Can We Rant? (About Lolita?)

I’ve been biting my tongue when it comes to writing about the whole Jeffrey Epstein debacle. In part, I’m afraid that once I start, I’ll never stop.

But hey, what’s a blog for, if you can’t rant on it every once in a while?

When I learned that Epstein’s private plane was named “The Lolita Express,” I shrieked, “are you f***ing KIDDING me?” (Or something to that effect.)

I first read Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Lolita sometime around 2004 or 2005.

I‘d tried to read it when I was in graduate school in the early 1990’s, but eventually flung set it aside.

Nabokov’s novel is narrated by an unabashed pedophile named Humbert Humbert.

From the comfort of HIS PRISON CELL, Humbert Humbert writes to explain to us, his readers, who Lolita was/is and what happened to her (and to him).

No spoiler alerts needed here: I won’t give away the plot or the ending.

I agreed to try to read the novel again sometime around 2004, because a student of mine had read it and was deeply troubled by it.

She wanted someone to talk to about the novel, so I agreed to give it another go.

In one of life’s odd ironies, I eventually ended up writing an article about Lolita.

I’ll put a link to it here, but be forewarned, the opening paragraph of my essay DOES give away the ending

Writing about Lolita, meant that, in addition to reading the novel, I also had to read what other people said and thought about it.

As it turns out, I was no less troubled by that.

I decided to write the article because what I found more troubling than the novel itself (and this is saying a lot) was the fact that numerous literary critics excused Humbert Humbert’s pedophilia as an “aesthetic.”

Ultimately, many scholars and critics took it for granted that we would—and should— sympathize with Humbert Humbert, the pedophile “seduced” by Lolita’s charms.

For my part, I found myself wanting to take out a full-page ad in The New York Times that read:

LOLITA WAS 12.

Because yeah, she’s not 16 or 15 or 14 or even 13, when Humbert Humbert begins to argue that she is “seducing” him.

She’s twelve.

And for the record, Humbert Humbert has no problem seducing Lolita’s mother first, with an eye to gaining access to the daughter.

Sound familiar?

It’s a novel in which a self-serving and predatory adult claims that it’s okay to take advantage of underage girls, because he’s good looking and, as Britney Spears once sang, she’s “not that innocent.”

A child’s chronological age, Humbert Humbert argues, is not an accurate index of their sexual maturity.

Needless to say, I begged to differ.

Ultimately, the article that I wrote (nearly 20 years ago now) argues that a reading of Lolita that simply sympathizes with Humbert Humbert is missing Nabokov’s point.

Yes, Humbert Humbert claims that he loves Lolita, even after she’s no longer a child, but Lolita is very clear that Humbert Humbert’s “love", or lack thereof, is not the point: the point is that Humbert Humbert’s destruction of others’ innocence is immoral and criminal.

Even Humbert Humbert himself eventually acknowledges that, as an adult, he was responsible for the well-being of the children in his care—not the other way around—and that he failed to uphold that responsibility.

In naming his private jet with a “nudge, nudge, wink, wink” if-you-know-you-know reference to Lolita, Epstein, like so many (frequently male) readers of Nabokov’s novel, preferred—like the novel’s narrator himself— to see only what he wanted to see, and to ignore the consequences.