Don-- I don't know whether Steve Almond's piece on Lolita has
been posted yet or not. In case not, here it is. Jim Twiggs
nerve
http://www.nerve.com/screeningroom/books/lolita/
AGELESS: Why Lolita, now fifty, endures.
By
Steve Almond
One night early in
grad school, a bunch of us aspiring writers gathered at a bar to blab
about the books we loved and of course Lolita came up,
because Lolita always comes up in such conversations. The other
guys and I took a cold, analytical approach to the book. We wanted to
say how much we adored it, how much we secretly identified with
Humbert Humbert and his excessive, illegal passion for prepubescent
Lolita. But we were also hoping to get laid (of course), and we
figured such a confession might not put us in good stead with our
female classmates.
There was one in particular, a
women I'll call Rita, who, as it happened, had more than a hint of the
nymphet in her. She wasn't exactly "four-foot-ten in one sock."
More like five-one in black stockings. But she was small and pale and
occasionally dressed like a schoolgirl, and this made us all the more
leery about directly endorsing Lolita. So we sat around parsing
Nabokov's intricate wordplay and sipping our beers until, toward the
end of the night, emboldened by a shot of George Dickel, Rita stood up
and addressed us in an imploring tone: "But you guys, don't you
get it - he loves her!"
And that, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is the whole ball of wax
when it comes to Lolita. He loves her. Without the blinding
force of Humbert's passion, the book - newly reissued for its
fiftieth birthday - would never have endured its initial ignominy,
nor become the most influential novel of the last century.
I feel vaguely qualified to speak about the
book's influence, because I spent so much of grad school either
writing dreadful imitations of Lolita, or reading them as the
fiction editor of our literary magazine. I have friends who still keep
a copy of the book by their keyboards, as a kind of talisman they can
rub when their own prose starts to flag.
There is no need to belabor
the plot of Lolita (man meets girl, man seduces girl, man loses
girl - that about does it) nor the oft-cited symbolism (old, refined
Europe seduced by young, vulgar America). What matters, in the end, is
the heartsick love song of Monsieur Humbert. Here he is describing the
boyhood tryst that presages his eventual coupling with
Lolita:
She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips
and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above
us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves . . . She sat a little
higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to
kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement
that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my
wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the
acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath
came near to my face.
To be overrun by feeling, yet able to marshal
words with such elegance and precision - this was Nabokov's knack.
That he did so on behalf of a quivering pervert makes the achievement
that much more astonishing.
We root for
Humbert because, when you come right down to it, most of our own
wishes are illicit.
And there should be no doubt
about it: Humbert is a perv. "The bud-stage of breast development
appears early (10.7 years) in the sequence of somatic changes
accompanying pubescence," he informs us, dutifully. "And the
next maturational item available is the first appearance of pigmented
pubic hair (11.2 years)." It should come as no surprise that
Lolita was originally published by a French press. Nor that it was
only published in the U.S. three years later, after being dubbed
"the filthiest book I have ever read" by a critic in a
British newspaper. Such is the American lust for scandal.
And yet it is our awareness of
Humbert's pathology that makes his seduction so powerful. He knows
he's doing wrong. We know he's doing wrong. He can't stop himself. And
we can't stop ourselves from watching.
Nor, if we are honest, do we look upon Humbert
with pure disgust. In our covert hearts, we root for him, because he
loves her, and because, when you come right down to it, most of our
own wishes are illicit, or feel that way to us. Humbert's crimes, in
other words, may be of a greater scale than the ones we commit, but
the same cauldron of deviance bubbles within us. (Note: this last
sentence does not apply to registered Republicans, who manage to avoid
immoral thoughts by hating gay people.)
Lolita has enjoyed periodic
resurgences, owing to two excellent film adaptations by Stanley
Kubrick (1962) and Adrian Lyne (1997). But the novel itself remains
the vital artifact, because only it can capture - with unflinching
fidelity - the fevered consciousness of Humbert himself.
"There my beauty lay down on her stomach,
showing me, showing the thousand eyes wide open in my eyed blood, her
slightly raised shoulder blades," he tells us. "Every
movement she made in the dappled sun plucked at the most secret and
sensitive chord of my abject body."
In moments such as these, Nabokov is nothing
less than a poet of desire. He is not writing about sex, but about the
tumultuous feelings that illuminate our clumsy acts of love. These are
what sweep us along - despite the bleatings of our conscience. Big
ideas, witty observations and tricky plotlines are all fine and well.
But the engine of any great book is desire. And by that standard,
Lolita is a Mack truck.
This is the
true scandal of Lolita: not that a man should love a child, but
that he should be so helpless.
It's worth noting that the scenes of physical
contact between Humbert and Lolita are fairly restrained in the
particulars. They feel lurid mainly because our narrator is so fraught
by his own yearning:
Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I
stroked them; there she lolled in the right-hand corner, almost
asprawl, Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing
through its juice - every movement she made, every shuffle and
ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of
tactile correspondence between beast and beauty - between my gagged,
bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent
cotton frock.
This is the true scandal of Lolita. Not
that a man should love a child, but that he should prove so helpless
to stanch his desires. Deep emotion is the book's central
transgression and its saving grace.
Never has this been more obvious than the
current era, which has placed carnality in the service of capitalism
by stripping from sex any vestige of authentic feeling. We see more
and more these days - virtually any dirty image is at our fingertips
- but feel less and less. Everywhere we look, glistening parts are
pumping away in congress, yearning to excite our wildest consumer
fantasies. Every day, it becomes harder and harder to make a clear
distinction between pornography and advertising.
But Lolita?
It has nothing to sell but the truth of
ourselves: our afflictions of want, our shame, elusive and horrible
and blessed. n°
ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
OR:
Steve Almond is the author of the
story collection My Life in Heavy Metal and the nonfiction
book Candyfreak. His new collection, The Evil B.B. Chow and
Other Stories, contains several of his stories for Nerve.com. To
find out what kind of music he listens to, check out www.stevenalmond.com.
©2005 Steve Almond and Nerve.com.