Failita, or, Lolita and the problem of the unreliable narrator

by Doctor Science

Brand, Gerhard. "Lolita." Magill's Survey Of American Literature, Revised Edition (2006): 1-2. Literary Reference Center. Web. 13 May 2013.

The novel works on many levels: It is a remorseless satire of middle-class, immature America and a seriocomic commentary on Continental-American cultural relations. More profoundly, it is a moving romance in the medieval tradition of courtly love, with the afflicted Humbert Humbert displaying his derangement by obsessional devotion and self-pitying masochism. He submits himself to his emotionally unattainable mistress as her slavish servant, glorying in her cruelly capricious power over him.

[emphasis mine] The medieval tradition of courtly love is calling, they want an apology. Flogging would be traditional.

From a manuscript, 1490-1500, of the Romance of the Rose.

Sprog the Younger found this gem while researching a paper for English class. She also discovered something I hadn't known, which is that the word "lolita" is filtered out by Google Safe Search. Frustratingly, I don't seem to be able to enable Safe Search for images while leaving it turned off for text results. Having it on for text is really annoying, especially when I'm being an adult searching for adult concepts; having it on for images is crucial if my eyeballs and brain aren't going to be seared.

Poor Mr. Brand is (apparently) a professional lit-critter, but he is also a textbook example of a reader not "getting" an unreliable narrator. It's boggling that a pro trying to give the potted, conventional-wisdom take on Lolita doesn't seem to have absorbed that Humbert Humbert is one of the leading Unreliable Narrators of the literary canon, which I thought was pretty conventional wisdom.

But the trouble with Unreliable Narrator as a literary device is that it's *really* difficult, in a way that makes it hard for the writer to realize what the problem is and to find hir way to fixing it. The problem isn't really in constructing a story with an Unreliable Narrator, it's in conveying it to the readers in such a way that most of them will *get* it, will recognize that the narrator is unreliable and read the story you, the writer, intend them to read. It's all too easy for the writer to decide that readers who don't "get" it are unworthy fools, swine before whom the pearls of your prose have been cast -- instead of recognizing that part of the writer's job is communication, and maybe you're not quite doing it right.

Unreliable Narrators are one of the literary devices fanfiction has helped me to understand far better than conventional English classes ever did, because they're a good deal more common (both as failures and as successes) in fanfic than in other genres.

The great advantage fanfic writers have in writing UNs is that the readers know ahead of time that some characters are much less reliable than others. If someone is writing an Avengers story, for instance, both Loki and The Hulk (as Hulk, not as Bruce Banner) can give you a POV that is extremely unreliable or distorted. Or they can give a POV that is more honest than the conventional heroic POV of, say, Thor or Captain America.

Because fanfic writers and readers share a pre-existing sense of the characters, it's easier for a writer to signal to the reader that this POV is not to be trusted, and easier for the reader to pick up on it, to overcome the very strong human tendency to trust one's own perceptions -- which includes trusting the words a writer is putting into your head.

Sustained distrust is difficult and tiring for a reader, because you have to fight the meaning of each sentence. I think that's why UN is much more successful in short stories than in novels. "August Heat", for instance, is IMHO an extremely successful example of an UN, and it illustrates why UN is often found in the horror or supernatural genre. The very sensation of unreliability, of having to struggle against your own perceptions, is creepy and unsettling, so it automatically puts the reader on horror/supernatural genre terrain.

Getting back to Lolita[1], I think there's a level on which Nabokov failed as a writer.[2] The fact that you can't safely search on "lolita" proves empirically that many, maybe most, readers haven't grasped that Humbert's POV is distorted, that Dolores isn't really like that, she is not an underage seductress. Even quite sophisticated readers like Mr. Brand here have completely bought into Humbert's vision: they read Lolita as a romance, not a horror story.

I am not completely convinced, myself, that Nabokov meant to be writing horror. I think it quite possible that he both wanted to write an unreliable, evil POV convincingly, *and* to indulge himself in the sexual objectification of a young girl, while condescending to readers who only "got" half of the story. I am dubious because I don't know that he was enough of a feminist to recognize that Lolita was reflecting and even amplifying a cultural narrative[3] where young girls are objectified, sexually exploited, and then blamed for it.

It seems to me there's definitely room for a re-writing of Lolita as horror, with Dolores as the Final Girl in the sense Carol J. Clover explicated in Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.

Clover suggests that in these films, the viewer begins by sharing the perspective of the killer, but experiences a shift in identification to the final girl partway through the film.

