Lolita

This entry is about the novel. For other uses, see Lolita (disambiguation).

Lolita

Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first published in 1955. The novel is both famous for its innovative style and infamous for its controversial subject. The novel's narrator and main character, Humbert Humbert, becomes sexually obsessed with a young pubescent girl.

Lolita is also the title of two motion pictures based on the novel:

• in 1962 by Stanley Kubrick (where Nabokov was involved in the writing);
• in 1997 by Adrian Lyne.

The name has also become a slang term for a sexually attractive or precocious young girl. For more about these non-literary meanings of the term, see the end of this article.

Plot

Template:Spoiler A scholar, Humbert leaves Europe for the United States and moves into a rented room in the home of Charlotte Haze, after seeing her twelve-year-old daughter (Dolores Haze, affectionately shortened to Lo, or Lolita) sunbathing in the garden. Humbert, who has had a lifelong passion for "nymphets" (attractive pubescent girls) --as a pre-adolescent, he experienced the loss of his childhood sweetheart--is instantly smitten, and will do anything to be near her (can we say pedophile?). The elder Haze, a lonely widow, becomes Humbert's unwitting pawn in his silent quest to be near her young daughter. She and Humbert soon marry. Some time later, while searching Humbert's room, she finds his diary, containing written confessions of indifference to his new wife and impassioned lust for her daughter. In disgust, she plans to flee her home with her daughter, whom she will send to a correctional school and beyond Humbert's reach. She writes three letters to settle some business before her departure, and in her mad hurry to mail the letters, she is hit and killed by a passing car.

Humbert begins traveling around the United States, from one motel to another, in the company of Lolita, with whom he is now having a sexual relationship. This relationship ends when a rival adult suitor, playwright Clare Quilty, convinces Lolita to leave Humbert and run away with him.

In the dry years that follow, Humbert has arguably his first "normal" love-affair, with an alcoholic named Rita. But this period comes to a sudden end when Humbert is contacted by the now 17-year-old Lolita, who needs cash. Humbert tracks her down and finds her married to an incidental husband and visibly pregnant. He had intended to kill her husband, but on meeting him realises this is not the character Lo had been seeing during their travels years ago. He persuades Lo to reveal the name of the mystery man and she eventually does so. Humbert gives Lo US$4,000, thus allowing her to go to Alaska with her husband. Humbert realizes that he still wants her: she is no longer one of those compelling young girls he refers to as "nymphets," but he has truly fallen in love with her. However, Lolita does not return his love. After finding this out Humbert goes to track down Quilty and kills him. He dies in prison of coronary thrombosis after dictating the story to his lawyer.

It is not until the end of the book that we learn that the Mrs. Richard Schiller mentioned in the foreword was Lolita, who died on Christmas Eve giving birth to a stillborn daughter "in the remotest Northwest."

Style and interpretation

The novel is a tragicomedy narrated by Humbert, who riddles the narrative with wordplay and his wry observations of American culture. His humor provides an effective counterpoint to the pathos of the tragic plot. The novel's flamboyant style is characterized by word play, multilingual puns, anagrams, and coinages such as nymphet, a word which has since had a life of its own and can be found in most dictionaries, and the lesser used "faunlet".

Humbert is a well-educated, multilingual, literary-minded European émigré. He fancies himself a great artist, but lacks the curiosity that Nabokov considers essential. Humbert tells the story of a Lolita that he creates in his mind because he is unable and unwilling to actually listen to the girl and accept her on her own terms. In the words of Richard Rorty, from his famous interpretation of Lolita in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Humbert is a "monster of incuriosity".

Martin Amis, in his essay on Stalinism, Koba the Dread, proposes that Lolita is an elaborate metaphor for the totalitarianism which destroyed the Russia of Nabokov's childhood. Amis interprets it as a story of tyranny told from the point of view of the tyrant. "All of Nabokov's books are about tyranny," he says, "even Lolita. Perhaps Lolita most of all."

Publication and reception

Because of the subject matter, Nabokov had difficulty finding a publisher, eventually resorting to Olympia Press, a publisher of "erotica" in Paris, which published Lolita in 1955. A favorable notice by English author Graham Greene led to widespread critical admiration for the book, and its eventual U.S. publication on August 18, 1958, by G.P. Putnam's Sons. Today, it is considered by many one of the finest novels written in the 20th century.

Nabokov originally intended Lolita to be called The Kingdom by the Sea[1], presumably after Edgar Allan Poe's poem Annabel Lee. In 1985 a Nabokov novella entitled 'The Enchanter' was posthumously published. 'The Enchanter' was written, in Russian, while Nabokov was living in France in 1939. It is an early version of 'Lolita' but with significant differences: the action takes place in central Europe, and the narrator is unable to consummate his passion with his step-daughter, leading to his suicide. It lacks the scope and wordplay of 'Lolita' but is essential reading for anyone interested in the genesis of the book.

Literary allusions

• Humbert Humbert's first love, Anabelle Leigh, is named after the woman in the poem "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe. In fact, their young love is described in phrases borrowed from Poe's poem.
• Humbert Humbert's double name recalls Poe's "William Wilson", a tale in which the main character is haunted by his doppelgänger, paralleling to the presence of Humbert's own doppelgänger, Clare Quilty.

Possible real-life prototype

According to Alexander Dolinin [2], the prototype of Lolita was 11-year-old Florence Horner, kidnapped by a 50-year-old pedophile mechanic, Frank La Salle, who had caught her stealing a five-cent notebook. La Salle traveled with her over various states for 21 months and is believed to have had sex with her. He claimed that he was an FBI agent and threatened to “turn her in” for the theft and to send her to “a place for girls like you”. The Horner case was not widely reported, but Dolinin adduces various similarities in events and descriptions.

Heinz von Eschwege's "Lolita"

Michael Marr's book The Two Lolitas (ISBN 1844670384) describes his discovery of a 1916 German short story titled "Lolita" about a middle-aged man traveling abroad who takes a room as a lodger and instantly becomes obsessed with the young pre-teen girl (also named Lolita) who lives in the same house. Marr has speculated that Nabokov may have had cryptomnesia (a "hidden memory" of the story that Nabokov was unaware of) while he was composing Lolita during the 1950s. Marr says that until 1937 Nabokov lived in the same section of Berlin as the author, Heinz von Eschwege (pseudonym Heinz von Lichberg), and was most likely familiar with his work, widely available in Germany during Nabokov's time there.[3],[4]. The Philadelphia Inquirer says[5] that according to Marr the word "plagiarism" does not apply and quotes him as saying "Literature has always been a huge crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast.... Nothing of what we admire in Lolita is already to be found in the tale; the former is in no way deducible from the latter."

Nabokov's Afterword

In 1956, Nabokov penned an afterword to Lolita ("On a Book Entitled Lolita") that was included in every subsequent edition of the book.

In the afterword, Nabokov wrote that "the initial shiver of inspiration" for Lolita "was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage". Neither the article nor the drawing has been discovered; however, there has been some speculation that photographs by an ape could have been influential.

In response to an American critic who characterized Lolita as the record of Nabokov's "love affair with the romantic novel", Nabokov wrote that "the substitution of 'English language' for 'romantic novel' would make this elegant formula more correct".

Nabokov concluded the afterword with a reference to his beloved first language, which he abandoned as a writer once he moved to the United States in 1940: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English."

Influence

Lolita has been filmed twice: the first adaptation was made in 1962 by Stanley Kubrick, and starred James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers and, as Lolita, Sue Lyon; and a second adaptation in 1997 by Adrian Lyne, starring Jeremy Irons, Dominique Swain, and Melanie Griffith. Nabokov was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on the earlier film's adapted screenplay, although little of this work reached the screen.

The book was adapted into a Broadway musical in the early 1970s by Alan Jay Lerner under the title Lolita My Love. Critics were surprised at how sensitively the story was translated into what can be a crass medium, but the show nonetheless closed on the road before it opened in New York.

In 1982, Edward Albee adapted the book into a nonmusical play. It was savaged by critics (Frank Rich notably attributing the temporary death of Albee's career to it).

The term lolita has come to be used to refer to an adolescent girl considered to be very seductive, especially one younger than the age of consent. In the marketing of pornography, it has been used to refer to any attractive woman who has only recently reached, or is still younger than, the age of consent, or sometimes to refer to women who only appear to be younger than the age of consent. For this reason, it is especially worth noting that Nabokov's Lolita is far from an endorsement of pedophilia, since it dramatizes the tragic consequences of Humbert's obsession with the young heroine. Nabokov himself described Humbert as "a hateful person" (see Humbert Humbert). In Strong Opinions, Nabokov opines that he is "probably responsible" for parents not naming their children "Lolita" anymore. Indeed, the town of Lolita, Texas nearly changed its name after the novel gained notoriety.

In the book itself, "Lolita" is specifically the name of the girl, and "nymphet" is the general term for the type of young girl to whom Humbert is attracted. However, commerce has preferred to use the girl's name, and to make "lolitas" attractive (in film adaptations and pornography) to a much wider audience than the small number of "nympholepts" (ephebophiles) which Humbert Humbert believes to exist. In the novel, Dolores Haze is attractive to the aging nympholepts Humbert and Quilty, as well as to her coevals, while her spiteful mother describes her as plain at best.

In 2003, Azar Nafisi's book Reading Lolita in Tehran was published. This work examines the lives of seven women in Iran who gathered in secret to read literary classics such as Lolita. The women compare their lives and the treatment of women in revolutionary Iran to that of Nabokov's character.

