Lolita was a book I read with distaste in college. I loved the wordplay I picked up on though I now know I missed most of it but I hated Humbert, and what happened to Lolita made me feel ill. This time around, I picked up the Annotated Lolita, and stopped at the end of every chapter to check the annotations. It was as though someone drew a curtain and I could suddenly see the complicated inner works of a beautiful music box. (My favorite annotation was in reference to Quiltys misquote of Shakespeare to Humbert, to borrow, and to borrow . . . as to which the annotator comments that for this pun alone Quilty should die.) I also finally realized that Nabakov manages to both humanize Humbert yet point out clearly how he destroyed Lolitas voice and childhood.
Immediately after finishing the Annotated Lolita, I read Reading Lolita in Tehran. Because that book is very much about how women were destroyed and silenced in Iran by the outcome of the rightist reactionary revolution there, it was a powerful echo for me of the strongest moral message in Lolita.
What did everyone make of the three Prof. Hungerford lectures? Her first certainly rejects my belief that Lolita does have a moral message at the heart she says Nabakov treats morality as mere clich. The second, guest lecture by Goldstone was tough for me to track in full but I wasnt taken with his thesis that Nabakov was expressing the alienation and nostalgia of a European expatriate. I actually thought the book presented a teasing, satiric, yet affectionate view of America. I did love the third lecture, which I think hit on a lot of critical themes in the book, not least the contrast it draws between nature and artifice (including the artifice that is literature.)

I haven't finished all the lectures yet (I'm 20 minutes into the first), but I really appreciated the opportunity to reread Lolita, which I haven't read for 23 years. The language is wonderful and it frequently made me laugh out loud. I look forward to hearing what people have to say here.

I am propelled by a strong impulse to be the internet equivalvent of the kid in pigtails at the front of the class, lunging up from the desk at a 45 degree angle, their hard is raised so hard. I shall try and avoid this.

But I don't think Lolita is unconcerned with morality. It's just that's it's concerned with the same moral question Nabokov is always concerned with, solipism...or better say, the borderland where the assertion of the self becomes the obliteration of the other. I'm at work, so I can't run off on this they way I'd like --- after five, cocktail in hand, I may have trouble shutting up....people think it's amoral or immoral because the sin Humbert commits is not having sex with a little girl --- the destruction of her innocence. It's the taking away of her childhood, or her choice, forcing her to act the role of his lover when she didn't love him, that I would say Nabokov considers by far the greater sin. "The absence of her voice from that concord." The interesting thing is that it is through the commission of his sin that Humbert becomes whole enough to perceive the wrong he has done ("I felt as if I were sitting next to the ghost of someone i had just killed"), to see and love Lolita as a person, and not as the living incarnation of his dead girlfriend, a fantasy.

I completely agree with you, diablevert. Sadly (gladly?) it is my birthday today and after 5 I WILL have a cocktail in hand and be far from my computer, so let me say now that I'd just add that to me the saddest thing about the book is that by the time Humbert sees his own wrong and regrets it, Lolita is indeed mostly dead in spirit, and soon to be dead in fact, in childbirth.

I'd also add that although Quilty's death is truly humorous, as there's nothing to love about him anyway, Humbert never does come to grips with his role in depriving Lolita of her mother. His diary, relishing his lust for Lolita, as well as his unwillingness to talk to his wife at the moment she confronts him, is the direct catalyst of his wife's death. Humbert can only take so much responsiblity, I guess.

Happy Birthday Bearwife.

Diablevert, I understand your pain. There is so much here, and I too, don't want to monopolize the discussion.

But, I haven't finished it, and although this is my third time around, this too is my first with the annotation at hand and a more full appreciation of the breathtaking otherworldly prose-poem daredevilry. I'm literally counting meter and enjoying every stressed syllabic and hear understand the omneopoetics and the ribaldry that's found throughout for the various male female aspects of "the act" and the fruit like allometry of it all. Perhaps I am a perv. But H "The Mural" at "The Enchanted Hunters," is the sexist thing I've ever read and it's all allegory.

Sigh. Yeah so, I'm wallowing, soaking it in. I am such a pig.


I can't believe Nabokov had the balls to write this and publish it when he did. Again and again, I'm stunned by his voice which never wavers or doubts itself for a moment. This was like in 1955. Holy wow!

