Phelan distinguishes two techniques of unreliable narration – «estranging unreliability», which increases the distance between narrator and audience, and «bonding unreliability», which reduces the distance between narrator and audience – and argues that Nabokov employs both types of unreliability, and «a coding in which he gives the narration many marks of bonding unreliability but ultimately marks it as estranging unreliability». In this way, Nabokov persuades the authorial audience towards Humbert before estranging them from him. Phelan concludes that this process results in two misreadings of the novel: many readers will be taken in by Humbert’s narration, missing the marks of estranging unreliability or detecting only some of the narrator’s tricks, while other readers, in decoding the estranging unreliability, will conclude that all of Humbert’s narration is unreliable.
William Riggan places Humbert in a tradition of unreliable narration embodied by the fool or clown, in particular the disguised insight of the wise fool and the ironies, variations and ambiguities of the sotie. For Riggan, Humbert’s imprisonment in art and solipsism makes his account a parodic burlesque of confessional writing that suspends the possibility of a realistic fiction in which Humbert’s point of view is credible. While superficially allied in his artistic aims with Nabokov’s «espousal of esthetic bliss as the foremost criterion in the novel,» Humbert separates himself with his contradictory depictions of himself and Lolita as literary constructs. Humbert depicts himself as «alternately monstrous, buffoonish … witty, brutish, tender, malevolent, and kind». He self-consciously casts himself in the buffoonish role of «a combination of urbane satirist, brutish satyr, and sadly gleeful Harlequin». He both caricatures Lolita as commonplace and idealizes her into a solipsized vision entirely different from the real Lolita. Riggan sees Humbert as personifying «the spirit of Harlequin or a sottie clown who annihilates reality, turns life into a game and the world upside down, and ends by creating chaos».
Some critics point to chronological discrepancies in Lolita as intentional and «centrally relevant» to Humbert’s unreliable narration. Christina Tekiner views the discrepancies as evidence that the last nine chapters of the novel are a product of Humbert’s imagination, and Leona Toker believes that the «crafty handling of dates» exposes Humbert’s «cognitive unreliability». Other critics, such as Brian Boyd, explain the discrepancies as Nabokov’s errors.
Publication and reception
Nabokov finished Lolita on 6 December 1953, five years after starting it. Because of its subject matter, Nabokov intended to publish it pseudonymously (although the anagrammatic character Vivian Darkbloom would tip off the alert reader). The manuscript was turned down, with more or less regret, by Viking, Simon & Schuster, New Directions, Farrar, Straus, and Doubleday. After these refusals and warnings, he finally resorted to publication in France. Via his translator Doussia Ergaz, it reached Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, «three-quarters of whose list was pornographic trash». Underinformed about Olympia, overlooking hints of Girodias’s approval of the conduct of a protagonist Girodias presumed was based on the author, and despite warnings from Morris Bishop, his friend at Cornell, Nabokov signed a contract with Olympia Press for publication of the book, to come out under his own name.
Lolita was published in September 1955, as a pair of green paperbacks «swarming with typographical errors». Although the first printing of 5,000 copies sold out, there were no substantial reviews. Eventually, at the very end of 1955, Graham Greene, in the London Sunday Times, called it one of the three best books of 1955. This statement provoked a response from the London Sunday Express, whose editor John Gordon called it «the filthiest book I have ever read» and «sheer unrestrained pornography». British Customs officers were then instructed by the Home Office to seize all copies entering the United Kingdom. In December 1956, France followed suit, and the Minister of the Interior banned Lolita; the ban lasted for two years. Its eventual British publication by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in London in 1959 was controversial enough to contribute to the end of the political career of the Conservative member of parliament Nigel Nicolson, one of the company’s partners.
The novel then appeared in Danish and Dutch translations. Two editions of a Swedish translation were withdrawn at the author’s request.
Despite initial trepidation, there was no official response in the U.S., and the first American edition was issued by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in August 1958. The book was into a third printing within days and became the first since Gone with the Wind to sell 100,000 copies in its first three weeks. Orville Prescott, the influential book reviewer of the New York Times, greatly disliked the book, describing it as «dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion». This review failed to influence the book’s sales and it is estimated that Lolita had sold 50 million copies by 2005.
