Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Lolita 93
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet
ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at
school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she
was always Lolita. (Lolita 11)
Rather like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Nabokov and Humbert
have been seen by some readers as making the case that vice is so
much more interesting than virtue, that there is a kind of repellent
attraction that can make evil irresistible.
Lolita invites thoughtful readers to ponder a series of questions,
not just about the novel itself, but about the process of experiencing
and understanding challenging and controversial works of literary art.
Among those questions remains the obvious: Is Lolita a dirty book?
As a quick internet search makes appallingly clear, the word
“Lolita” has entered the English language with the meaning of a
sexually precocious young girl. Many more people have heard at least
something about Lolita than have actually read the book. The novel’s
racy public image guarantees that its sexually suggestive reputation
confronts most readers before they have a serious encounter with
Nabokov’s actual words. Of course, in some respects, the work’s repute
is helpful: many students and others are relatively eager to read the
book, because its reputation precedes it. After a few chapters, though,
readers are going to recognize that Nabokov does not present what
the author characterizes as typically pornographic action, “limited
to the copulation of clichés” (Lolita 305). To Nabokov, “the term
‘pornography’ connotes mediocrity, commercialism, and certain strict
rules of narration. Obscenity must be mated with banality because
every kind of aesthetic enjoyment has to be entirely replaced by
simple sexual stimulation . . .” (“On a Book Entitled Lolita” 315).
Even the harshest critics of Lolita, at least those who have read
any of the novel, would not suggest that it is mediocre, commercial,
predictable, or banal.
The “dirty book” question, however, does invite thoughtful readers
to consider the difference between a book in which sex is an important
motif (which is surely the case in Lolita, and in life) and a work
of pornography, which, as I believe Nabokov accurately suggests, has
as its primary, usually sole, function as the predictable sexual stimulation
of the reader. Actually, by contemporary standards, and even by
those of the mid-twentieth century, this novel is remarkably prim