Some thoughts: I too, am struck how much this idyll is that of an immigrant (or expatriate, as you call him Bearwife), in the promised land, chasing his American Dream of sorts and consummating a life's desire, as ruinous as it is to all involved. The price of Freedom? Is one person's freedom, another's forced captivity?? Is Humbert going through an assimilation of sorts, an extreme assimilation based on his darkest, anti-social needs?? Is that the journey of America? As an immigrant, myself, that stuff really strikes a chord.

Once the fantasy is realized (as you say diablevert), he sees Lolita: "I felt as if I were sitting next to the ghost of someone i had just killed." He has killed someone, actually a few people. He's eclipsed the memory of his childhood love, Annabel Leigh (in a kingdom by the sea). He is once and for all a fully realized Humbert Humbert. He has attained his dream, his fantasy, and everything has changed forever. He is no longer that Humbert Humbert living for his fantasy, for his imagination which keeps him holding on from day to day, and an almost vertiginous nausea overtakes the book. The nausea of the American road trip, with all the aimlessness and generic convenience and trappings that contain and support it. I think many lovers go through this point: That most wanted thing is finally attained and it's like "Now what?" What does one do once the dream of a life time is realized? There is nowhere else for Humbert to go, but to try and relive that moment over and over, and try and keep that dream frozen in stasis, a perhaps even greater perversion than his fetish. Lolita is a living breathing girl reaching towards womanhood and it's crime (against the law and nature, these parallel foundations for the law, and morality are constantly in play and in tension in the book. One pair of many dualities including the name Humbert Humbert) to keep her identified as a "nymphet."

And yes, she dies spiritually, Diablevert, but progressively, not at in an instant after their becoming lovers, at that moment the Ghost of someone Humbert Humbert has murdered is his Annabel Leigh (lee in a kingdom by the sea) and himself. Lolita is actually quite resilient, she's no delicate flower, and even begins to define herself outside of Humbert's sexual needs (with the monies she begins to exact from him for various favors). But Humbert is forever finding an emotional threat to hold against her (in that case orphan-hood and abandonment), which is one of the (many) times, although he is a hilarious sociopath, you want to beat him with a stick.

Butafter their first lovemaking she chides him as a "dirty dirty old man, you've ruined me. I was fresh as a daisy, you dirty dirty old man...etc" I think she's okay pretty much. It's once he throws down the cage around her, by announcing that her mother is dead and begins to play the mind games that she, a child and really no match begins to give in to helplessness.

One last thing, and I'm sorry to be throwing this all up here like this before I've finished all the materials, and this is more in regards to man's place in nature and perhaps the play of fate, within that nature. One could argue that Nabokov when he was simply following his nature was in a healthy mode, and once he began to manipulate it with the perversion of a life he forced unto Lolita and himself, it was the beginning of his undoing. So what I'm saying is what if he hadn't gone on the road with Lolita? What if instead they continued their life in a town away from Ramsdale, and he had adopted her and let her develop naturally, even if they were lovers. I almost think everything would've ended up working in his favor, at 16 or 17 they could marry, I mean it would've been a bit eccentric, but so what?

I guess what I'm saying is, I wonder if there are certain aspects of nature that mankind has perverted with artificial laws and religious hang ups, and certain aspects of nature that express themselves through love and that's the final law and the final real morality.

Humbert wasn't driven by love. He was driven by a pathology. One that told him that he wouldn't be able to lust after Lolita once she left her Nymphet phase, and he painted himself into a corner still too much a prisoner of his imagination and his fantasy.

Almost as if that in his imagination which compelled him forward, and helped him survive, that dream and that fantasy, was finally also his demise. SO the imagination as survival mechanism and fate. A double-edged sword.

Anyhow, I've yet to hear the Hungerford lectures, although I'm hungering to and I hope this discussion goes on for while because. I could happily discuss this book all summer...



Thx, for setting this up BearWife. This is teh awesome!!11!!11

Great comment, Skygazer. I liked the (Freudian?) slip when you said, "One could argue that Nabokov when he was simply following his nature was in a healthy mode . . ." because part of the fascination of this book is its transparency, the way Nabakov is sometimes inside it and part of it.

True confession time: I didn't listen to any of the Hungerford lectures, for this or earlier books in the syllabus. I read them. That worked better for me in terms of comprehension and also in terms of time management.

