The Reflection of Dorian Gray

"How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrid, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June. . . . If it was only the other way! If it was I who were to be always young, and the picture that were to grow old! For this--for this--I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give!"

So laments Dorian Gray, staring into his beautiful likeness. There is something very fishy about the way Wilde writes this gothic horror. Compared with the explicitly Victorian Dracula, Wilde paints the same themes but instead of focussing on the hero, focuses on the monster. Underlying Lord Henry, with his light hearted hedonism is Satan, the great tempter. Dorian, tempted by the pursuits of the flesh, sells his soul to feed his Henry-induced desire to keep his beauty forever and in the end, perishes, the guilt and fear forcing his hand; a clear indictment of his own moral excesses and promotion of Christian value.

However, there is a certain ambiguity in Wilde’s analysis; there is no doubt that he paints Dorian as wrong. With the moral turpitude that he practises comes drug addiction, murder and the ruin of reputations, in that time a fate slightly better than out and out murder. Yet, the supernatural element of the painting hides a deeper meaning. Wilde appears to be commenting on the ridiculousness of it all.

"I know what conscience is, to begin with. It is not what you told me it was. It is the divinest thing in us. Don't sneer at it, Harry, any more,--at least not before me. I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous."

Do we have a soul underneath our skin carrying all of our collective sins or are we instead instinctive creatures that should embrace the pleasures of life? His death comes at his own hand after attempting to purge his sins, Wilde knows such an act is not possible; to attempt to purge one’s sins is to kill oneself. Henry in the book is both devil and Savior, Wilde leaves enough ambiguity to feel some truth in his words, some reflection in the joy of hedonism. It is the old who realise the truth of pleasure, it is the folly of youth to attempt to pursue these outdated moral truths.

"Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot…"

If anything, this story is about the rejection of these illusions of youth and learning to accept one’s sins for what they are. A reflection of our true selves. A society cannot repress its sexuality, its brutality, it must embrace and understand indulgence. Wilde never attempts to suggest this means going down the dark path of Dorian's disgrace but it is the denial that brings his worst sin and his own death. Only in acceptance can we be truly satisfied.

"Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."

Detective P. D. O'Phile

What makes Lolita a great novel? It is the confessions of a pedophile, and might be expected to illuminate that condition to some extent, but I thought that the greatness of the book really lay in its language and structure, which is like a detective story hiding in the novel itself.

From the very first page Nabokov's use of language in Lolita is enthralling. Nabokov is able to transform "What makes twelve year olds sexy?" into this:

You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs--the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate--the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.

While I was reading Lolita practically every other sentence stood out as a tiny masterpiece. I found it easy to be carried along by the prose itself, regardless of the depravity of the thoughts being expressed. This made the occasional slips where the truth is plainly stated brutally jarring, as the reader is suddenly snapped out of the hypnotic spell of writing into confronting reality:

And I catch myself thinking that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night--every night, every night--the moment I feigned sleep.

The sentence starts with what could a beautiful evocation of the common feeling of the waste and weariness of endless travelling, but ends with the sting of the horrible truth.

While the language continues in this gorgeous style throughout the book, as the plot unfolds the rigourous structure of the novel begins to become apparent. Helped out by the design of the plot, H.H. can make literary references like this:

This book is about Lolita; and now that I have reached the part which (had I not been forestalled by another internal combustion martyr) might be called "Doloros Disparue," there would be little sense in analyzing the three empty years that followed.

H.H.'s comparison of Lolita to Proust's Albertine is at once self-serving (Proust may have been weird, but at least his 'prisoner' was of legal age) and also extremely apt: One of Proust's major concerns is the jealousy and helplessness he feels as the object of his affection tries to have her own life independent of him. The last part, "there would be little sense...", seems to be mocking Proust for spending several hundred pages examining the forgetting of his love instead of just getting over it in a page or two, but also suggests a clue to the ending, where Lolita returns changed and no longer appealing to H.H., much as Proust's childhood love, Gilberte, about whom he expends so much emotional energy, comes back as Proust's friend's wife, but since she is no longer the girl she was he no longer feels any jealousy. Lolita is full of similarly multi-layered references and clues.

Passages like this, marked by Nabokov through H.H.'s ironic remarks about coincidence, serve as more overt clues in the detective story:

a comparatively recent (1946) Who's Who in the Limelight--actors, producers, playwrights, and shots of static scenes. In looking through the latter volume, I was treated last night to one of those dazzling coincidences that logicians loathe and poets love.

