Lolita is the fulcrum for criticism of Vladimir Nabokov’s fictions. Taken together, Jenny Minton Quigley’s expansive Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century and Robert Alter’s exuberant Nabokov and the Real World: Between Appreciation and Defense provide 31 cogent viewpoints on that “timebomb” and other works.
Quigley has a privileged perspective. For her, Lolita is personal. Her father, Walter J. Minton, published the controversial novel at G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1958. Its reputation preceded it. In a letter to New Directions publisher and editor James Lauglin, Nabokov tagged the novel with that explosive label. Five publishers had previously rejected it.
It took until 1998 for the board of the Modern Library to name Lolita a “bona fide runaway commercial success,” fourth on its list of the “greatest English language novels” of the 20th century. Other best lists followed from Time, TheNew Yorker, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
The vast number of commentaries on Lolita must make compendiums like Quigley’s a chore to compile. She shapes the collection wisely, choosing 30 writers who approach the subject from cultural, thematic, cinematic, and personal angles. Balancing the context of the past with assessments of the present, she acknowledges #MeToo movement. Scalding statements from Lauren Groff (“Delectatio Morosa”) regard the novel as a clash between “urgent beauty” and a “dazzling creation [that] is both a truly towering work of genius and a profoundly poisonous thing that works in darkness and hurts in stealth.”
This bifurcated vision is echoed in many of the contributions, including imaginative narratives by Jessica Shattuck (“Charlotte’s Complaint”) and Cheryl Strayed (“Dear Sugar”). Shattuck’s “letter” by Lolita’s mother begins in “outrage,” swirls through the “afterlife” of 2020, and pleads with readers to “think for a moment” of her as a myopic witness to the novel’s ruse and resolution. Strayed formulates a letter from married, 85-year old Dolores Haze Mayes (who has lived beyond her literary demise) in which she purports to “tell the truth” about her life for Strayed’s “advice on love and life” columns. She wants to tell “not the story that has been made of me [but] the story I made of myself.”
In one paragraph, Christina Baker Kline (“Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury”) makes congruent comparisons to Lolita’s narrator, Humbert Humbert, with convicted sexual predators, #MeToo “villains” — Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein — who “may have used” the novel as an “instruction manual.” She cites quotes from Lolita’s story that appear relevant to the comedian, producer, and financier: when the child’s seducer administered a “powerful sleeping potion to both mother and daughter so as to fondle the latter through the night with perfect impunity”; or “hurt too many bodies with my twisted poor hands to be proud of them”; or thought “what little girl would not like to whirl in a circular skirt and panties?” She includes Louis C. K.’s admission of “constant perverted sexual thoughts” in his comedy routines and Matt Lauer’s “indignant response” to accusations of rape by saying that “each act was mutual and completely consensual.”
The taint of perversion is taken up by most of the contributors. Sometimes, however, that approach verges on retroactively facile judgments. Beating the dead horse of censorship that surrounded the initial response to Lolita simply becomes repetitive and unnecessary. Lolita does not need to be defended from Susan Choi’s charge (“Badge of Honor”) that it is “morally hazardous” or “psychically deforming.” Nor from Robin Givhan’s (“Fashion’s Lolita Fragile, Subversive, and a Paean to White Femininity”) perception of the character as “both a noun and an adjective … both oppressive and freeing, exploitative and exploited.” Neither Nabokov nor his creation is responsible for “long-legged, gangly young girls in short skater skirts who are a wind gust away from decency.” The pernicious insinuation insults those readers able to distinguish fiction from reality, image from imagination.
To turn from the obvious to the enlightening, Tim Bissell’s discussion of the movie versions of Lolita is the most dazzling, informative, and entertaining essay here – as well as the longest at 37 pages. In “Nabokov’s Rocking Chair: Lolita at the Movies,” he elucidates how the “unfilmable” novel was shot not once but twice. He covers the “dramatic fixity” of a book and the challenges of adaptation to “retain things out of love and disfigure them out of necessity.” (The fictional Lolita did not wear those lipstick red, heart-shaped sunglasses that appear on the cinematic Lolita in movie posters.) Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film was not “faithful” to the book. It quickly turned into the story of Peter Sellars’s Clare Quilty rather than James Mason’s Humbert Humbert or Sue Lyons’s Lolita. Even Shelley Winters’s Charlotte Haze was diminished. Adrian Lyne’s 1997 version (from Fatal Attractionscreenwriter James Dearden) was an “abomination worthy of spinning several generations of Nabokovs in their luxurious graves.” Bissell gives a close reading to the “unmade” Nabokov screenplay and demonstrates how it, too, was “unfilmable.” He even notes a crucial point about the twin Lolita actresses — Sue Lyon and Dominque Swain — and how the role affected their lives.
