Lolita

Article written by Israel Njoku

Degree in M.C.M with focus on Literature from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

In poetic prose full of allusions, wordplays, and subtly constructed riddles, Humbert details his lustful obsession with Lolita, the 12-year-old daughter of his landlady. He schemes towards obtaining sexual release from Lolita and when he got the opportunity, manipulated and forced her into a cross-country tour filled with sexual romps. However, as he travels, he has to deal with Lolita’s discontent, as well as the specter of a mysterious figure hot on their trail.

Key Facts about Lolita

• Title: Lolita 
• When/where written: Nabokov wrote Lolita in the United States between 1949-1954
• Published: 1955
• Literary Period: Post-modernism
• Genre: Post-modern Novel / Travel novel
• Point-of-View: First-person reminiscent
• Setting: France, United States
• Climax: Humbert Humbert murders Clare Quilty
• Antagonist: Clare Quilty

Vladimir Nabokov and Lolita

Lolita is Vladimir Nabokov’s most popular and successful work. Nabokov built on themes he abandoned in an earlier novella, The Enchanter, to form Lolita. However, since he was setting the book in a land he emigrated to and was not very familiar with, he started with some research. He took bus rides with school children to help him understand how they talked, followed news stories involving pedophilia, and read case studies on the subject. He also benefited from the knowledge of the American landscape afforded him by his pursuit of butterflies through fifty-fix states in the United States.

Nabokov wrote Lolita partly to demonstrate the effects of enchanting and persuasive rhetorical skills on not just the characters in the book but the reader as well. Inspiration for Lolita came when Nabokov heard the news of an Ape who managed to produce a painting of the bars of his cage after months of coaxing by a researcher.

Nabokov was then challenged to create a “beast” endowed with artistic capabilities that would enchant readers. He delighted in taking on the role of an enchanter, creating an original, twisted world where normal conventions are defied and a reprehensible character is humanized and endowed with gifts or attributes typically reserved for moral protagonists. Nabokov was motivated by the post-modernist notion of exploring subjective human experience as well as the complexity of language.

Books Related to Lolita

The theme of an older man being in love with a younger girl that was central to Lolita had interested Nabokov before he wrote the book. While in Berlin in 1928, he composed a poem titled Lilith, in which a male narrator is infatuated by a naked girl and is led by her into a house. There he begins to have sex with her but she pulls away just as he was about to ejaculate. He then suddenly finds himself outside the house, surrounded by a mob. The man then spills his seeds before this mob in an embarrassing and dreadful experience.

This work is similar in a lot of respects to Lolita. Both feature a narrator with a longing for an underaged girl that is fulfilled only to an extent before disaster comes. However, a significant difference between both works is that while Lilith is a demonic and active seducer, Lolita is more the unwilling victim of a pedophile’s desires.

Also, scholars have observed a similarity between Lolita and another work by Nabokov titled Laughter in the Dark, published in 1933. In this novel, the central protagonist, Albert Albinus, an adult married man abandons his wife and child for the sixteen years old theatre attendant he became infatuated with, named Margot. However, Margot is considerably older and much less innocent than Lolita. Nabokov described her as a “common young whore, not an unfortunate little Lolita”.

Perhaps the clearest relative to the book Lolita is Nabokov’s novel titled The Enchanter. Like in Lolita, the protagonist in this novel is a pedophile who looks out for special features he desires in an underaged sexual partner. His scheme with an ailing woman and her young daughter closely resembles Humbert Humbert’s designs with Lolita through marriage with Charlotte. However, unlike Humbert, the protagonist in The Enchanter committed suicide when he was confronted by inquisitive onlookers after trying in vain to have sex with the terrified girl.

Lolita also bears similarities to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment because of the similar point of view of a flawed main character trying to rationalize his crime. Stylistically, it shares the taste for allusions and wordplay that James Joyce favors. This devotion to the aesthetic capacity of language would influence the works of later writers like Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and Martin Amis.

The Lasting Impact of Lolita