The best art,
like the best science, critiques itself, both building on and challenging what
has gone before. In Lolita, Nabokov throws down a
strong challenge to his own chosen art. Despite John Ray, the pages that
follow his foreword show literature cannot guarantee superior sensitivity or
conduct. It is no accident that the two men who prey on Lolita are both
littérateurs, one a scholar and
poet who tries to marshal Dante, Petrarch, and Poe as precursors, exemplars,
and excusers of his own love for Lolita, the other a playwright who knows his
Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Molière, Sheridan, Shaw, and Maeterlinck and who
has fashioned “many plays for children.” Humbert, the lone,
tense, scholarly European, draws on literature as exalted romantic
aestheticism, as if it underwrites what he thinks the rare elevation and
refinement of his passion. Quilty, the relaxed, gregarious, and populist
American, sees little difference between art and commerce, piquant pleasure
and pornography, the slick and the sleazy. Both are “well-read” in literature,
but neither is morally better for it. . . .
As Nabokov
shows, literature does not guarantee elevation of conduct or extension of
sympathies: those who engage with literature are too various, and literature
itself would run counter its own deepest nature if it sought to impose a
rigid, and rigidly enforced, uniformity of response on the diversity of real
readers. But here in Lolita, Nabokov invites good
readers, as we respond to Humbert’s perspective, to reject that perspective
precisely for its failing to consider or see Lolita’s. Lolita
invites us
to confront the human capacity to ignore the suffering of others, in the
supposedly refined Humbert; to see beyond the blinkers of our own roles as
protagonists and narrators of our own stories, and beyond the privileges and
power our education may give us; to expand our sympathies to those with little
power or voice. Literature at its best, Nabokov suggests, can invite, though
never ensure, an expansion of human possibilities, into a world where
“curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy” become “the norm”—ecstasy in its
root sense of standing outside oneself, not at all in the sense of Humbert on
the davenport crushing out against Lolita’s left buttock “the last throb of
the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever
known.”
Art guarantees
nothing,
Nabokov’s critique of Humbert and Quilty suggests, but then this complex world
precludes large guarantees.