Notebook: Nabokov, LOLITA, And The New Authoritarian Age

A Look Behind The American Mask

Why yes, I am accepting gifts if you’d like to send a First Edition my way…

In my late twenties¹, I picked up a copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel LOLITA and, seeking to find its transgressive key, found it to be an unexpectedly difficult read. Having found my way to the book through other, late-twentieth century works and its influential reputation, I was not expecting Nabokov’s use of language to be so (to my mind at the time) formal, and as I made my way through the book, my ability to concentrate on it waned. The novel came out in 1955, two years after a book like William S. Burroughs’ JUNKIE, and to my twenty-something eyes, felt so much less, well, transgressive than other books I was reading in the 1990’s. LOLITA left an impression on me, but it sat on my bookshelf for the next few decades— If I wanted to revisit the question of LOLITA, I would defer to Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation² and my delight at the performance of Peter Sellers, whose on-screen presence retained its modernity and freshness, capturing a different energy than what I found in the novel.

Last month, I read a recent novel called THE DISCOMFORT OF EVENING by a young Dutch author named Lucas Rijneveld (translated brilliantly by Michele Hutchison) and was deeply moved by the novel’s extremely transgressive approach to loss and grief through the eyes of children on a conservative Dutch farm. I saw that Rijneveld had a new novel (again, translated by Hutchinson) entitled MY HEAVENLY FAVORITE and, heading to my local bookstore to pre-order it, skimmed the online description:

“A confession, a lament, a mad gush of grief and obsession, MY HEAVENLY FAVORITE is… the story of a veterinarian who visits a farm in the Dutch countryside where he becomes enraptured by his “Favorite”—the farmer’s daughter. She hovers on the precipice of adolescence, and longs to have a boy’s body. The veterinarian seems to be a tantalizing possible path out from the constrictions of her conservative rural life.

Narrated after the veterinarian has been punished for his crimes, Rijneveld’s audacious, profane novel is powered by the paradoxical beauty of its prose, which holds the reader fast to the page. Rijneveld refracts the contours of the LOLITA story with a kind of perverse glee, taking the reader into otherwise unimaginable spaces—“

I stopped reading right then and there, ordered the book and, in anticipation, decided, some twenty five years later, to re-read LOLITA. Maybe it would bring me into Rijneveld’s new novel in a meaningful way?

MY HEAVENLY FAVORITE comes out this week.
I finished LOLITA this weekend.

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In the 1990s, back when I was reading LOLITA for the first time, America was just emerging from the narrative of unrestrained optimism that defined life under Ronald Reagan. Nothing captured the absurdity of that time like the Satanic Panic, when conservative communities across America created false narratives about Satanists operating among them, leveling ridiculous accusations under absurd pretexts, all in the name of “saving children” from the corrupting forces of an imagined Satanism, and destroying countless lives in the process.³ A wave of insanity had been unleashed, coupled to public life, the structures of stories and mythological superstitions twisted into the form of their ironic opposites and hardening as “news,” manufacturing hysteria out of the most obvious and ridiculous of falsehoods.

In the midst of this wave, and in the wake of the overall cultural swing in America away from the dominance of countercultural narratives and toward a reactionary, greed-driven individualism, novelists provided a new set of insights into the state of the nation— the violent subtext of American exceptionalism and the corny, whitewashed mythology of the Conservative Revolution perfectly represented in Brett Easton Ellis’ AMERICAN PSYCHO, our unspoken addiction to a rapidly globalizing post-Cold War capitalist consumerist landscape literally the text of David Foster Wallace’s INFINITE JEST, two monumental bookends that shaped the “middle decade” that framed my early adult years.

Those then-recent novels were books with which I connected deeply, and they oriented my approach to contemporary literature away from a feeling of “work” and toward a post-scholarly relationship to meaningful reading as pleasure. Suddenly, as that process began, books that spoke to me and my time were being published, and while the demands of “assigned reading” at school had shifted my reading habits toward a feeling of obligation, these books sent me looking at the work of earlier 20th century writers who sought to show their own times, writers that exposed an otherwise unspoken understanding of the truth— not the romanticized kitsch of domestic electoral politics and mainstream culture, but the worms beneath its soil, writhing in the mud, fertilized by the decomposing proteins of hidden lives and illicit experiences. That is where I first encountered LOLITA.

In the years that followed, life shifted again, and books became a tertiary pursuit. Reading fiction grew into something I wanted to do but for which I made infrequent time— never a habit, not a necessity, and older books, classics, became almost an afterthought. Because of this, I am not “well read” and have huge gaps in my reading, having taken decades of time not prioritizing books, and when I did, I was more interested in books of the moment, hit and miss, conversation pieces that garnered positive contemporary reviews or awards that caught my eye. I read, but I wouldn’t have called myself a “reader.”

A few years ago, I decided to try again. I had not been tracking the shifts in my life or how experience was slowly transforming my ability to read, but as someone who is, I think, a very good, professional “reader” of films as texts, I realized that my film experience, which had been developing in me in parallel, had opened new doors in my understanding of art and narrative and story and structure, understanding that had been unavailable to me as a younger, more inexperienced person. As someone who loves the films of Robert Bresson, Andrei Tarkovsky, and, more recently, filmmakers like Arnaud Desplechin, Clare Denis, Jia Zhangke, Joachim Trier, etc⁴, the text of books suddenly became more available to me, more immersive, more meaningful. Complexity became enjoyable, books began offering a deeply pleasurable form of immersion, concentration, and private reflection. I had always understood books and enjoyed reading, but now, each book posed a series of problems and questions that not only drew me in, but which held me, a space in which I felt capable of fully engaging and understanding.

