Sorry…Lolita Is A Love Story
Let’s not confuse a novel about the complications of our emotions with a romance novel.
This week I’ve been cowed by all the hot takes and commentary online about the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump. How could I avoid entering such a controversial topic when it seems like everyone is on a mass cancelation campaign? I know! I’ll write about Lolita!
Yes, the 1955 classic novel by Vladmir Nabokov is back in the news–this time dragged into the conversation via a Tweetstorm from comedian Sooz Kempner, who wanted to do something edgy and original by attacking JK Rowling. To that end, she dug up a 25-year-old interview Rowling did with the BBC whereby she praised Nabakov’s novel as a “great and tragic love story.”
I don’t know what’s more disheartening: a comedian moralizing about one of the greatest literary masterpieces ever written just to score social points, or the fact that her moralizing position got so much support while her detractors got ratioed all the way back to before the internet.
I followed the thread of one Twitter user named “Bren,” only to discover that “Bren” was just trolling to ramp up engagement. He eventually confessed, and even added that he’d never even read Lolita. Trolling or not, Bren did a stellar job making really important points in defense of the novel as a “love story.”
To anyone reading Lolita with the slightest critical eye, to anyone reading Lolita through the lens of a writer, to anyone reading Lolita as a master-class in narration and how to build honesty through dishonesty, it’s clear that Lolita is a love story. That’s likely how anyone who read the first print of the novel saw it, including the publisher themselves, who described the novel in this jacket copy: “The most tender, shocking and outrageous love story ever told…”
If you’re looking to Nabakov himself for any guidance, best of luck. His responses to even the most pointed questions about his intentions with Lolita were ambiguous at best. In a televised interview that has made the rounds again recently, Nabakov gave very little by way of interpretation of Lolita one way or another. In the clip, the CBC host, Pierre Berton, makes an assertion and Nabakov immediately contradicts it. Nabakov’s co-star of the show, famed critic Lionel Trilling, also attempts to corner Nabakov into an interpretation and repeatedly fails. Even Berton’s invitation to get Nabakov to cough up the likely real inspiration behind the novel: the 1948 abduction and harrowing cross-country exploitation of 11-year-old Sally Horner, is instead replaced by Nabakov’s strange attribution to an article he’d read about apes drawing the bars of their own cages when given paper and ink. He says he wanted to write a character named Humbert Humbert who draws for the reader a depiction of the bars on his own cage. He never mentions Horner, and he never mentions any statement or message he was trying to convey.
It’s left up to critics like Trilling to determine, and at one point in the interview, Trilling says this: “It is not a book so much about an aberration as it is an actual love, and a love that makes all the terrible demands that almost any love makes.”
It is telling that Nabakov makes no attempt to correct Trilling on this vital point. One would think that if Nabakov was depicting an incontrovertible monster in his book, he would have squashed anyone’s attempt to frame Humbert’s feelings and actions as the feelings and actions of someone in love.
But anyone who recognizes Lolita for its genius understands the book is far more complex than merely a gothic horror novel with a monster on the loose. Online obsessives and weird political operatives in the feminist camps want to make the book about sex, apply bizarre #metoo sensibilities to the work, and completely miss the point. They even go so far as to smear those who defend the novel as Humbert Humbert adjacent: making snide comments about checking our browser history and sending up red flags. So, for the deliberately dense, I need to make this clear. Humbert Humbert is a criminal. And a rapist. And a murderer. And, when the novel opens, he was serving a life sentence in prison.
This is one way in which Nabakov allows us to hold multiple thoughts about Humbert at the same time. Many people in Sooz Kempner’s replies repeatedly made reference to Nabakov’s “flowery language.” It was his flowery writing that made everything OK. It was his flowery, poetic language that masks Humbert’s monstrous acts. It’s not. The impact of Humbert’s poetic musings does indeed help us understand Humbert’s firm belief in his love for Dolores, but that’s not what complicates things for the reader. The fact that Humbert, at the opening of the novel is dead (symbolically of heart failure), and that he died while in prison, eases some of the moral anxiety we might feel about what we’re about to read. This is how the book holds its moral foundation while traveling us down a psychological pathway through the point of view of a man who feels a deep and profound sense of love. The fact that Dolores doesn’t (or for those imposing modern parameters, is incapable of consent to) requite his love, doesn’t change the fact that Humbert feels, (as Trilling rightly identifies in that interview) an “actual love that makes all the terrible demands that almost any love makes.”
