Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [62]
11: Nabokov's Lolita
quite mistaken. To his surprise and disappointment, eighteenth-century audiences (particularly the novel's target audience, women) bought Lovelace's version of reality. They fell in love with the rake and started demanding of the author that he end the story with a happy marriage between the angelic Clarissa and the man whom Richardson saw as a consummate stalker and rapist. In response to such demands Richardson prepared a revised edition of Clarissa (1751). It contained new scenes and pointed editorial notes, all of them tending to the same end—"blackening" the image of Lovelace1 so that no future readers would be so naive as to see him as a misguided, wretched, star-crossed but still romantic and desirable lover.
To see how much these efforts availed Richardson, take a look at the back cover of the most popular modern edition of the novel (Penguin, 1985).2 It describes Lovelace as "easily the most charming villain in English literature" and claims that in this "fatally attracted pair, Richardson created lovers that haunt the imagination as Romeo and Juliet do, or Tristran and Isolde." Lovelace would have certainly been happy with this blurb. Didn't he strive mightily to persuade his audience that he is a new Romeo or Tristan even if his Isolde is occasionally unwilling to live up to her part?
An eerily similar fate (down to the phrasing of the cover blurb) awaited Nabokov's Lolita, another novel that challenged its readers' metarepresentational capacity with its figure of the unreliable narrator. Lolita features a sexual predator who tells the story of his "relationship" with a twelve-yearold girl by portraying himself as an ultimate star-crossed lover, doomed both by the social unacceptability of his love and by the stubborn unwillingness of the underage object of his passion to rise up to his transcendent feelings. "Betrayed" and "abandoned" by her—for, like Clarissa, Lolita manages to escape her jailer—he discovers new depths of feeling. He is ready to "shout [his] poor truth" to the cruel world until he is "gagged and half-throttled" by philistines, for he insists "the world know how much [he] loved [his] Lolita," even when she outgrew the tender age which made her attractive to pedophiles and turned into a seventeen-year-old woman, "pale and polluted, and big with another's child" (278).
Many readers swallowed Humbert Humbert's "poor truth" hook, line, and sinker. As Brian Boyd reports, one early reviewer saw the book's theme not as "the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child."3 Another admitted that he had "come virtually to condone the violation . . . [for he] was plainly not able to muster up the tone of moral outrage. . . . Humbert is perfectly willing to say that he is a monster; we find ourselves less and less eager to agree with him."4 Peter Rabinowitz highlights critical reactions to Lolita that strike me as particularly reminiscent of responses to Clarissa. He cites one distinguished critic who characterized Lolita and Humbert as "lovers" and their relationship as a "love affair," and another who saw Lolita as Humbert's "Juliet" (a "trivial" and "complicit" one, but still a Juliet).5
Like Richardson before him, Nabokov felt compelled to correct his readers' misperception. He pointed out that Humbert Humbert is a "vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear touching" (Strong Opinions, 94). Also like Richardson, Nabokov did not altogether succeed in his corrective endeavor.
I know that he did not, based on my own first experience of reading Lolita in my early twenties. I was profoundly touched by this story