Was Nabokov trying to create that sort of shift, from identifying with Humbert to identifying with Dolores? If he was, he failed for most readers, he didn't leave a clear enough trail for most readers to follow him -- we can tell because they *don't*. I wonder if a writer would need to use some of the techniques of horror to get readers to go there, and which techniques would *work* if the text was still from Humbert's POV.

I see from Wikipedia that there have been several novels re-telling Lolita from Dolores' POV, but none so far that bring forward her character while keeping Humbert's POV. It would definitely be a very high degree-of-difficulty, but then -- so is the book.

And for another example of how difficult it is to read -- and write -- an Unreliable Narrator when romance/sex/love is involved, the following quote was going around Tumblr this past week:

"DiCaprio and Mulligan, meanwhile, don't seem like star-crossed lovers so much as a delusional man in love with a bauble of a woman. Maybe that's intentional?"
— People Magazine's review on 'The Great Gatsby'

I have been unable to confirm or deny that this is an actual quote from People, it must have been in last week's magazine, not the current one (with Angelina Jolie on the cover).

"The Little One Is Dreaming, Etude", Paul Gauguin (1881). She is dreaming, but she is not dreaming about you. Ordrupgaard Collection, Copenhagen.

---

[1] I should confess that I tried to read Lolita only once, decades ago, when I was unsophisticated enough not to realize it was UN. I never finished it because I found being inside Humbert Humbert's head both revolting and boring. This post, then, technically falls under the heading of bullcrit: having a detailed literary opinion about a work you haven't actually, like, read. Also known as "grad school".

[2] Another advantage of fanfic for lit-critting is that we get into the habit of not assuming the text is perfect and that the writer didn't make any mistakes. High school English teachers could really benefit from spending time with fanfic, Sturgeon's Law and all.

[3] And not just American or even Western culture, either. "Lolita" is a huge cultural emblem in Japan, pervading both fashion and porn.

Comments

[Aaron Boyden]

Er, Humbert's an unreliable narrator, sure, but I think you're being way too hard on Gerhard Brand. The medieval tradition of courtly love is deeply, deeply problematic, a fact that Brand seems to be invoking, and I don't think it's crazy to suggest that it's problematic in ways similar to the ways Humbert's attitudes are problematic.

[Bruce Baugh]

I think Aaron's got a point here, Dr., even though you have a great point too. Courtly romance is, well, it's the love fantasies of a class of guys who were basically priestly-sanctioned mobsters. They lived really, really messed up lives, and they daydreamed about intensely dysfunctional relationships, tangled up with the real-life dysfunctions of their marriages and affairs (broken in ways overlapping but not continguous with the fictions).

I think you're quite right that Nabokov was oblivious to his role in amplifying and dressing up a widespread existing abusive approach to life. He was oblivious to a lot. But the story Humbert tells himself genuinely is a fair amount like courtly romance, and I do think Nabokov intended that.

[bob_is_boring]

I've read a lot of Nabakov, but not Lolita--I'm saving it for...something--and I don't really want to engage in (the otherwise delightful neologism) bullcrit...

...however, diagnosing "problems" in a work of art based on your reading of authorial intent invokes a classic of the [literary criticism] genre.

cf.
http://faculty.smu.edu/nschwart/seminar/Fallacy.htm

Besides, within the edicts of New Criticism any reading is justifiable if the interpreter/hermeneuticist can justify it; that is to say: if Brand can convincingly paint his interpretation of Lotita as referencing the Medieval trope of the 'courtly love story' --even, or especially, absent appeals to the author's intentions-- his reading is a valid description of his experience of the book.

Besides, seeing as how IIRC HH is often held up as one of the paradigmatic unreliable narrators (as a quick search reveals is indeed the case), it is easy to imagine attempting a reading deliberately not grounded in that POV.

As for

"He was oblivious to a lot." (Bruce, above)

I don't know; I suppose I wouldn't be surprised. But I find his prose both delicious and nutritious.

[mike shupp]

Damned if I can recall just where, but I remember an account by Nabokov remarking that Americans who viewed themselves as sophisticated were quite willing to believe that adolescent boys might be debauched by strange males but not that young girls might harbor sexual impulses of any sort. This seemed to annoy him; he wished to provoke.

Likely he was right. I read Lolita about the time I got out of high school, in the mid 1960's, and being a naïve reader, I knew at once that Humbert's detection of sexual interest in young Lolly was complete bull pucky and that the rest of Humbert's observations were apt to be inaccurate.

In other words, Nabokov could in fact expect the majority of his readers WHEN THE BOOK CAME OUT to understand that HH was an unreliable narrator. Half a century later, we've all gotten a bit more sophisticated, or at least inured to sexually experienced children, and I guess it gives comtemporary readers a misleading impression of Humbert's normality and reliability. (I suspect the filmed versions of Lotita, with 14 or 15 year old girls rather than 12 year olds, probably have skewed our reactions as well.)

