Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

92
Vladimir Nabokov
upon subject matter which was, and still is, strongly taboo in Western
culture is, clearly, a flamboyant understatement.
The novel’s notoriety was surely enhanced by the two movie
versions that have been made of it. The first, in 1962, was directed
by Stanley Kubrick and starred James Mason as Humbert Humbert
and Sue Lyon as Dolores, with Shelley Winters playing Charlotte
Haze and a madcap performance by Peter Sellers as Quilty. The 1997
version by director Adrian Lyne had Jeremy Irons and the 15-yearold
Dominique Swain in the two major roles, and Melanie Griffith
as Charlotte. Frank Langella played Quilty in a performance entirely
different from Sellers’, but equally wild. Nabokov himself actually
wrote a script for the earlier film, but Kubrick chose not to use it, a
decision that Nabokov himself eventually concluded was wise.
Since Humbert Humbert is the sole narrator of the book, we see
all its characters and action through the eyes of a pedophile, and this
adds an important level of nuance and complexity to Lolita. Moreover,
Humbert is telling his story from a jail cell to justify his obsession and
to try to make the case that he is not a criminal, much less a pervert,
just a devoted lover with a particularly rich imagination. Thus, he
constantly addresses the readers of Lolita as “Ladies and gentlemen
of the jury” (Lolita 11). He argues that “the majority of sex offenders
that hanker for some . . . girl child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive,
timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to
pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their
little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and
society cracking down upon them. . . . We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed
gentlemen. . . . emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill” (89).
And yet, as we noted earlier, Humbert does kill his rival Quilty. But
is he a “poet”?
What makes Humbert’s narration problematic is that, poet or not,
he is a consummate wordsmith: learned, witty, full of arguments and
examples that support or justify his obsession. His words are always
fascinating, even mesmerizing (Nabokov even considered naming the
character “Mesmer Mesmer”). Consider just the opening lines of his
narration:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps
down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.