It took time, I didn’t mark the process or the change, but I found myself, in very recent years, newly in love with reading. 

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Every single person is their own Ship Of Theseus, rebuilt completely over time into a new person, from our processing of experience and life to the very cells that make up our physical being. And yet, words on the page are unwavering in their permanence. Books don’t change, we do. The world does.

Reading LOLITA today, with its overwhelming, playful joy in the English language deployed in service of a horrific story of sexual exploitation of a child? The sensation of finding that this book spoke so powerfully to me was overwhelming. I was not ready the first time, but it is clear to me now— LOLITA is a masterpiece, and for me, one of the greatest literary representations of irony, that great creative tool that has defined my approach to art, to meaning, and to survival in a culture of deep hypocrisy and cynical literalism deployed in the service of personal power. I have seen so many readers addressing LOLITA as a “love story” or “a story of desire and obsession,” but I did not see it that way at all— it is the story of captive psychopathy, of being a prisoner to a twisted, interior violence that refuses the humanity of others in service of an unbound, relentless Id⁵ so powerful that the mask of self-delusion cannot contain it.

And here now, reading this masterpiece not on the other side of a ridiculous Satanic Panic, but instead, in the midst of a violent, merciless, yet equally cynical and ridiculous attack on LGBTQIA+ children, their personhood, their families, their right to exist as themselves, LOLITA takes on fresh meaning.  Here, today, that violent national psychopathy, that unrestrained madness, is unleashed as a political weapon, intentionally inflicting pain on others as a form of self-certain sadism. The difference between life and the novel is suddenly, starkly realized; LOLITA’s protagonist Humbert Humbert, the infamous hebephile whose abduction and years long sexual abuse of a prepubescent girl he has named “Lolita”, is filled with self-awareness, regret, shame, and doubt on the pages of the book, whereas American right-wing political destruction is a conscienceless cover story for its refusal to confront its own guilt.

The true face of hypocritical warfare

Let’s just come out and say it: the current political attacks in this country that equate consensual adult sexual identity and personal gender expression at all ages as a culture of “pedophilia” and “grooming” are a mask hiding the face of unspoken sexual desire, fantasy, trauma, and a deep, internalized shame. In the best case, these feelings of need are contorted into a crooked finger of blame, a silent realization that others must be as guilty as the self (they are not), and in the worst case, the same mask of social manipulation undertaken by Humbert in the novel is used as a tool for covering up ones own crimes by seeking control and distraction in contemporary political life.

Every
Accusation
Is
A
Confession

… and every mask is a mirror.

LOLITA operates from behind that reflective mask, but crucially, does so by using stunningly beautiful language as a way to double the deception. The book brings us into Humbert’s mindset, and while it is penned as a “confession,” Humbert uses the power of the English language to exert a form of control and influence over the reader, a mastery that he could never have over Lolita herself as the object of his insane desires. Lolita’s experience, biding her time under the violence of Humbert’s abuse in order to escape it, is one of being manipulated by an older man to whom social institutions grant not just the benefit of the doubt, but legal control and physical power over her life. Humbert’s exploitation of the façade of American respectability— a foreigner, a professor, married and then a widower, bless him—  is coupled with a retrospective romanticism of his own experience, one that requires an active battle by the reader against complicity with his story.

Nabokov, in his afterward for the book, defined his authorial intent as one of linguistic and structural interest in figuring out how to tell this story. Psychoanalysis, politics, symbolism, pornographic depiction, America as subject—  Nabokov denounced them all,  sweeping these interpretations aside in the name of a “love affair with the English language”, which he humbly asserts is not is his native tongue (despite his dazzling mastery of English.) To be clear, Nabokov is not his fictional Humbert, but his writing is so powerful that disentangling the book and its author from its protagonist remains a challenge, and when we eliminate the interpretive tools the author has denounced, it becomes even more difficult to know how to grapple with Humbert’s narrative. Nabokov’s afterword in this book is a mask unto itself, and so everyone must take their own approach— I rejected Nabokov’s parameters of intent as his own. Instead of worrying about what he meant, I made my own way past his intentions, into what the novel means, crossing into a contemporary world in which LOLITA continues to resonate.

What is most moving about reading LOLITA now is how it liberates the current authoritarian romanticization of America’s past— that duplicitous vision of a better world, one that itself doubles Humbert’s own romanticism, hiding a terrible reality behind the clichéd idealism of a pure and perfect past— from its own self-mythology, exposing it as the intentional deception that it truly is. LOLITA creates a stunning portrait of America in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, those “great” days that so many want to bring back “again”, and yet, still, there it is on the page, that ironic self-love that drives private brutalities, a possessive, violent narcissism that wants nothing more than the fulfillment of its unspeakable desire to dominate others for ecstatic pleasure.

Books don’t change, times change. We do. LOLITA stays the same on the page.

America wants to be itself again, and so it is, donning Humbert’s mask, that stunning, seductive looking glass that reflects a beloved self-regard into the world while, under the surface, lurking behind its hollowed eyes, in the very center of its conscious mind, the truth remains inescapable.

1. The mid to late 1990s. Please be gentle with me.

2. Which is such an interesting adaptation, but that’s for another time…

3. If you have not seen Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky’s PARADISE LOST films, please do not miss them, as they are a perfect echo of the reality we are experiencing right now.

4. I could go on all day. How long have ya got?

5. Oooh, man, Nabokov, who loathed Freud, would hate that but, uh, too bad. #Facts