Today I got the energy to finish Lolita. A few months ago when I read most of the book, I used the following ploy: I started at the beginning and read until it got disgusting. Then I moved to the last page and read sections backwards until I hit the end of the disgusting part in the middle. I thought I'd missed 20 pages, but the disgusting part was much longer than that. It was also a lot more than disgusting. But I'll get to that.
Before today, I honestly did not know what the middle part contained. When I stopped reading, Humbert Humbert had attempted to drug 12-year-old Lolita to sleep and had joined her in bed expecting to "take advantage" of her as she slept. But she kept waking up. I stopped here and turned to the last pages where he is about to be executed for murdering a man. Safe enough, I turned back further towards the middle... Humbert and Lolita meet when she is older (17?)and she tells him that he ruined her life. She is engaged, pregnant and broke and needs money. He gives her some. I read all of that, and stopped there.
I put the book down - thankfully in the dark - about what may or may not have happened in those middle pages. I noted that Humbart was a fool, that the writing was spectacular, but the material was questionable at best. Several people on a blog I follow mentioned that nothing much happens in that middle section. So I figured that Lolita made a cuckold of Humbert and scampered away unscathed. Today I discovered that "nothing much happens" means that the sex is not explicit, that is, it's not hard-core pornography. Nabokov does, in fact, write about enough details to make scenes come alive.
What a surprise. The nothing much in the middle includes him seducing her (this is statutory rape) on the morning of the sleeping pill and implying that this thirteen year old was fair game because she had had sex with a boy at summer camp. This scene was followed by a year of raping her all across the country. He cajoled her, threatened her and sometimes simply raped her. He paid her money to do "special favors" for him. And then, worried that she might use the money to run away, stole the it back from her.
Whoa.
Academically, this book may be a jewel. Nabakov poured his heart into it. I can see that. It is a treasure of wit and prose. But why would anyone recommend that the general public read it? Why would critics put it on the best-books lists? This is prurient material about children. We should not be recommending prurient material about children to the general public (or our best friends, either!). It even appears on the Radcliffe 100 best books. This is a perverse book in which horrible things happen to a beautiful, pubescent girl. Let's not glamorize this as great literature to be read by all. I don't want us to become so jaded that a book like Lolita doesn't make us squeamish any more.
One critic argued that the book is not erotic because the sexually suggestive material in the first three chapters becomes boring and so the reader is not aroused by the later material. I am not sure if this commentator reads a lot of pornography and so found Lolita boring or if he keeps his genitals buttoned up very tight and is therefore not affected. My guess is that if it were not erotic - even slightly - it would not have sold 100,000 copies in three weeks.
Others say that Nabokov distances himself from Humbert at the end of the book and makes it clear that Humbert's behavior is despicable. What that says at best is that Nabokov is redeemed at the end, not that Humbert is. Humbert never sees himself for the monster that he is. A large amount of sexually titillating material about a child has been read by the time the reader reaches the end. It's a bit late by then to be distancing oneself.
I am not a prude. I am simply noting that this book about a foolish pedophile has prurient material about a child and we should not put it on our best-books lists. I think that someone has missed the difference between objecting to censorship (which I do) and condoning a sexual book about children (which I don't).
I did not finish reading the book. I won't bother. I hope you don't either.
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