[LINK] "The Real Lolita"

[rfmcdonald]

A John from Facebook linked to Sarah Weinman's blog post at Penguin Canada describing the genesis of Vladimir Nabokov's famous and controversial novel Lolita in a real-life abduction of a young girl, Sally Horner, by a pedophile. I will say that I've always read Lolita as a subtle but damning condemnation of the narrator, but Weinman's exploration of the girl whose story gave form to Nabokov's novel is entirely merited.

Vladimir Nabokov’s 1956 essay “On a Book Entitled Lolita” was an essay he never intended to write. He disdained literal mapping of nonfiction to fiction, as well as the search for moral meaning: “For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.”

[. . .]

Lolita is a nested series of tricks. Humbert Humbert, the confessing pervert, tries so hard to obfuscate his monstrosities that he seems unaware when he truly gives himself away, despite alleging the treatise is a full accounting of his crimes. Nabokov, however, gives the reader a number of clues to the literary disconnect, the most important being the parenthetical. It works brilliantly early on in Lolita, when Humbert describes the death of his mother—“My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three”—or when he sights Dolores Haze in the company of her own mother, Charlotte, for the first time: “And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess (lost, kidnaped, discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at the king and his hounds), I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side.” The unbracketed narrative is what Humbert wants us to see; the asides reveal what is really inside his mind.

Late in Lolita, one of these digressions gives away the critical inspiration. Humbert, once more in Lolita’s hometown after five years away, sees Mrs. Chatfield, the “stout, short woman in pearl-gray,” in his hotel lobby, eager to pounce upon him with a “fake smile, all aglow with evil curiosity.” But before she can, the parenthetical appears like a pop-up thought balloon for the bewildered Humbert: “Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle [sic], a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?”