Whoops...thanks for catching that! Total Freudian slip there.

Have a great birthday!

I can only participate via dim memory of having last read the Annotated over a decade ago and gotten through most of the first part about six-seven years back.

Skygazer, that's an interesting point about the interplay between nature and fate - in the sense that it wasn't Humbert's nature that ruined him and Lolita, but his deliberate manipulation of the fate that awaited her. By holding on to her nymphet-ness, by refusing to allow her to settle down and grow up, he's doing more than raping her (bad enough, of course) - he's taking away her childhood entirely.

I think it's telling that their first sexual encounter is instigated by Lolita. I read that as Nabokov suggesting that the sexual act itself isn't the destructive aspect of paedophilia.

Perhaps it's fitting that she dies in childbirth, as motherhood is often seen as a signifier of adulthood, and Nabokov's showing that by ruining Lolita's childhood he's wrecked any chance she had of becoming an adult.

(small caveat: these are all relatively half-formed thoughts and will surely change along the way. It's good to be thinking it out though.)

Jump in anyway, dhartung!

I pored over The Annotated Lolita and listened to the lectures and talked my partner's ear of about Lolita... and then my blasted wifi was down on the 15th.

I loved the wordplay I picked up on though I now know I missed most of it but I hated Humbert, and what happened to Lolita made me feel ill

For me, this is the snare at the book's heart that makes it such a masterpiece: the language is so playful, so powerful, by turns so luxurious and luscious, then barbed and sharp. It's irresistible... but the story is at odds with that, using this rich, potent, enrapturing language to describe a tragedy enacted to sate one man's selfish lust.

In Part 1, Humbert justifies --- to himself, and (he thinks) to us --- his own desires and actions by explicitly denying the humanity of the nymphets (bolded emphasis mine):

Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as "nymphets." [part 1, ch. 5]

Note that he also gives himself special dispensation as the rare perceptive person, the discriminating man who can distinguish a true nymphet from a child (and again establishes his belief in the nymphet's inhumanity):

A normal man given a group photograph of school girls or Girl Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs--the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate --- the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.[part 1, ch. 5]

Humbert claims to himself a special --- perhaps a unique --- privilege to identify as inhuman the specific children who arouse him. He also claims that he can see what others cannot, and therefore gives himself blanket permission to treat any child he likes as less than human.

It's the taking away of her childhood, or her choice, forcing her to act the role of his lover when she didn't love him, that I would say Nabokov considers by far the greater sin. "The absence of her voice from that concord."

I intended to quote you,diablevert, because my remarks about Humbert's dehumanizing tactics are an attempt take your statement (with which I wholeheartedly agree) a step further: in the book's beginning (but with all the story's action behind him), Humbert is still trying to rationalize and excuse his own use of nymphets (and among them Lolita) by claiming they are something other than fully human. By the book's end, Humbert has reflected upon the events and their emotional content carefully, and he recognizes Lolita as a person, not a nymphet.

Indeed, when he finally sees Delores again in person, he sees her as an adult, and even sees Charlotte in her gestures and appearance. He acknowledges her as a person, as an adult, and he loves her:

[...] and there she was with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and her goose-flesh white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits, there she was (my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at seventeen, with that baby, dreaming already in her of becoming a big shot and retiring around 2020 A.D.--and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds... but thank God it was not that echo alone that I worshipped.[part 2, ch. 29]

I am glad you got here, Elsa. (Sorry about your wifi!!) Your comments are great. I am glad I wasn't the only one swimming in a Lolita sea -- and inflicting an ongoing account of it on my husband!

I almost think everything would've ended up working in his favor, at 16 or 17 they could marry, I mean it would've been a bit eccentric, but so what?

Notice that Humbert himself planned (whether in earnest or in fantasy) to marry Lolita... but (at that point in the narrative) not for love. In fact, he talks about the difficulty of "get[ting] rid of" Delores in her adolescence.

