Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov, one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, is a highly aesthetic writer. Most of his work shows an amazing interest in and talent for language. He deceptively uses language in Lolita to mask and make the forbidden divine. Contextually, Lolita may be viewed as a novel about explicit sexual desire. However, it is the illicit desire of a stepfather for his 12-year old stepdaughter. The novel’s subject inevitably conjures up expectations of pornography, but there in not a single obscene term in Lolita. Nabokov portrays erotic scenes and sensual images with a poetic sensibility that belies the underlying meaning of the words. The beautiful manipulation of language coerces one to understand Humbert’s interdict act of pedophilia. By combining erotic and poetic desire in the context of the forbidden, Nabokov challenges the immorality of pornography, as illicit desire becomes masked in sensuous language. Nabokov carefully tailors the language Humbert Humbert uses to tell the world of his love for the forbidden nymphet, urging sympathy and innocence from the reader. However, the deeper meaning of the forbidden sexual desire is clearly seen in the use of only slightly veiled metaphor alluding to Humbert's own obsession.

The very first words of the novel set the stage for Nabokov's masterful use of poetic and erotic allusion. The poetic and romantic lyricism become the foundation for allusion from the deviancy of Humbert’s sexual desires: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in ...

... middle of paper ...

... unambiguously seeks to transmute Humbert’s erotic experience into a work of art, and to induce us to relive it intensely in our imagination and with our senses. He does not want us simply to identify with his protagonist as a crude pornographer would, but to bring us to adhere totally to this beautiful text in which the gradual eroticization of the language eventually creates a poerotic ecstasy. There is no longer any separation between signifier and signified, between the pretext and the present text; the obstacle that prevented novelistic language from representing the sexual act is magically abolished, even though sex still remains a powerful source of anxiety. It is not the sexual interdict, no matter what its true nature is, which is transgressed, but the aesthetic one. As Humbert later acknowledges “sex is but the ancilla of art,” it cannot be its main subject.