People Talk
How shall we read Lolita? Nabakov’s seminal text subtly invites the reader to don the glasses of an array of different observers; it tempts us in turns towards judgment and complicity, dispassionate analysis and evocative terror. In what appears at first gander to be a tale of perversion lies hidden a whole world of meaning to be read between the lines: as much as it is a character study of a clever and desperate pederast, Lolita is a potent forewarning of the spectator state, a critique the commercialization of life, and a cogent commentary the emerging roles of the artist, the academic, and the child.
Simply put, Humbert Humbert is the villain, and Dolores Haze (not to mention her mother) the victim of his distorted mind. One layer down, though, Humbert is a hunted, haunted man who clings desperately to his sexuality in the face of existential crisis. (Why, after a long career in Europe, has he suddenly absconded for America? What was our venerable academician doing during the war? All of these questions are sublingually present in Humbert’s imagined narrative.) We are intermittently reminded of his status as a respected scholar and expert in French Literature, but never once does any spot of passion for his work stain the cloth of his monomaniacal obsession the his prized nymphet Lolita. In this we are given a glimpse of Nabokov’s bleak notion of intellectual achievement: plaudits may add length to your name and dollars to your bank account, but they cannot grant you youth, and cannot earn you life. Those best versed in the archetypal story lines (and the legendarily romantic literature of France at that) are still capable of falling into their tropes—perhaps even more so because they have so deeply informed their conceptions of the world.
Our narrator’s pursuer is felt around each corner in the second half of the book as the prose becomes ever more claustrophobic and the journey ever more nihilistic. He dons many faces that all trace to a name: Clare Quilty. In turns, Quilty acts out the roles that all who feel themselves to be outside society’s norms have cause to fear: the everyman, the cop, the psychiatrist, the snoop. And yet he is an artist, an outsider, able to don masks and throw them away because he recognizes this culture to be a game, one to be played with pleasure and mirth. Contrast that with glum Humbert, heir to the centuries-old European romantic tradition, for whom every act bears the weight of dreadful consequence,. In their shared infatuation with and competition young Lolita, Humbert is the stodgy conventions of the continent, while Quilty is a lithe chameleon of American capitalism. He changes his form to suit his needs, to vex his opponents, and, most of all, because he can. For Quilty, and the emergent mindset of materialism that he represents, there needs no deeper purpose than the score itself. His illness is, in its own way, even darker—and much trickier to unravel—than H. H.’s. It is the schizophrenia of capitalism, where nothing is solid and. Least of all the life of a beautiful young girl.
Tags: Academe, Lolita, Quilty, Schizophrenia