But he imagines himself impregnating her in order to provide himself with a self-generated series of replacement nymphets once Delores is too old to satisfy his tastes. He regrets coming to Beardsley rather than

somehow scrambling across the Mexican border while the scrambling was good so as to lie low for a couple of years in subtropical bliss until I could safely marry my little Creole; for I must confess that depending on the condition of my glands and ganglia, I could switch in the course of the same day from one pole of insanity to the other --- from the thought that around 1950 I would have to get rid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose magic nymphage had evaporated --- to the thought that with patience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still be dans la force de l'age; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind, was strong enough to distinguish in the remoteness of time a vieillard encore vert --- or was it green rot? --- bizarre, tender, salivating Dr. Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a granddad. [part 2, ch. 3]

Hi, bearwife! Thanks so much for setting this up --- Lolita is one of my favorite books, and it's such a treat to hear other viewpoints on the meat of it.

Elsa: Humbert claims to himself a special --- perhaps a unique --- privilege to identify as inhuman the specific children who arouse him.

Yes, he is robbing her of her humanity, but he's doing it by deifying her. Proclaiming her a supernatural spirit possessed of unholy powers even she isn't aware of. He is the maniac with the hot bubble of poison in his loins, and the High Priest of here church who holds the key to unlocking her destiny. Her cache of unearthly pleasures.

It's just hilarious. He's taking this twelve yr old girl and imbuing her with the strength and beauty of a thousand suns. Ha ha ha...

Even more funny is Humbert in a insane idyll imagining telescoping (ahem), himself into the future with Lolita 2 and 3 (daughter and daughter/granddaughter, respectively), making deals with time: Lolita the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still be dans la force de l'age; reassuring himself he will still be a force of virility to unlock all the supernatural powers of his burgeoning flock of Lolita's.

It's terrible I know, but black humor wise, this tickles a terrible terrible place in this reader, and manifests the mans drooling buffoon-like lunacy so well. Beyond nature's law, man's law and most terribly the laws of love.

His fantasy world and imagination feeding on itself and growing ever more monstrous, ever more blind to everything, especially Lolita's humanity and any possibility of love. Being lovable. And therefore becoming fully human himself.

Just to clarify: It tickles a terrible terrible place, because Humbert Humbert's masochistic whacked ideas (and the reader's guilt-free sadistic entertainment of it) is so funny and relentless.

It's terrible I know, but black humor wise, this tickles a terrible terrible place in this reader, and manifests the mans drooling buffoon-like lunacy so well. Beyond nature's law, man's law and most terribly the laws of love.

Oh, absolutely agreed, Skygazer: Nabokov strokes some deep dark places with these ideas, and especially by wrapping them up in such evocative language. That's part of what makes Lolita such a remarkable piece of writing: it retains the ability to shock even after half a century, even after many reading, precisely because it draws the reader into complicity through humor, through Humbert confidence that we are indeed complicit with him, through the sheer delight of rhythm and tone, and by using language that all but urges the reader to sound out the words, (as Hungerford puts it

not just to identify our minds with the point of view of this particular person, this particular character, but actually to move your body, and to feel something bodily that he wants you to feel, to share that sensuous experience with him. [Lecture 5]

It's a tremendously powerful piece of writing, and that's a big chunk of the reason why. Nabokov manages to mix the repugnant, the delicious, the witty, the kneeslappingly hilarious, and the outright horrifying, and all this without fully alienating the reader, driving us out of Humbert's head. It's a remarkable seduction of the reader.

And I don't know if I was clear in my remarks about Humbert's assigning the status of nymphet. My point is not only that he excuses his own behavior (and I think you're right that he evidently thinks that nymphets are are transcendent creatures and that this designation raises them above mere humans), but that it is a powerfully convenient designation: it applies to any child he thinks it applies to, and other people cannot perceive the elements and attributes that he sees so clearly.

ever more blind to everything, especially Lolita's humanity and any possibility of love. Being lovable. And therefore becoming fully human himself.

This sums up how I feel every time I finish the novel: that it's a double tragedy, that Humbert only becomes fully realized, fully human, after he comes to terms with the tragedy he's precipitated in Delores' life, and in his own.

Just to clarify: It tickles a terrible terrible place, because Humbert Humbert's masochistic whacked ideas (and the reader's guilt-free sadistic entertainment of it) is so funny and relentless.

I agree that the novel is generally hilarious, but (without disagreeing --- I'm going to turn your idea over in my head next time I re-read it) I find most of it so horribly funny for a slightly different reason. For me, it's the disconnect between Humbert's apparent certainty (at the book's beginning) of the reader's complicity with him and the plainly appalling acts to which he thinks this sympathy extends.

