Today, the term Lolita is known throughout the world and defines, more or less, a girl or adolescent who has not reached the age of sexual consent, but who is sexually attractive to older men. It's an American word. But before being a word, before being a song by Lana del Rey, before being a Stanley Kubrick film, before representing a concept, it was simply the name of the protagonist of one of the best novels of the 20th century.
“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. 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".
With this perfectly written paragraph begins one of the most controversial works of universal literature. For some people who have not read the book, and perhaps for many who read it incomplete, or completed their reading without understanding it, it's about the story of "an old man who seduces a young girl". But the novel is so much more than that. Yes, it's an obsessive love that Humbert Humbert, a fortyish teacher, feels for the beautiful Lolita who is barely twelve when they meet. Yes, twelve! And it's true that Humbert marries Charlotte, the mother of Dolores, only to be close to her and that after the death of his wife in almost miraculous circumstances, Humbert maintains a loving relationship with his nymphet that borders on the incestuous. All this is true, but it is insufficient to judge the story, the characters and above all, the novel and its author.
I'll start with the latter. Nabokov can't be labeled a "pervert" for writing this novel. Literature doesn't have the obligation to be moralizing. The characters in a novel can commit the worst humiliations and that's not reason for the author to be condemned. More in his favor, at no time defends Humbert's obsession. Quite the opposite. He's a man who was admitted to sanatoriums several times, before and after meeting Lo, and who is aware of his deviation. He doesn't exalt it, in fact he hides it and represses it for a large part of his life because he knows that it's not right. He himself traces that condition back to his origin, when he was a teenager but that only crystallizes with Dolores Haze. That is, always dreamed, fantasized, wished to conquer a nymphet, and make her his own but only managed to fulfill that fantasy with his Lolita. Lolita in turn is not the tender girl that most twelve years old can be. Despite her young age, she already has some experience in the field and when she's observed by her mother's boyfriend, she voluntarily attracts him, looks for him and in her way seduces him, allowing herself to be seduced. In other words, there are two who play the game, there are two hunters who end up hunted by their respective prisoners. But Lo also knows that what he does with his stepfather is not right. As the novel progresses, we see that the seductive Dolores, cheerful, smiling at the beginning, mutates in a sullen, grumpy, rude and violent adolescent. It's her way of rejecting her lover and herself for allowing herself to enter such a dangerous game.
However, despite this incestuous, scandalous, unnatural union, there is still room for love. In the first instance, Humbert seems to love only the idea of what Lolita represents: "I knew that I had fallen in love with Lolita forever, but I also knew that she would not always be Lolita", as if their relationship was condemned by the expiration of his nymphet condition. However, towards the end of the novel, when he meets her one last time after a three-year estrangement, already grown and married, Humbert confesses "I looked at her and I looked at her and I understood, with as much certainty as I have to die, that I loved her more than anything in this world". Lionel Trilling, the literary critic, said about this novel: "No lover has thought of his beloved with such tenderness, no woman has been so enthralledly evoked, with such grace and delicacy, as Lolita". And I give him the reason. A man who says to his beloved: "I will create a new God, and I will thank him with heartrending cries, if you give me hope, even if it's only microscopic" and that his novel ends with "Lolita of mine" is without a doubt a man in love. Obsessive, jealous, pedophile, solipsist, upset, violent at times, yes, all that and more, but also a man tender and in love, who reveres his goddess with the servitude of a slave.
In addition to the central wicked attraction, the novel has many merits. It's aesthetically delicious and although it evidently has erotic passages, adorned with rich language, it's not pornographic. The sexual scenes are not only not crudely explicit, but they are few in number, ratifying that the novel has a complete and complex argument, beyond the love encounters between the protagonists. It also adds much of a road movie in the adventure of Humbert crossing the country with Lo and is imbued with that American culture of roads, restaurants, motels, commercials and the cult of the plastic. Nabokov manages to portray a country in an acid and visionary, but accurate way, which leaves an aftertaste to irony because Lolita may well be considered a great American novel that has brought new terms to its culture and although it was originally written in English ... it was written by a Russian!
Undoubtedly it is a great novel that manages to remain in the memory of the reader (of the good reader, of course) not because of the controversy, but precisely in spite of it. Love, obsession, tenderness, madness, violence, revenge, jealousy, all this and more can be seen in a novel that is partly romantic, partly erotic, partly a journey, partly a psychological drama, partly a story of jealousy and revenge, but in its totality is Literature of the best quality.