Quigley’s thoughtfully curated selections invite reflection, discussion, and debate. Whether Lolita is the “most lyrical novel of the 20th c.” (Sloane Crosley, “They Stay the Same Age”); or a “cubist masterpiece bringing together disparate elements of cinema, arts, and literature into an unsettling (and often gorgeous) mosaic” (Lila Azam Zanganeh, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Lolita”); or a subversive novel that provokes sex-starved rhetoric of the “dark ecstasy” of “working schoolgirl shtick” (Jill Kargman, “Lo and Behold”), it is indisputably the most talked about novel of the mid 20th to the early 21st century.
Alter’s task is quite different. Instead of 30 varying perspectives, Nabokov and the Real World: Between Appreciation and Defense speaks with one resounding voice, his own. He assembles eleven chapters which place Nabokov’s stories and novels within the framework of his own life. Agile analyses and astute observations abound. Like Quigley’s book, Alter’s basic premise is enhanced by his all-encompassing subtitle which also serves as the title of the opening chapter. He remarks on Nabokov as the “most polarizing of the major novelists who have written in English,” one who divides readers and critics. Admirers are “passionate about him.” Others “cannot abide” him. The disconcerting enigma of these “starkly antithetical responses” is that both sides seem to love him and hate him for the same reasons, “coy literary devices, mannered or overwrought prose, and a pervasive archness.”
Alter goes on to explore how “self-reflexivity and realism work together” in some of Nabokov’s major works. How the “games of his fiction” lead the reader to “various emotional, moral, and even political aspects of the real world.”
His exegesis of the short story “That in Aleppo Once …” acts as the cornerstone of his approach to the other fictions. His close precise examination of the story’s style reads as if he were explicating poetry. He comments once again on the division of readers who see the play of language as either “inventive, amusing, arresting, and at peak moments altogether sublime” or “self-regarding, precious, annoying, and anything but a vehicle for engaging [the reader] in something like the real world.”
In defense of his observation he cites a sentence that appears early in the story:
“And the sonorous souls of Russian verbs lend a meaning to the wild gesticulation of the trees or to some discarded newspaper sliding and pausing and shuffling again, with abortive flaps and apterous jerks along an endless windswept embankment.”
He sees this as the “interaction between language and things,” a “small riot of personification [that] imbues the represented scene with life.” This is a key idea he returns to frequently in the remaining essays. He also recognizes that the exacting language is not just a concatenation of mellifluous words but is a “powerful representation of how finely wrought prose can, with the greatest concision, convey the full emotional burden of a character’s experience.” His own tone and manner often mimic the rhetoric of his source with alliteration, puns, repetition of words, and figures of speech, displaying wit and erudition.
When he writes about Nabokov the person — as he does in the chapter on “Not Reading the Papers” — he reflects on how Nabokov, the entomologist functioning as the lepidopterist, sees reality as a “kind of infinite regress of related but unique entities — snowflakes and souls — endlessly and unpredictably linked with each other through hidden patterns, layer after layer or level after level of ‘reality’ dimly glimmering behind the one we strive to see.” There is the “constant awareness that all representations of reality in fiction take place against a large and complex background of established representational techniques and specific memorable instances of representation.” This line of thinking leads Nabokov to devise a “new method of classification that involved counting the scales of butterfly wings” in the real world and catching what “lay below the threshold of perception” in the fictional world. That could be played out as a “radiant artist and perverter of art (Humbert Humbert” or a “hopelessly inept, absentminded professor who is also a bumbling moral hero (Pnin).” For Nabokov, “fidelity to the imagination is a form of political courage.”
It takes Alter three chapters to get to “Lolita Now,” one of the two new pieces in the group (the establishing argument in “Between Appreciation and Defense” being the first). His perspective encapsulates the whole of Quigley’s gathering.