Side note: Lolita is a peculiar book to discuss in public because the subject is so very incendiary. I notice that people are often verrrrrrry careful in their phrasing, especially when talking about sympathy or empathy with Humbert, or about it being funny. I hope we (and here I mean "all of us discussing the book") can take it as given that we are discussing this as a piece of literature and not, say, as a parenting guide, and maybe dispense with some of the guarded caution.

Humbert in a insane idyll imagining telescoping (ahem)

Ha! I completely missed the pun!

in the book's beginning (but with all the story's action behind him), Humbert is still trying to rationalize and excuse his own use of nymphets (and among them Lolita) by claiming they are something other than fully human. By the book's end, Humbert has reflected upon the events and their emotional content carefully, and he recognizes Lolita as a person, not a nymphet.

Oh, word. But perhaps I cut too much slack because it's kind of a problem you can't get round, technically speaking. First-person narrator, you want to show them growing over the course of a novel, you have to write them shrunk at the beginning. If they demonstrate the fully realized wisdom you want them to have at the end when describing the beginning, then they are obliged to treat their younger selves with a contempt and/or "more in sorrow than in anger" tone that undermines the reader's emotional stake in the very journey you want to take them on.

But Nabokov does slip in a little bit of that very contempt, here and there. ("And now I can cease to mock poor Charlotte for the sake of historical verisimilitude"? Something like that, don't have my copy on me.) Which brings me to the interesting point about poor Charlotte...

The mechanism for Humbert's transition into treating Lolita as a real person is his taking on the role of her father, I would argue (and have, in a term paper once). Charlotte's ghost shows up several times in the second half of the book (usually coupled with an allusion to water) and almost always in the context of Humbert's sham fatherhood.

That's one of the things I find fascinating about the novel, the subtlety of its moral problem....if Humbert had never gotten his way, if Humbert had never had a chance to possess one of his nymphets as he does with Lolita, he'd never have had to live with one, as a girl, to care for her, to fight about clothes and homework and chores. Humbert the obsessive lover is free to keep Lolita a prisoner of his fantasy. Humbert the concerned father has to keep in touch with reality a bit --- her weight, her grades, her pimples, her sulks --- if only to maintain the necessary facade to the outside world. ("In the long run, the parody of incest was the best I had to offer the waif.") It is when he is confronted with his ineptitude at this aspect of their relationship that he comes closest to seeing Lolita as a full and separate human being, and when he kills Quilty he claims he is revenging not the loss of his lover but his daughter...

Good point! I think that, in addition to giving us a hint of Humbert's dawning self-contempt, Nabokov quite intentionally pokes a hole in the narrative with that phrase you quote about "historical verisimilitude": he's drawing our attention once again to the fact that the events are not unfolding, that they are in the past and therefore fixed. He wants to remind us that Humbert has already experienced everything he's describing for us, and therefore that
A) all our information is filtered through this narrator
B) that all the real-time change we are witnessing is internal, not external: we see Humbert change simply through the power of memory and reflection on his acts.

And of course this completely contained, quite literally self-centered narrative fits beautifully, because Lolita is in large part about solipsism: the singular imposition of Humbert's desires and Humbert's fantasy upon the world around him, and especially upon the girl in his care. Humbert's fantasy is so persuasive, so seductive, that we allow him to reshape our understanding of who she fundamentally is. The girl Delores (meaning "sorrows") and Dolly (as he mother calls her, as her friends and teachers call her) are almost completely elided by the fantasy creature with Humbert's private pillow-talk endearment: Lolita.

And clearly Humbert knows that she does not identify herself as Lolita: when he asks Quilty if he remembers her, he asks not about Lolita but about Delores Haze, Dolly Haze.

Charlotte's ghost shows up several times in the second half of the book (usually coupled with an allusion to water) and almost always in the context of Humbert's sham fatherhood.

I'm going to have to revisit the book with this thought in mind. I was struck by the frequent appearance of water, but didn't pick up on Charlotte reappearing (except in Dolores' gestures as I mentioned above). That notion gives the book yet another dimension; so glad you pointed it out!

It's always such a treat to revisit this book, and every time I notice motifs and subtexts and imagery that had never been clear to me before. This time, for example (and with the guidance of The Annotated Lolita), I noticed the anti-semitism Humbert witnesses and repor