Lolita was later translated into Russian by Nabokov himself and published in New York City in 1967 by Phaedra Publishers.
Present-day views
The novel continues to generate controversy today as modern society has become increasingly aware of the lasting damage created by child sexual abuse. In 2008, an entire book, Approaches to teaching Nabokov’s Lolita, was published on the best ways to teach the novel in a college classroom given that «its particular mix of narrative strategies, ornate allusive prose, and troublesome subject matter complicates its presentation to students». In this book, one author urges teachers to note that Dolores’ suffering is noted in the book even if the main focus is on Humbert.
Many critics describe Humbert as a rapist, notably Azar Nafisi in her best-selling Reading Lolita in Tehran, though in a survey of critics Elizabeth Patnoe notes that other interpreters of the novel have been reluctant to use that term, despite Patnoe’s observation that Humbert’s actions «can only be interpreted as rape». Patnoe finds that many critics «sympathetically incorporate Humbert’s language into their own», or believe Lolita seduces Humbert while emphasizing Humbert’s responsibility. Of those who claim that Humbert rapes Lolita, Patnoe finds that many «go on to subvert the claim by confounding love and rape».
Near the end of the novel, Humbert states that had he been his own sentencing judge, he «would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape». Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd denies that it was rape «in any ordinary sense», on the grounds that «it is she who suggests that they try out the naughty trick» which she has already learned at summer camp. This perspective is vigorously disputed by Peter Rabinowitz in his essay «Lolita: Solipsized or Sodomized?». Rabinowitz argues that in seeking metaphorical readings and generalized meaning, academic readers viewing Lolita within the frame of high art are «standing back from the situation — a posture that leads, in this case, to a blame-the-victim reading by turning this victimized child into a femme fatale, a cruel mistress, a girl without emotions.»
In 2015, Joanne Harris wrote for The Independent about the enduring controversy and fascination with Lolita, saying: «This novel, so often condemned as obscene, contains not a single explicit phrase, but instead radiates colour and sensuality throughout, spinning the straw of obscenity into the gold of rapture. Perhaps this is the real reason for the outrage that greeted its publication. Paedophilia is not a subject that should be linked with poetry.»
In 2020, a podcast hosted by Jamie Loftus set out to examine the cultural legacy of the novel, and argued that depictions and adaptations have «twisted» Nabokov’s original intention of condemning Humbert in Lolita.
Sources and links
Links in Nabokov’s work
In 1928, Nabokov wrote a poem named «Lilith» (Лилит), depicting a sexually attractive underage girl who seduces the male protagonist only to leave him humiliated in public. In 1939, he wrote a novella, Volshebnik (Волшебник), that was published only posthumously in 1986 in English translation as The Enchanter. It bears many similarities to Lolita, but also has significant differences: it takes place in Central Europe, and the protagonist is unable to consummate his passion with his stepdaughter, leading to his suicide. The theme of hebephilia was already touched on by Nabokov in his short story «A Nursery Tale», written in 1926. Also, in the 1932 novel Laughter in the Dark, Margot Peters is 16 and has already had an affair when the middle-aged Albinus becomes attracted to her.
In chapter three of the novel The Gift (written in Russian in 1935–37), the similar gist of Lolita’s first chapter is outlined to the protagonist, Fyodor Cherdyntsev, by his landlord Shchyogolev as an idea of a novel he would write «if I only had the time»: a man marries a widow only to gain access to her young daughter, who resists all his passes. Shchyogolev says it happened «in reality» to a friend of his; it is made clear to the reader that it concerns himself and his stepdaughter Zina (15 at the time of Shchyogolev’s marriage to her mother), who becomes the love of Fyodor’s life.
In April 1947, Nabokov wrote to Edmund Wilson: «I am writing … a short novel about a man who liked little girls—and it’s going to be called The Kingdom by the Sea.» The work expanded into Lolita during the next eight years. Nabokov
