how is humbert humbert a monster?

I think that's probably exactly what it was. Authors exorcise their demons in their work all the time. See Burroughs, another pedophile.
x-post to Kenan

-- From a Land of Grass Without Mirrors (aaronh...), November 3rd, 2004 10:50 PM. (AaronHz) (later)

How could Nabokov done that accidentally, though? How can you read that from even the subtext of a book and not understand that it's the whole point?

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I don't think any of it was accidental -- I think Nabokov's goading us into a comfortable pattern, into saying 'oh, isn't the pedophile terrible' as, practically, lip-service. Obviously in our world he is, but in the extremely constructed, extremely constricted universe of the novel, he's not ever presented that way.

OF COURSE NOT!

The narrator of the novel hates everyone except himself. The writer of the novel hates everyone including himself. That's a huge and important difference.

was a good thread.

I agree with you up until you start talking about Nabokov's intentions. Again, my concept of his intentions might be colored by how he talks about himself in interviews and essays, so they could admittedly be wrong, but I see his intentions as more playful and mischevious than sadistic. I agree he's toying with his readers somewhat, but I think he also wants to draw them to a conclusion, and I don't think he wants to "sock 'em in the gut."

I think the fact that the word "Lolita" has come to mean a debased version of what HH refers to in the book as the "nymphette" would have been amusing to Nabokov and horrifying to HH: HH wants his Lolita to be proclaimed as a singularly exulted being, a unique and precious child/goddess he has defiled, and to return her to her proper high place through his language; Nabokov knows that he (pronoun deliberately left imprecise) is doomed to fucking that up, to protraying more about himself than his unique individual subject.

Nabokov was a butterfly collector. So he knows all about taking pleasure in the destruction of innocent beautiful things, and then pinning them in a book so they can live forever.

OTM. HH suffers for what he does, it's not thought of as right. I think HH feels this too, but is flawed and turbulent. I do, however, feel no hatred for HH, only sadness for him and Lolita.

Do people think HH genuinely loves Lolita, at any point in the novel?

H takes his pleasure because he can't not, and his pleasure destroys her. I think Nabokov leaves the question of whether there is pleasure in the very destruction open, but at the very least does want to show that any aethete suffers at least SOME sort of moral pain when destroying a beautiful thing. "The moral sense in mortals is the duty/we have to pay on mortal sense of beauty."

"or are you saying Nabokov took pleasure in writing this?"

I think he did, but I think he also considers the possibility that this is in itself pretty fucked up. He took pleasure in butterfly collecting, and he knows that the butterflies are dead. There is an eroticism in the writing, in the desire to WRITE Lolita into some kind of eternal existence (as Dante did to Beatrice) that also makes it completely impossible to really know who the hell Delores Haze was (and who the hell was Beatrice, anyway?)

I think the novel is partly a dissection of all romantic love, not only paedophilia. Shifting balances of power, delusional objectification of the loved one, the ultimate selfishness of a certain kind of intense desire, these are all themes that can apply to any relationship.

Take it up with Hunter S. Thompson. I can't be the only person who read that interview.

But unfortunately, someone is probably going to read that and believe you.

HST saying that in Rolling Stone vs. some schmuck like me repeating it on ILX. What if someone did believe it, so what?

Allegorically, how about the standard riff that Humbert is Old Europe to Lolita's New World, appalled and entranced and intoxicated by her freedom and vulgarity, and all that? Lolita came out just a few years after Bazin started Cahiers du Cinema -- there was that whole postwar European fascination with America as the immediate future, the embrace of American pop culture. (For that matter, Lolita also came out the year after "Rock Around the Clock" -- Humbert as Beethoven rolling over and telling Tchaikovsky he should check out this sweet young thing, yeah she talks too much but you should see her dance.)

the thing that in my opinion is so good about "Lolita" is that, apart from the OBVIOUS fact that Humbert H. is a charming, erudite monster with unfortunately some fairly defensible opinions about America and its inhabitants, the novel describes quite chillingly what happens when you get what you want without thinking about what you got to do to get it. There's a scene where Humbert recalls a painting of a big locomotive rushing through an imaginary America--his dream of the country--and then of course the reality was somewhat different, motels and cheapness (sure, beauty as well). And that's the spookiest thing about the novel, is imagining Humbert on the road in some godforsaken place and his recalling that dream-painting.

I've never read anything about Nabokov being a pedophile. He did have an affair, stepped out on Vera once. But he always seemed pretty busy and Vera certainly seems to have been a constant presence. So I dunno.

I mean, who'd want to read a novel about a writer who comes to America, struggles to find work and make a living, has a devoted wife, travels around the country and loves it, shares virtually none of the standard European disdain for American culture and intellectual attainment, becomes successful after writing a novel about what might have happened if he hadn't had the love of his wife and had been obsessed with old and rotten ideas left over from his romantic youth, and then continues to produce pretty good art up until his death? No one.

But part of what's so grimly funny about Lolita is that it's almost not, in context, so monstrous. I can't remember if the two words are Nabokov's or someone else's or mine, but the world around Humbert and Dolores has this quality of "cheerful barbarism" that compares really interestingly to the relationship between the two of them. I haven't read this in years, but part of what kills about the ending, I think, is that the blank shrugging Lolita of the end seems to have been way fully inducted into that cheerful-barbarism America -- and there's room to wonder whether it's as a result of being "damaged" by Humbert or as an intractable destiny from the get-go.