Theme came to VN in Sept., 1939, when he read in a French newspaper of an ape who drew
a picture of his own cage. Novel is about a man imprisoned by his own passions. “Lolita is a
novel of prisons.” HH imprisons Lo, but is also a prisoner of Lo, as well as of Charlotte. “Most
of all, Humbert is a prisoner of his past, the idyllic and brutally disrupted childhood romance
which he is sentenced to attempt to repeat in his grotesque longing for nymphets.” Nymphets,
in turn, are imprisoned “in the excessive flesh of maturity.” Lo was imprisoned by Quilty, who
is finally imprisoned and killed by HH. Chess “the natural correspondent to these various
cagings.” VN completed novel in 1954, submitted it to Olympia Press, where Maurice Girodias
wanted to use it to resist “moral censorship.”-- Andrew Field, Nabokov, His Life in Art (Boston:
Little Brown, 1967)
In The New Statesman, V.S. Pritchett wrote, “I can imagine no book less likely to incite the
corruptible reader,” since it is “filled on every page with literary allusions, linguistic experiment
and fits of idiosyncrasy.” – Cited in Field
Lolita, an “allegory of the artistic process,” is shown through “lust and child-molestation as a tale
representing the tragic pain and entrancing beauty of art.” Lolita, like all VN novels, mirrored,
but it is pre-eminent “because its central reality remains ever firm and vibrant, even while its
diabolically artful reflections play around it.” -- Field
“Readers who are able to transcend their socially conditioned response to sexual perversion,
to suspend for the time being their moral repugnance for the pederasts and nympholepts, find
in Humbert’s story something that is touching and most un-comic in the destructive power of
his obsession. For Humbert Humbert is not a monster; he is not simply grotesque and absurd.
Unlike Rousseau, whose confessions his sometimes resembles, Humbert evokes our sympathy
and pity.” (108-109) Page Stegner, Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov
(London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1967)
“Nearly everything about Lolita is parodic, save for the primary love story, which ridicules
only itself.” (82) It is a book with “no clinical, sociological or mythic seriousness.“ Lolita, if it
is anything ‘really,’ is the record of Mr. Nabokov’s love affair with the romantic novel, a today-
unattainable literary object as short-lived of beauty as it is long of memory. It is also, not to
change the subject for a minute, just about the funniest book I remember having read.” (83)
John Hollander, Partisan Review, Autumn, 1956
Disagreeing with Hollander, Dupee sees the novel’s art devoted to the “human.” “The images
of life that Lolita gives back are ghastly but recognizable.” (85) HH feels his own evil. “Lolita
is partly a masterpiece of grotesque comedy, partly an unsubdued wilderness where the wolf
howls – a real wolf howling for a real Red Riding Hood.” (91) F.W. Dupee, Anchor Review, 1957
“Lolita is not about sex. It is about love.” (95) “It is H.H., that mixture of ferocity and jocularity,
who reminds us that ‘Love seeketh only self to please….And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.’”
(100) Lionel Trilling, Encounter, October, 1958
Amis finds the novel “bad as a work of art” and “morally bad – though certainly not obscene
or pornographic.” (103) Amis faults VN’s overelaborate style as “logomania.” (105) “There
comes a point where the atrophy of moral sense, evident throughout this book, finally leads to
dullness, fatuity and unreality. Humbert’s ‘love’ for Lolita is a matter of the senses, even of the
membranes; his moments of remorse are few, brief and unconvincing; it never really occurs to
him to ask himself just what the hell he thinks he is up to.” (105-106) The novel suffers from “an
appalling poverty of incident and even of narrative….The only success of the book is the portrait
of Lolita herself.” (106) Kingsley Amis, Spectator, 6 Nov., 1959
“Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order
to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.” But VN rebels “against this state of affairs.” (20)
On his mother: “I inherited an exquisite simulacrum – the beauty of intangible property, unreal
estate – and this proved a splendid training for the endurance of later loss.” (40)
Lolita :was…a painful birth, a difficult baby.” (65)
His sense of loss was not for property, but nostalgia for “a hypertrophied sense of lost
childhood.” (73) Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York:
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1966)
In Lolita (1955, Olympia Press, Paris; 1958, in America), Nabokov has written a "modest
proposal" for the postwar years, with special reference to the counterfeit fifties. Instead
of Swift's suggestion that the Irish eat their infants to relieve their hunger, a parody of
English 'proposals,' Nabokov has suggested how American males can slake their thirst for
sexual fulfillment by nourishing themselves on nymphets. Just as Swift could indulge his
disgust for mankind in his work, so Nabokov could indulge his revulsion for women, physicality,
and even passion by way of Humbert Humbert's obsession with Charlotte Haze and Lolita.