Be that as it may, I rather enjoyed Lolita, and one of these days I'll get around to rereading it. You might like it too.

[Nous]

Bruce brings up an important point. When Brand makes reference here to courtly romance as a genre, he's not necessarily claiming that the novel itself is to be read as such. It's hard to tell how Brand supports his claim in a short excerpt, but I can definitely see how one could make the argument that, while Humbert is a loathsome toad of a narrator, he draws the reader into his story by casting himself as a courtly lover in a medieval romance. The fact that so many readers fall for this ploy only underscores the deep satire.

Pay no attention to the pedophile behind the curtain. Brave Sir Humbert is on a quest to win the love of fair Dolores.

[Countme-In]

"Pay no attention to the pedophile behind the curtain."

Pay attention to Clare Quilty.

I haven't read "Lolita" for awhile, but doesn't Humbert Humbert admit near the end of the novel that he has ruined a life -- Lolita's? By which I mean, and others have pointed out, that his "inner life" is the narrative we hear, but Lolita's inner life, that of a 12-year old girl, is not made available to us by this self-absorbed narrator, yet we can imagine that it was killed before physical Lolita died.

Not that redemption was sought or available by or to Humbert, of course, but this unreliable narrator's arrested development was finally placed under arrest.

Humbert was a pedophile; Nabokov was a lepidopterist. One could unpack that but suffice it to say that if you utter those two statements to a mother (or father) or teenaged girls, they are likely to answer, if the second term is unknown to them, "you can say that again."

About a dozen years ago, I chose "Lolita" to present to a book club, now defunct, many of whose members were parents of teenagers and you could cut the "yuck" factor with a knife.

But late in the discussion, finally one of the women spoke and said something along the lines of, "Yes, the subject is revolting, but if you read closely the writing is stunning" and then went on to read a passage from the scene in which Lolita is playing tennis.

That's all I sought, the recognition of "prose both delicious and nutritious" as bob_is_boring put it upthread so non-boringly, albeit with a little bit of intent to shake up the usual quarterly suburban book club meeting, which took place right across the street from Columbine High School, where worse of a different color happened not too long before.

[bob mcmanus]

Well, I've read Lolita several times, not liking it very much, but I have always thought Nabokov was viciously attacing, with a scattershot weapon, the whole constellation of ideals and affects that derive from Dante's La Vita Nuova

"...like all medieval literature it is far removed from the modern autobiographical impulse. However, Dante and his audience were interested in the emotions of courtly love and how they develop, how they are expressed in verse, how they reveal the permanent intellectual truths of the divinely created world and how love can confer blessing on the soul and bring it closer to God."

The basic sentiment that love (worship, care) ennobles and improves the lover (and the obnject of affection is less relevant that the strength of the passion) is a vastly more interesting target than the pedophilia that is now understood as N's subject. I would contend that "Love Does NOT Ennoble or Improve" is a recurring theme in the works of Nabokov.

So the next time you hear "I was a schmuck until he/she/it saved me" send them to Vlad.

[bob mcmanus]

And one of my favorite books, and the academic work Lewis was most proud of and most admired for, is The Allegory of Love

And The Four Loves as a later addition.

[sapient]

Thanks so much for this, bob mcmanus. I love Nabokov's poetry, and am fascinated by Speak, Memory. I read Lolita, and was so creeped out by HH, that I reallly didn't know what to do with it. I saw an exhibition at the NY Public Library with his butterfly things ...

I'm going to read it again with your thoughts in mind.

[liberal japonicus]

I've not read Lolita, and I'm not really sure why except for the fact that I liked to carry around my reading material and who wants to be settling a park bench with that novel on top of your stack of books.

My favorite Nabokov work is Pnin, about a expatriate Russian who teaches at a fictional college. Writing about this expat in a world which he does not understand and doesn't understand him has made me a lot more tolerant of Nabokov, maybe because I often find myself in a Pnin-like existence. Not sure how bob's theme fits in Pnin. A bit of googling find this David Lodge (a man who knows a few things about the campus novel) introduction and this paragraph:

Pnin is Nabokov as he might have been in American exile if he had not possessed a mastery of the English language, a supportive and cherished wife, and the resource of literary creativity - a quaint, eccentric, rather sad figure, doomed never to understand fully the society in which he finds himself.

[DBN]

I would contend that "Love Does NOT Ennoble or Improve" is a recurring theme in the works of Nabokov.

How do you reconcile that position with the end ofLolita?