What’s being confused here seems to be the discussion about Humbert’s love, with questions like: Is it a healthy love? Should this be condoned by society? Can it be true love if the other person doesn’t feel the same way? Is this more an obsession than love? How does this match up against the Bible’s definition of love as laid out in 1 Corinthians 13? It’s not that these aren’t worthwhile questions, but they’re not the right questions when determining if something is or is not a love story. One could ask these same questions of a less controversial “tragic love story:” Romeo and Juliet.
There’s also the matter of Clare Quilty to consider. Despite the impulse of many people to identify Humbert as an antagonist, Quilty, in my estimation, is the actual antagonist of the plot. Quilty stands in as Humbert’s moral compass. Quilty is a pornographer. Quilty objectifies Lolita. And ultimately, Quilty throws Lolita away after she refuses to comply with the demands of his pornographic film. With Quilty’s looming influence on Humbert’s actions throughout the book, and with the knowledge that we are reading the account of a man who has died while rotting in prison, we are mentally free to at least take Humbert’s side in the debate. Very rarely does the antagonist get the sympathy that comes with a love story and Lolita is no different. Despite assertions that Humbert is an unreliable narrator, we trust Humbert more than we trust Quilty, and we sympathize with Humbert’s intentions toward Lolita more than we sympathize with Quilty’s. This is Nabakov’s stroke of genius, and has nothing to do at all with “flowery, poetic language.” Nabakov has created the psychological Hans Moretti Sword Box that allows us to escape the moral swords. He does more than that: he actually convinces us that Humbert is in love, and that Lolita is (among many things) a love story.
Some of the chatter online about Lolita (and by extension the moral bankruptcy of JK Rowling) includes the absurd proposition that by our logic we should include Sleeping With The Enemy and Fear as examples of love stories. Since, the argument goes, we’re talking about one man’s belief that he’s in love, we should by extension allow Martin Burney (Laura’s (Julia Roberts) abusive husband in the film) and David McCall (Mark Wahlberg) their feelings of love. While it may be true that those characters feel a profound sense of love, the difference is we are told these stories through the perspective of Julia Roberts and Reese Witherspoon’s characters, respectively. We are meant to sympathize with them, rather than Patrick Bergin and Mark Walhberg’s characters because the vehicle of the film is principally a thriller. Martin and David are clearly antagonists, and we anticipate the female objects of their obsession to escape from their clutches. Nabokov doesn’t construct anything remotely similar in Lolita. Could Sleeping With The Enemy and Fear be converted into love stories? Certainly, but the filmmakers would need to drastically rearrange the universe they originally built. They’d need, in effect, to read Lolita and see how Nabakov did it.
What’s really happening here is multifaceted. For one, a bizarre need to further pillory JK Rowling for her gender critical positions has reignited this tired moralistic retrospective critique of Lolita as though it was some #metoo case. Secondly, we are witnessing a sea change in how we approach not only works of literature in the past, but (frighteningly) how we judge contemporary modern literature going forward. Would Lolita, an incredible stroke of inspired genius, even make it past the barely-out-of-college screeners planted in publishing houses and agencies in 2024? I don’t mean to catastrophize, but my instinct on this question scares me. A third thing happening here is that an entire generation is missing the point of why we read Lolita, in fact, why we read literature at all. They’ve mistaken the beauty and truth to be found in human complexity with some sort of odd endorsement of antisocial behavior. They’ve mistaken the love story with the romance novel genre. In romance novels, the lovers are suited for one another, intentional toward each other, respectful of the dynamics that might create a power imbalance (not realizing, or course, that almost every relationship suffers eventually from some sort of power imbalance). Lolita simply can’t be a love story because the love isn’t mutually shared between equally yoked partners. While it’s true that Lolita is not a romance novel, it is a love story. Humbert’s love, however disfigured, is genuine, and rooted in the psychological trauma he endured as a child in France. We are meant to feel some level of compassion for Humbert in a way that we are not meant to feel for The Big Bad Wolf, and no amount of modern progressive hand-wringing should make us feel guilty about that.
I leave you with this poignant quote from Azar Nafisi, who wrote Reading Lolita in Tehran. In it she discusses the immoral behavior of characters in other great novels, such as Madame Bovary, The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby.
“You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.”
What we are seeing is a pretty vocal subset of self-righteous scolds deliberately misinterpreting a tragic love story to suit some weird cultural and political movement. It’s fine to be put off by Lolita. It’s fine to not read Lolita if the subject matter is too much of an emotional burden. It’s not fine to repackage the novel in a way that strips it of its power by denying what it is. A love story.