Lolita

The following poem written by Vladimir Nabokov goes a long way in explaining the frustrated passion of his protagonist Humbert Humbert in his controversial and infamous novel of pedophilia and incest, Lolita:

"Let me in!" I shouted, noticing with horror

that I again stood outside in the dust

and that obscenely bleating youngsters

"Let me come in!" And the goat-hoofed,

copper-curled crowd increased. "Oh, let me in,"

I pleaded, "otherwise I shall go mad!"

The door stayed silent, and for all to see

writhing with agony I spilled my seed

and knew abruptly that I was in Hell.

The above poem by Nabokov reveals the passion and frustration of Humbert Humbert for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Despite the book's subject matter and its being banned upon publication in many countries including the U.S., critics, scholars, and professors found the book to be a masterpiece with tragi-comedy its reason for being not titillation or pornography. As Charles Rolo noted in the September 1958 Atlantic Monthly, "The novel's scandal-tainted history and its subject-the affair between a middle-aged sexual pervert and a twelve-year-old girl�inevitably conjure up expectations of pornography. But there is not a single obscene term in Lolita, and aficionados of erotica are likely to find it a dud" (78).

Certainly the story of a vulgar barely pubescent teen that loses her childhood and maidenh

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on the other hand is pure perversion. This is not to ennoble Humbert but it is to show there is a definite distinction between his passion for Lolita and Quilty's. The book confirms this near the end when Humbert explains his poetic perspective of his relationship with Lolita: "And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita" (Nabokov 311). There is also pain and loss in Humbert because he knows he has stolen Lolita's voice from the voices of other carefree children..."the absence of her voice from that concord" (310). The film obliterates this distinction and artistic transcendence of the relationship because it plays out the murder of Quilty in the beginning, thus losing its impact at the end. It is for this distinction that Humbert must murder Quilty. In judging his own involvement he argues he should be serving time for rape, nothing more. Yet, inexplicably, Kubrick totally reworks the ending of the n

Category: Literature - L