LITERATURE: Lolita – Hypersexual, Hypertextual

A quickie–

We find that indeed, Lolita has been deflowered prior to Humbert’s groping, and she in fact is the one who, after a painfully frustrating night for Humbert, seduces him.

But onto hypertextual:  This novel with its high-falutin’ words and in particular, it’s multitude of French phrases and words interspersed with Humbert’s narrative, would be an ideal candidate for hyperlinks that give meaning or translation.  I’ve given up on dictionary digging for the English translations entirely–although I must say that in looking up phrases it has to a minute degree allowed me to recognize some words as they later show up in the text.

Closing the novel to open the dictionary–or to go online for the French language–is distracting.  Making notes and checking a list of words at a time is not as effective to the reading comprehension.  Footnotes, I would think, would be useful but how not to insult the reader on the English definitions?

With Nabokov’s love of language, it is often easy to guess at the meaning by its relevance to the sentence.  But here we are truly using the reader’s experience and intuition to progress the story. 

So then, what is the answer to the reading?