Because, like Swift, he was dealing with both the indulgence of an obsession and its parody,
Nabokov found a way of reinforcing his own hatreds…
"Everything about Lolita is parodic, a celebration of the counterfeit; its methods based on mirrors
and reflections.…Nabokov's use of language is itself a parody of language, self-consciousness
played back as self-reflexive fiction....The address to the reader, the breakdown of tone, the
intrusion of authorial voice by means of the narrator all suggest an author so contemptuous
of his readers that he feels he can do anything and escape." -- Frederick R. Karl, American
Fictions 1940-1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1983)
Options of interpretation: "Nabokov is complicitous with his paedophiliac protagonist and his
novel is morally opprobrious; Nabokov is comically exposing his protagonist and his novel is
morally alert; Nabokov is playing an aesthetic game and moral considerations are irrelevant to
his artistic design." -- Tony Hifler, American Fiction Since 1940 (London: Longman, 1992), 135.
What we question is Humbert's arrangement of all this, which is hindsighted and deeply
suspect, full of what he himself calls static -- meaning the electrical interference of what is
felt in what is reported. At the crucial moment he gives us a moving speech verbatim, and
then says "words to that effect"; and moments later, "to that effect." He is only translating, or
recreating. We are reading Humbert's novelization of Humbert's life. (118)
[Nabokov] defines art as "curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy," and doesn't restrict it to
what is officially called art -- life itself will have it in moments of grace. There is much sense to
be sifted from Humbert's madness; but of course we shan't see it unless we see the madness
too. (123)
Quilty is the artist not only as manic plotter of infinite details but as the superfluous, gratuitous
subject, master of finely tuned and quite pointless skills. This is art for no sake at all, not
even art's; and this is why he eludes our schemes; why we enjoy him; and why he is almost
impossible to kill. (130)
[Humbert's expression of regret that Lolita's voice is absent from the "concord" of children at
play,] seems mawkish and self-regarding, altogether too good to be true, "dictated by some
principle of compensation," as [F.W.] Dupee says. Humbert's fussy prose, elsewhere so
resourceful and acrobatic, here manages to seem both artful and hackneyed. (140) Michael
Wood, The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (Princeton University Press,
1995)
Humbert is a moral monster, as the novel shows in such detail. One of the marvels of the book
is that while it presents such damning facts it also allows Humbert full scope to lure inattentive
readers into acquiescence -- until Nabokov confronts them with their facile complicity. (233)
Humbert demonstrates how easy it is to let moral awareness turn into sincere regret after
the fact, but how much more difficult to curb the self before it tramples others underfoot. The
emphasis throughout Lolita on the contrast between a forward and rear view of time is ultimately
a moral one. (254) Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov:The American Years (Princeton University
Press, 1991).
