Lolita

Image credit: Penguin Books Australia

In a world where we increasingly churn out more and more narratives and content in a blur of different mediums, it’s always exhilarating to watch or read a significant work and realise just how much modern content owes to the past. Obviously the present owes everything to the past, but what I’m trying to talk about is the undying poignancy of works that just retain their brilliance, shock value, and significance when read by a modern audience.

I have just finished reading a classic example of this: Lolita.

A shocking, but beautiful and compelling piece of fiction, Lolita tells the story of European elite Humbert Humbert and his erotic obsession with his 12-year-old stepdaughter Dolores (nicknamed Lolita, or Lo). Written as a non-fiction memoir during Humbert’s incarceration, there is so much happening in this book it’s hard to know what to begin raving about!

I guess the first would be all the incredible themes that this book tackles. Being published and brought into a culture that was preoccupied with the dangers of perverts, paedophilia, and the abuse and sexualisation of children, Lolita was (predictably) highly controversial, but despite its taboo content, its gorgeous lyrical prose had people flipping pages like crazy. The protagonist is not a nice man, and he makes no attempts to convince us otherwise, but his poetic narration and teasing scenarios that leave a fair chunk to the imagination, bring a deeper, literary character into the mix rather than a mere pervert and murderer. You travel with Humbert, you see the world as Humbert, and you realise that sometimes we are all simultaneously victim and villain.

Alongside the taboo relationship, a perverted take on the traditional doomed romance a la Romeo & Juliet or Beauty & the Beast, there is this fantastic conflict happening between artistic Europe and corporate America, upstanding age and crass youth, high art and pop culture; social battles that are still recognisable today.

Amongst redefining the ‘unreliable’ narrator, blending fiction and non-fiction, and dealing with a story that a lot of modern writers probably wouldn’t dare tackle, Lolita is constantly asking questions that morph and reroute the reading experience (and the role of fiction in particular). Can we find pleasure, comedy, and beauty in a story that is morally wrong? Ethically, are we allowed to enjoy this narrative? By violently mixing the repugnant and taboo with such gorgeously stylish and crisp turns of phrase, Lolita plunges its readers into a completely new and uncharted type of reading experience; one that –when you come up for air- really makes you think and take stock of all the conflicting feels tumbling about inside you.

Image credit: The Blair Oracle

It’s probably one of the most artistically controversial pieces of literature around and, when you look at the books and films that were made in its wake, you realise just how influential it was. Disregarding Kubrick’s adaptation and a later one starring Jeremy Irons, Lolita made it possible for other artists (Tarantino, for example) to explore the darker underbelly of society and culture whilst still treating their audiences to delightful voyeuristic experiences.

Thank you Nabakov!

Lolita was written by Vladamir Nabakov and published in 1955 by the risqué Parisian Olympia Press. It was first published in Great Britain in 1959 by Weidenfeld & Nicholson and has since been remade and sampled in many works, the most famous being Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film starring James Mason.