Nymphet Season, Part 1

“An American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution ‘English Language’ for ‘romantic novel’ would make this elegant formula more correct.”
--Vladimir Nabokov, in the afterword of Lolita



Yes, perhaps Nabokov is right on in this above quotation (may I so smugly and comfortably refer to my own annotated epigraph?), and ultimately, Lolita, for all its smutty and alluring subject matter, is simply a story of a torrid, obsessive, dark and sweaty palmed love affair. A love affair not with an underage barely pubescent 12 year old girl, but with the English language. And though Nabokov explicitly denies the intentional use of allegory or symbolism throughout his novel (“everybody should know that I detest symbols and allegories,” writes Nabokov in his Afterword of his novel), is it so far fetched to symbolically pair Humbert Humbert’s predatory lust and obsession with Lolita, the nymphet, with Nabokov’s own predatory attack and attempt to capture and caress the English language? Just watch how Nabokov begins his novel in an alliterative and metered ejaculation of onomatopoeiatic sensual bliss: “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.”

That being said, I am going to refuse Nabokov’s overt denial of the use of allegory in his book, and argue that Clare Quilty’s play, “The Enchanted Hunters” and the hotel coincidentally of the identical name both brilliantly and (dare I say) symbolically function as H.H.’s, and Nabokov’s (and eventually the whole American imaginary’s) obsession with attaining the unattainable—whether it be the pinky flesh of fresh pubescence, or the sensual possession of a foreign language (which would be English to Russian born Nabokov).




“For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. "
--Nabokov

Though Nabokov agonizes over how Lolita is not a pornographic tale of imagined incest and pedophilia, I want to analyze little Lolita in her present day form—in her form as an almost third-order simulacra (for those familiar with Baudrillard), functioning far beyond the pages of Nabokov’s novel and dancing in little nymphet saddle shoes across the middle aged American male’s imagination. It is a fact that in the American imaginary, Lolita is the ultimate and naughty Sadein prize. Lo. Lee. Ta. The name that launched a thousand porn sites. The name that even launched a Japanese street fashion dubbed “Gothic Lolita,” in which coy Japanese teens dress in gothic versions of little bo-peep and baby-doll style ruffled dresses that make them appear coquettishly youthful-- and perhaps dangerously alluring.

So roll over in your grave, Mr. Nabokov. After all, more than fifty years after Lolita’s publication, the common conception of Lolita, the novel, is not the beautiful and adroit handling of the English language, but the pedophiliac image of Lolita, Dolly, Dolores Haze herself.