Alter reiterates the novel’s reputation as “the most commented-on novel written in English in the past hundred years” raising “moral questions” about its subject at the same time that it is a “literary achievement of the first order of originality.” He then resolves this seemingly double-edged reaction by focusing on the book’s “extraordinary, habitual extravagant style” at the same time that it presents itself as paradoxical parody.
As he did with “That In Aleppo Once …,” he settles on a representative passage from Lolita that exposes the “tricky balancing act” of the “contradiction between subject and style.” In what is viewed as “the most explicitly sexual moment” of the narrative, Nabokov’s “verbal pyrotechnics” are “exquisitely orchestrated” to engage the reader in both delight and revulsion. The elevated alliteration in the first sentence of the paragraph — “The implied sun pulsated in the supplied poplars” — incorporates a rhyme but also visualizes the real outside world with objective perceptions. There is the recognition that Humbert Humbert is both a “compelling fictional representation of a disturbed person” and a “kind of pawn in an inventive literary game” created by a “shrewd and witty” novelist observing “the world outside of literature entirely mediated by literature.”
Alter completes the chapter by acknowledging that “for all the moral dubiety of the protagonist’s story, it is fun if also at the same time troubling to read Lolita.” Much of that “fun” comes from the “essential role of parody.” Those elements include Nabokov’s dismissive disdain for Freud beginning with the framing device of Dr. John Ray, Jr.’s “Foreword” to the “Confession of a White Widowed Male,” his use of a Dostoevskyian (a writer he despised) double in developing Quilty as Humbert’s doppelganger, and the resonating references to Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee” (alluded to in the third paragraph with the line “a princedom by the sea”) when Humbert’s first traumatizing love is named Annabel Leigh. This technique culminates in the climactic scene when Humbert confronts Quilty in a “plethora of parodic literary and cinematic references” interfusing “fun and horror” in an “hilarious” manner. Nabokov thereby “approaches two things with the utmost seriousness: the profoundly consequential act of sexually exploiting a child and the instrument of art through which the moral issue is represented.”
Ada and Pnin receive due attention. Alter deems “Ada, or The Perils of Paradise” as another exercise in the “dimension of parody.” Nabokov’s vision of “paradise regained — or retained” allows him to create a “fictional antiworld” with “anagrams, trilingual puns, coded hints, and conflated allusions for their own sake.” The result conflates Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden” with Charles Baudelaire’s “Invitation au voyage” becoming an “extended poetic vision of Eden” albeit resembling a “dark drama of fatal, incestuous passion.”
Alter sees Pnin in “Nabokov for Those Who Hate Him” as the most accessible of the novels, the “most instructive about his moral imagination.” It is a “blessed change of pace. Its protagonist is repeatedly poignant in his well-meaning, hapless ineptitude, in his loneliness, in his unrequited loves.” The character of the academic is “irresistibly funny … one of the great comic characters of twentieth-century American fiction.” The narrator is meant to be a “negative alter ego” and “mirror-reversal” of Nabokov. The novel was his first commercial success, drawing on his experiences in teaching at Wellesley and Cornell, working in the “academic world but not really of it,” constrained to do it out of “material necessity.”
Concluding chapters explore the politics of Invitation to A Beheading, the allure of memory and the transcendence of time in Speak, Memory, his “metaphysics of fiction” in Lectures on Literature which reveals Nabokov’s “sense of the novel as a form that requires exacting craft, close observation, and constant imagination of concrete things.” He sees a “definite relation between fiction and reality” and conceives the “artist as magician” functioning in an enchanted world.
Alter’s final remarks (“Style in the Novel, Style in Nabokov, and the Question of Translation”) reflect on the art of the novel in general. He sees the form as “always immeasurably smaller than its objects of representation — a life, a relationship, a city, a society, a historical moment — but its fundamental mimetic trick is precisely that it does not feel small.” It is the writer’s obligation to create an “illusion of the largeness of life.” Which may account for the longevity of Nabokov’s “timebomb” and the rest of his canon. Lolita will continue to be explosive.
[Lolita in the Afterlife, published by Vintage on March 16, 2021, 448 pages, $16.95 paperback // Nabokov and the Real World, published by Princeton University Press on March 16, 2021, 248 pages, $19.95 paperback]