” He confesses, “I broke her spell by incarnating her in another,” one that was to “far surpass her prototype” and then “What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita – perhaps, more real than Lolita.” This at first appears to be one of the central questions that need to be dealt with – if Humbert Humbert had never truly outgrown his unfulfilled juvenile sexual appetite, and simply truly projected the childish fantasy of his “princedom by the sea” onto Lolita, who was no more to him but a conjured fragment of his imagination. However, this in of itself is a rather weak argument. What Nabokov is trying to do very subtly, is to actually point to the fact that the novel is not about psychology, of working out whether or not Humbert should be sentenced to the thirty five years for rape or held accountable for murder, but rather that his primary interest is the presentation of the beauty of the “red-licked candy” of Lolita’s lips and the “gooseberry fuzz of her shin,” and the demonstration of his talent in manipulating the two-fold nature of the characters involved.
The novel ends on a note of tragedy, but it arises more from a sense of irrevocable loss, of the inability to change what has passed, more so than from the actual events themselves. There can be no better way to encapsulate the significance of the novel better than Nabokov: “what is most singular is that she, this Lolita my Lolita, has individualized the writer’s ancient lust, so that above and over everything there is – Lolita.”