This book is not comfortable reading and I’m trying to decide whether it’s the topic or if it’s the skill with which it involves the reader into this topic.
The idea of a forty-plus year-old man lusting after a twelve year-old does not as deeply disturb me for its own sake for several reasons. First, as yet there is no action in the desire. That I must take into consideration that the bias is a cultural taboo, and one that has changed through the centuries. Physiologically, most young girls are able to bear children with the beginning of the menses, normally around age eleven. Where environment and conditions warranted, girls were married at age twelve and that was acceptable. Also, we must remember, that it was often to very much older men–seldom if ever to a boy their own age. Even in modern day America there are girls of eleven and twelve who willingly engage in sexual activity.
Sex itself is an enigma in that it is both described as wrong and right depending only upon conditions that according to some standards need exist to sway its meaning one way or the other.
But Nabokov’s Humbert is deeply disturbing for other reasons. Primarily, because he is the first person narrator of his story, and his attitude is more upsetting then his desires themselves. His plan is to drug both Lolita and her mother (before this poor woman is unfortunately killed in a car accident) to make them not only compliant, but rather oblivious to his physical satisfying of his needs and wants. And, he speaks not of penetration but more of fondling, and in some way that’s yuckier because it’s more weird somehow.
Another thing that disturbs me quite a bit is Humbert’s seemingly overblown obsession with Lolita. It reminds me of Sarrasine’s torturous passion for La Zambinella, as well as many other doomed heroes and heroines of early Romantic literature. It revulses the reader who sees it as pathetic and weak. Nabokov’s use of language is brilliant, and his technique of weaving in colors of humor and pathos and adventure in such a planning of pacing make it good reading, but the relationship between Humbert and the reader is almost too intimately fastened. Perhaps that is where the level of comfort feels rubbed raw.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology