The reason for it all

Count the words, captain.

All right, so Quilty’s dead and Lolita’s married and dead and Humbert Humbert is dead and we’re done. That’s the story. (And to help out Ginger, who can be a little slow: I’m talking about the last part of the book)

But there’s a question that has to be considered. Why this story, why these characters? Why did Nabokov decide to write the story of a pedophile outwitted by another pedophile? He obviously wanted to tell something that was unconventional and new, with the unreliable narrator and the realism-dissolving winks. It’s possible that in order to tell a story that took us so far away from our normal fiction expectations, he needed a situation that was also out of the ordinary. Nabokov took us out of our comfort zone both morally and narratively.

And yet, he took us a little farther than that. I haven’t seen discomfort in our class sessions, I’ve seen blood-pissing anger at Humbert, at Nabokov, at the society that produces individuals who rape children. Now imagine the reader of 1958. How angry would they have been? I imagine, much worse. Nabokov couldn’t misjudge his audience that badly. He knew that he was creating a work which would violate social taboos so fiercely that the book would have to be cleaned up to be merely banned.

It’s possible that he wanted us to be angry. Anger is a strong reaction, and evoking reactions is the ultimate goal of any work of art, classical or modern or otherwise. If that is the case, then he suceeded. But of course there’s a snag to this. If Nabokov just wanted to ruffle feathers, he could have used much clunkier prose style and come off as a close cousin to Bill O’Reilly. Instead he wrote it beautifully.

In modern society we see several groups who promote pedophilia as a natural form of love, the idea being that no sexual behavior can be called deviant so long as it is an innate desire of human beings. I’m sure that Nabokov’s beautiful prose and image of pure love felt toward a child could be appropriated by these sick bastards as an example of their purity. Fortunately, Humbert and Quilty are much too monstrous to allow for that.

The purpose of the story could be any of these things, or more likely none of them. I’m not Nabokov, so I can’t know why he wrote Lolita. But it’s worth thinking about.