Lolita: Opening Sentiments

John Jay Jr. is the cousin of Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., who happens to be Humbert Humbert’s lawyer in the trial for his sex crimes. Clark chooses Jay to edit “Lolita” because Jay has some familiarity with writing about “morbid states and perversions”—in the context of the book, “Lolita” is the memoir of H.H. concerning his life immediately prior to, during, and after the course of his criminal actions.

            The foreword frames Lolita, the novel, as reality—by setting it up as a postscript to a man’s life, a man who has endured punishment for his vile actions, the reader is jabbed with some expectation of empathy before they hear what Humbert himself has to say of these matters. The continual framing of the story from different angles: as a cautionary tale of currently developing fissures in civilized society; as a great opportunity for case study and psychoanalysis—these angles of viewing Humbert’s criminality made me find myself taking a more sterile approach, looking not for striking emotional moments, but combing over the text more scientifically, appreciating facts of Humbert’s situation and their justifications in his mind. The foreword is a brace for what is to come, but it is also an attempt at socially contextualizing the book to make it seem less about the obscene and more about what the obscene can teach civilized society.

            As far as the balance of banality and originality goes, I did find that the text so far did not strike me as completely Nabokovian—aside from the up-front cynical sarcasm of our main character’s narration, the intricate language is not quite as intricate; there is not anything noticeably puzzle-like about the text, yet. It seems Nabokov, though certainly his own writer to an extent, is pulling from other texts of the time—the set-up of the foreword and the first chapter, for instance, (for some strange reason) reminds me of the beginning of The Immoralist by Andre Gide. Though I did not read past the first ten pages of that book (it isn’t very good), the tone of Lolita’s opening has a definite similarity in its direct address to the reader, a precautionary segment before the text itself, not completely similar but resembling in some sort the opening justifications of Edgar Allen Poe’s stories. The first chapter itself pulls from Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” going as far as to pull near-complete lines from the poem: “In a princedom by the sea” in the first chapter copies “In a kingdom by the sea” from “Annabel Lee.” The themes of the works are similar, too: love, madness, perversion. It is clear that Nabokov took these similarities with utmost purpose to frame the beginning of his novel.

            Either Nabokov wants to make parody of Freud’s psychoanalytic approaches, or he is consciously borrowing from but not wanting to be associated with the strict constraints of psychological thought. While one may not put it past Nabokov to make parody of well-known and somewhat respected social figures, it seems to me that he does find some treasure to be wrought for literature in psychoanalysis but wishes to discern himself on a higher level in his interviews by denying association and even slandering the work of Freud and the like. The precursors of The Enchanter and Lolita are, in many senses, pulling from figures ( I am thinking of Camus and Freud, specifically) that Nabokov has openly denied of seeing any intellectual prowess in. Since he has observed them closely enough to shit-talk them relentlessly, it is nearly certain that he is borrowing from their theories consciously, and it is hard to think of this borrowing as parody, as it contextualizes entire stories which have worked in Nabokov’s favor. Perhaps he is using the psychological approach as a means of making his stories relevant in circles that appreciate Freud and Camus.

            Like the use of psychoanalytic approaches, I believe that Nabokov is exploiting the exploitative and its appeal to the masses in order to characterize his main characters as troubled, sleazy, corrupted—in Lolita, especially, the foreword’s frame of justification followed by the vulgar perversions of Humbert’s account—his speaking of these matters matter-of-factly—creates a conflict in the reader as to whether or not they should feel empathy for him. It keeps the average reader interested and reading.