Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [22]
We in our class disagreed with all of these interpretations. We unanimously (I am rather proud to say) agreed with Véra Nabokov and sided with Lolita. “Lolita discussed by the papers from every possible point of view except one: that of its beauty and pathos,” Véra wrote in her diary. “Critics prefer to look for moral symbols, justification, condemnation, or explanation of HH’s predicament. . . . I wish, though, somebody would notice the tender description of the child’s helplessness, her pathetic dependence on monstrous HH, and her heartrending courage all along culminating in that squalid but essentially pure and healthy marriage, and her letter, and her dog. And that terrible expression on her face when she had been cheated by HH out of some little pleasure that had been promised. They all miss the fact that the ‘horrid little brat’ Lolita is essentially very good indeed—or she would not have straightened out after being crushed so terribly, and found a decent life with poor Dick more to her liking than the other kind.”
Humbert’s narration is confessional, both in the usual sense of the term and in that he is literally writing a confession in jail, awaiting trial for the murder of the playwright Claire Quilty, with whom Lolita ran away to escape him and who cast her off after she refused to participate in his cruel sex games. Humbert appears to us both as narrator and seducer—not just of Lolita but also of us, his readers, whom throughout the book he addresses as “ladies and gentlemen of the jury” (sometimes as “Winged gentlemen of the jury”). As the story unfolds, a deeper crime, more serious than Quilty’s murder, is revealed: the entrapment and rape of Lolita (you will notice that while Lolita’s scenes are written with passion and tenderness, Quilty’s murder is portrayed as farce). Humbert’s prose, veering at times towards the shamelessly overwrought, aims at seducing the reader, especially the high-minded reader, who will be taken in by such erudite gymnastics. Lolita belongs to a category of victims who have no defense and are never given a chance to articulate their own story. As such, she becomes a double victim: not only her life but also her life story is taken from her. We told ourselves we were in that class to prevent ourselves from falling victim to this second crime.
Lolita and her mother are doomed before we see them: the Haze house, as Humbert calls it, more gray than white, is “the kind of place you know will have a rubber tube affixable to the tub faucet in lieu of shower.” By the time we stand in the front hall (graced with door chimes and “that banal darling of arty middle class, van Gogh’s ‘Arlesienne’ “) our smile has already turned smug and mocking. We glance at the staircase and hear Mrs. Haze’s “contralto voice” before Charlotte (“a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich”) descends into view. Sentence by sentence and word by word, Humbert destroys Charlotte even as he describes her: “She was obviously one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or a bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul.”
She never has a chance, poor woman; nor does she improve on further acquaintance as the reader is regaled with descriptions of her superficiality, her sentimental and jealous passion for Humbert and her nastiness to her daughter. Through his beautiful language (“you can always trust a murderer for his fancy prose style”), Humbert focuses the reader’s attention on the banalities and small cruelties of American consumerism, creating a sense of empathy and complicity with the reader, who is encouraged to conceive of as understandable his ruthless seduction of a lonely widow and his eventual marriage to her in order to seduce her daughter.
Nabokov’s art is revealed in his ability to make us feel sympathy for Humbert’s victims—at least for his two wives, Valeria and Charlotte—without our approving of them. We condemn Humbert’s acts of cruelty towards them even as we