What should our response be to HH's assertion of contrition and love for Lolita? Some
critics (Michael Long) are not convinced he is sincere; others (Alfred Appel) are. Michael
Wood "can't believe in his repentance because the language of his renunciation is the language
of gloating…(overwritten) nostalgia, not regret." How much does it matter whether we believe in
HH's sincerity?
a picture of his own cage. Novel is about a man imprisoned by his own passions. “Lolita is a
novel of prisons.” HH imprisons Lo, but is also a prisoner of Lo, as well as of Charlotte. “Most
of all, Humbert is a prisoner of his past, the idyllic and brutally disrupted childhood romance
which he is sentenced to attempt to repeat in his grotesque longing for nymphets.” Nymphets,
in turn, are imprisoned “in the excessive flesh of maturity.” Lo was imprisoned by Quilty, who
is finally imprisoned and killed by HH. Chess “the natural correspondent to these various
cagings.” VN completed novel in 1954, submitted it to Olympia Press, where Maurice Girodias
wanted to use it to resist “moral censorship.”-- Andrew Field, Nabokov, His Life in Art (Boston:
Little Brown, 1967)
In The New Statesman, V.S. Pritchett wrote, “I can imagine no book less likely to incite the
corruptible reader,” since it is “filled on every page with literary allusions, linguistic experiment
and fits of idiosyncrasy.” – Cited in Field
Lolita, an “allegory of the artistic process,” is shown through “lust and child-molestation as a tale
representing the tragic pain and entrancing beauty of art.” Lolita, like all VN novels, mirrored,
but it is pre-eminent “because its central reality remains ever firm and vibrant, even while its
diabolically artful reflections play around it.” -- Field
“Readers who are able to transcend their socially conditioned response to sexual perversion,
to suspend for the time being their moral repugnance for the pederasts and nympholepts, find
in Humbert’s story something that is touching and most un-comic in the destructive power of
his obsession. For Humbert Humbert is not a monster; he is not simply grotesque and absurd.
Unlike Rousseau, whose confessions his sometimes resembles, Humbert evokes our sympathy
and pity.” (108-109) Page Stegner, Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov
(London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1967)
“Nearly everything about Lolita is parodic, save for the primary love story, which ridicules
only itself.” (82) It is a book with “no clinical, sociological or mythic seriousness.“ Lolita, if it
is anything ‘really,’ is the record of Mr. Nabokov’s love affair with the romantic novel, a today-
unattainable literary object as short-lived of beauty as it is long of memory. It is also, not to
change the subject for a minute, just about the funniest book I remember having read.” (83)
John Hollander, Partisan Review, Autumn, 1956
Disagreeing with Hollander, Dupee sees the novel’s art devoted to the “human.” “The images
of life that Lolita gives back are ghastly but recognizable.” (85) HH feels his own evil. “Lolita
is partly a masterpiece of grotesque comedy, partly an unsubdued wilderness where the wolf
howls – a real wolf howling for a real Red Riding Hood.” (91) F.W. Dupee, Anchor Review, 1957
“Lolita is not about sex. It is about love.” (95) “It is H.H., that mixture of ferocity and jocularity,
who reminds us that ‘Love seeketh only self to please….And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.’”
(100) Lionel Trilling, Encounter, October, 1958
Amis finds the novel “bad as a work of art” and “morally bad – though certainly not obscene
or pornographic.” (103) Amis faults VN’s overelaborate style as “logomania.” (105) “There
comes a point where the atrophy of moral sense, evident throughout this book, finally leads to
dullness, fatuity and unreality. Humbert’s ‘love’ for Lolita is a matter of the senses, even of the
membranes; his moments of remorse are few, brief and unconvincing; it never really occurs to
him to ask himself just what the hell he thinks he is up to.” (105-106) The novel suffers from “an
appalling poverty of incident and even of narrative….The only success of the book is the portrait
of Lolita herself.” (106) Kingsley Amis, Spectator, 6 Nov., 1959
“Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order
to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.” But VN rebels “against this state of affairs.” (20)
On his mother: “I inherited an exquisite simulacrum – the beauty of intangible property, unreal
estate – and this proved a splendid training for the endurance of later loss.” (40)
Lolita :was…a painful birth, a difficult baby.” (65)
His sense of loss was not for property, but nostalgia for “a hypertrophied sense of lost
childhood.” (73) Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York:
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1966)
In Lolita (1955, Olympia Press, Paris; 1958, in America), Nabokov has written a "modest
proposal" for the postwar years, with special reference to the counterfeit fifties. Instead
of Swift's suggestion that the Irish eat their infants to relieve their hunger, a parody of
English 'proposals,' Nabokov has suggested how American males can slake their thirst for
sexual fulfillment by nourishing themselves on nymphets. Just as Swift could indulge his
disgust for mankind in his work, so Nabokov could indulge his revulsion for women, physicality,
and even passion by way of Humbert Humbert's obsession with Charlotte Haze and Lolita.
