Lolita. Lo-lee-tah. (”Fire of my loins?”).

Fifty-three years after the original publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the scandalous work maintains its aura of notoriety and, for many readers (or abstaining readers), even just the title Lolita still represents the illicit in modern literature. In this controversial work, Nabokov writes beautifully decorously, decadently, repulsively? about, in an admittedly cursory interpretation, a middle-aged pedophile’s sexual obsession with his twelve year-old stepdaughter and the specie of nymphets in general.

Since the novel’s original publication in 1955 by the French Olympia Press, Nabokov’s work has continued to surface in and inspire other artistic productions. For example, Azir Nasifi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran was published in 2003, Nabokov’s Lolita serving as the memoir’s namesake. Likewise, in 1958, Stanley Kubrick produced the first Lolita movie, advertising with the pertinent question: “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?,” and, in 1997, Adrian Lyne’s cinematic version starring Hollywood stars, such as Melanie Griffith and Jeremy Irons.

In short, this 317-page book, ostensibly about pedophilia and perversion, persists in modern culture and, at the same time, continues to be a mystery to many of the novel’s contemporaneous and modern readers. As such, it deserves (or if the novel itself does not deserve, we deserve) a more focused and discerning eye to this piece of literature whose contentious reputation precedes its reading, even half a century later.

As the many controversies surrounding Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita demonstrate, cursory readings and even the accusations of non-readers often overlook the vital principle of solipsism, which illuminates the fundamental thematic significance of the often misinterpreted novel. The novel, written entirely through the lens of one man, the pedophile Humbert Humbert’s, exhibits a world defined by a distorted individual subjectivity. It is the world of “Humberland,” in which what society labels pedophilia and homicide, he considers to be love and morality. Working within this individually-constructed reality, Nabokov uses a distinct narrative structure and a proliferation of imagery to demonstrate both the liberation and the confinement of being able to see the world only through one’s mind.

Ultimately, rather than being about an erotic relationship between a man and a child, Lolita the novel is actually about the isolated human condition of perceiving reality through the inescapable filter of one’s own subjectivity. Now, that seems far more identifiable.

Hence, this is not a call to like Lolita, or by any means agree with it, but, rather, a literary milieu to re-address literature that has not been forgotten, but neither it been fully addressed. It is 2008. How do we think about Lolita now?

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Related Post

• No Related Post