References in popular culture

In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, political theorist Hannah Arendt used the novel to help illustrate her theory of the "banality of evil". She noted that while in prison, Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann was offered Lolita as reading material and refused to read it, calling it "unwholesome". Shortly thereafter, Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) provided an early example of the modern "nymphet" usage entering the literary canon. Serge, a teenage rock singer, loses his girlfriend to a middle-aged lawyer whom he compares to Humbert Humbert. (Pynchon was a student at Cornell University, where he may have audited Nabokov's Literature 312 class.) As many characters do in Pynchon's novels, Serge breaks into song to express his angst. Another early usage occurs in Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), where "nymphet" describes Tawny Wainwright, a fourteen-year-old girl impregnated by her abusive stepfather.

In the Woody Allen film Manhattan (1979), when Mary discovers Isaac is dating a 17-year-old, she says, "Somewhere Nabokov is smiling."

The Police's 1980 song "Don't Stand So Close to Me" refers to "just like the old man in that book by Nabokov", which in context is clearly Lolita. The song is about a teacher having a relationship with a young student. (The line was altered to "just like the old man in that famous book by Nabokov" in the Police's 1986 remake of the song.)

The case of Amy Fisher, whom in 1992 the press dubbed the "Long Island Lolita", helped popularize the term among a new generation. Screenwriter Alan Ball considered writing a play based on the Fisher case, but the story soon got away from him and mutated into the screenplay which became American Beauty (1999). The narrator, played by Kevin Spacey, falls for a teenage girl, played by Mena Suvari, who is a "Lolita" in the mainstream or pornographic sense but is too old to be a Nabokovian nymphet. His name, Lester Burnham, is an anagram of "Humbert learns"; the girl's name, Angela Hayes, is also a play on Dolores Haze.

In the climax of Peter Jackson's film Braindead, one of the party guests is discussing Nabokov. When zombies starts to attack, he believes them to be angry pedophiles coming for him. He defends himself using lines like, "I never said Nabokov was a pedophile" and "Some of my best friends are pedophiles!"

The Crush, a 1993 film starring Alicia Silverstone and Cary Elwes, is similar to the Lolita story with the roles reversed. In this film, a 14-year-old femme fatale becomes obsessed with a 28-year-old man. After he turns down her sexual advances, she decides to destroy his life.

An episode from the first season of Law and Order: SVU entitled Wanderlust revolves around the death of a ficitious travel writer named Richard Schiller who is killed by his 16-year-old girlfriend.

In the summer of 2000, the French music industry released a song with the title "Moi... Lolita", written and produced by Mylène Farmer and Laurent Boutonnat. It tells the story of a young teenage girl, and is sung as a nymphet's autobiography. Alizée Jacotey, from Corsica and then 15 years old, was chosen from thousands of girls between 12 and 18 to sing the song and has become the France's most popular media "Lolita". While placed in the modern days of disco clubs and not directy connected to Nabokov's story, Alizée in the clip shows a much greater resemblance to Humbert's definion of nymphet than does either Sue Lyon or Dominique Swain (stars of the two films).

The teen-comedy film Mean Girls (2004) was released in France as Lolita Malgré Moi ("Lolita Despite Myself").

In the 2005 film Broken Flowers starring Bill Murray and directed by Jim Jarmusch, Alexis Dziena has a brief appearance as an overtly sexual teenage girl named Lolita. The central character Don (played by Murray) remarks about the ironic choice of name to Lolita and her mother, an old flame of his.

In modern-day Japan, "lolicon", a shortened form of "Lolita complex", is a fascination with actual or (more commonly) manga/anime depictions of young girls. "Gothic Lolita" or "gosuloli" is a fashion style combining "gothic" and childish elements.

References

Nabokov Library

• Appel, Alfred Jr. (1991). The Annotated Lolita (revised ed.). New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 0-679-72729-9.

One of the best guides to the complexities of Lolita. First published by McGraw-Hill in 1970. (Nabokov was able to comment on Appel's earliest annotations, creating a situation which Appel described as being like John Shade revising Charles Kinbote's comments on Shade's poem Pale Fire. Oddly enough, this is exactly the situation Nabokov scholar Brian Boyd proposed to resolve the literary complexities of Nabokov's Pale Fire.)

• Nabokov, Vladimir (1955). Lolita. New York: Vintage International. ISBN 0-679-72316-1.

The original novel.

• "Zembla"

A resource of the Arts & Humanities Library of the Pennsylvania State University Libraries, home of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society and its publication The Nabokovian.

External links

• NPR: 50 Years Later, Lolita Still Seduces Readers
• Slate: Lolita at 50 - Is Nabakov's masterpiece still shocking?