Because, like Swift, he was dealing with both the indulgence of an obsession and its parody,
Nabokov found a way of reinforcing his own hatreds…
"Everything about Lolita is parodic, a celebration of the counterfeit; its methods based on mirrors
and reflections.…Nabokov's use of language is itself a parody of language, self-consciousness
played back as self-reflexive fiction....The address to the reader, the breakdown of tone, the
intrusion of authorial voice by means of the narrator all suggest an author so contemptuous
of his readers that he feels he can do anything and escape." -- Frederick R. Karl, American
Fictions 1940-1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1983)
Options of interpretation: "Nabokov is complicitous with his paedophiliac protagonist and his
novel is morally opprobrious; Nabokov is comically exposing his protagonist and his novel is
morally alert; Nabokov is playing an aesthetic game and moral considerations are irrelevant to
his artistic design." -- Tony Hifler, American Fiction Since 1940 (London: Longman, 1992), 135.
What we question is Humbert's arrangement of all this, which is hindsighted and deeply
suspect, full of what he himself calls static -- meaning the electrical interference of what is
felt in what is reported. At the crucial moment he gives us a moving speech verbatim, and
then says "words to that effect"; and moments later, "to that effect." He is only translating, or
recreating. We are reading Humbert's novelization of Humbert's life. (118)
[Nabokov] defines art as "curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy," and doesn't restrict it to
what is officially called art -- life itself will have it in moments of grace. There is much sense to
be sifted from Humbert's madness; but of course we shan't see it unless we see the madness
too. (123)
Quilty is the artist not only as manic plotter of infinite details but as the superfluous, gratuitous
subject, master of finely tuned and quite pointless skills. This is art for no sake at all, not
even art's; and this is why he eludes our schemes; why we enjoy him; and why he is almost
impossible to kill. (130)
[Humbert's expression of regret that Lolita's voice is absent from the "concord" of children at
play,] seems mawkish and self-regarding, altogether too good to be true, "dictated by some
principle of compensation," as [F.W.] Dupee says. Humbert's fussy prose, elsewhere so
resourceful and acrobatic, here manages to seem both artful and hackneyed. (140) Michael
Wood, The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (Princeton University Press,
1995)
Humbert is a moral monster, as the novel shows in such detail. One of the marvels of the book
is that while it presents such damning facts it also allows Humbert full scope to lure inattentive
readers into acquiescence -- until Nabokov confronts them with their facile complicity. (233)
Humbert demonstrates how easy it is to let moral awareness turn into sincere regret after
the fact, but how much more difficult to curb the self before it tramples others underfoot. The
emphasis throughout Lolita on the contrast between a forward and rear view of time is ultimately
a moral one. (254) Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov:The American Years (Princeton University
Press, 1991).
What should our response be to HH's assertion of contrition and love for Lolita? Some
critics (Michael Long) are not convinced he is sincere; others (Alfred Appel) are. Michael
Wood "can't believe in his repentance because the language of his renunciation is the language
of gloating…(overwritten) nostalgia, not regret." How much does it matter whether we believe in
HH's sincerity?