1. “Lolita” should make all of us—parents,
social workers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance
and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.
This quotation, from the end of the
fake foreword to Lolita by John Ray, Jr., Ph.D.,
sounds like a serious pronouncement. However, by the time the reader
has finished the novel, its assessment sounds patently ridiculous.
As an editor of psychology books, Ray is understandably attached
to the notions that psychology can shed an illuminating light on Lolita and
that the novel might become a notable book in psychiatric circles.
However, Nabokov, an outspoken critic of psychology, writes Lolita from
a romantic point of view, portraying Humbert’s impulses as emotional
and artistic, rather than psychological or scientific. Themes such
as lust and love were, for Nabokov, greater than the sum of their
scientific explanations. As a result, Ray’s attempt to assert that Lolita has
some “social significance” is comical, an indication that Nabokov
intends to derail a psychological explanation of his novel, in favor
of a more magical or emotional one.
This quotation also seems heavy-handed in its assumption
that the moral of Lolita will be clear to the reader.
While Nabokov does not excuse Humbert’s pedophilia or his controlling
nature, and while he clearly outlines Lolita’s loss of innocence
and corruption, Lolita is not a morally didactic
novel. Nabokov makes Humbert speak in romantic, persuasive tones
that convince a reader to sympathize with Humbert’s pedophiliac
impulses, even as the reader is repulsed by those impulses. Humbert
is not portrayed wholly as a villain, and Lolita is no deflowered
virgin: thelines between good and evil are not clearly drawn. Even
Quilty, who lurks behind the scenes as a malevolent shadow, is more
similar than dissimilar to Humbert. The so-called moral impulses
scattered through the novel, such as Charlotte’s religious tendencies
and Pratt’s psychological analysis, are portrayed comically. Such
moralizing often leads to absurd conclusions and blinds the characters
to the truth of what is happening around them. As a result, Ray’s
assertion that Lolita must have a moral lesson
seems like a foolish attempt to justify the beauty of a novel that
deals with such sordid, immoral subject matter.