Here we see the fateful name "Quilty" appear of course, but it is not until H.H. finally hears the truth from the now-pregnant Lolita that the hint is resolved:

she emitted...the name that the astute reader has guessed long ago. Waterproof. Why did a flash from Hourglass Lake cross my consciousness? I, too, had known it, without knowing it, all along. There was no shock, no surprise. Quietly the fusion took place, and everything fell into order, into the pattern of branches that I have woven throughout this memoir with the express purpose of having the ripe fruit fall at the right moment; yes, with the express and perverse purpose of rendering--she was talking but I sat melting in my golden peace--of rendering that golden and monstrous peace through the satisfaction of logical recognition, which my most inimical reader should experience now.

Somehow when I read this, the name Quilty really did pop into my mind, just like this passage describes. It felt obvious, but I couldn't figure out why. It was like those magic shows on TV where somehow you just can't believe you picked the Queen of Diamonds which is now right there on the screen, mocking you. Waterproof. Breathtaking. From the early hints of trickery, like the class list which seemed like a word puzzle, to the coincidental names H.H. finds in the hotels as he pursues the stolen Lolita, the novel builds up a huge force of mystery and purpose from all of these hints and references: you just know that something sneaky must be going on.

In the end, these fateful coincidences make the plot of Lolita rather far-fetched, yet I felt that much of the force of the book as an artwork came from the resolution of all of the unlikely connections. Not just the resolution of the actual events of the story, but the resolution of all of the hints that stand out as not really belonging in a "realistic" story. Unlike a standard Sherlock Holmes-style detective, H.H. already knows all the answers, since he wrote the story himself. The detectives are the readers, as they try to uncover the master plan of the "pattern of branches" which Nabokov imposes on H.H.'s confession.

All of this is kind of an expansion on why I said that pedophilia is in some sense a MacGuffin in Lolita. Not that it isn't important to the novel, but that I thought the book's effectiveness was as a pure work of writing, from the smallest details of language to the overall structure of the novel. There are deep truths to be found in Lolita, but I felt that they were often incidental to the grand design of Nabokov's big literary puzzle.

To begin, I must stress that we are not experienced literary critics or for that matter, literature students of any capacity. We have a certain degree of experience between us, all in our twenties, all having spent a significant proportion of time reading and appreciating the written form in various forms but none of us profess to possess any higher understanding or knowledge of the densely populated critical context that surrounds the books we read. So our opinions will probably seem amateurish or simply silly to those of a more well rounded literary persuasion. Otherwise, read on and enjoy!

Lolita splits critical reception, England and France had it banned, America calls it the great American novel or pornography. It both impressed and dissatisfied me without ever really getting anywhere close to what I’d feel is a great novel. Why?

Nabakov convolutedly describes his work as “his love affair with the English language.” There is no denying the utterly wonderful style, resplendent in sly wit, endless clever devices, French and a brilliantly manipulative main character who effortlessly draws you into his perverted world. However, writing alone does not make a good story. This is clearly a book by an academic artist; an excellent piece of writing that is perhaps not as aesthetically pleasing or entertaining as it is objectively superb.

Many seem to be engaged by this book, but for me, it simply offered a showcase of excellent technical application. The problem, in the end, lies in the subject. The tale of moral turpitude; the paedophile who spends as much time in rationalisation as guilt, has been criticised quite fairly as pornography. In our book club, Giles argued that the paedophile aspect could be replaced with anything, I disagree. Nabakov bases his whole character around the odious condition, and although along with Happiness, the Woodsman and the like, provides an interesting study of that most perplexing disorder, it doesn’t seem to go any further. What can we take away from the book, other than perhaps an increased understanding, perhaps even a degree of sympathy for those in our society that cannot be excused. I genuinely believe a work of fiction should attempt to do more than merely showcase technique and at least try to shed some light on some aspect of the human condition. Nabakov wrote on the book: “For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss.” For me, that’s not enough and that’s why I gave it a 5/10.

How Lolita Affected My Life

One month since reading Nabokov's classic Lolita, I posed the question 'how had my life changed directly from reading this novel?'. Apart from the obvious discussions about the book, surely there were themes or characters who had some level of affect and therefore have shown their facades through my actions or thoughts or philosophic state.

Personally the most atrocious themes have not personified themselves in my day-to-day living, nor my non-day-to-day living, although I was drawn into watching The Woodsman one night. Firstly I must self realise what has changed for me in the last month. There are the obvious things, a new job, biking being made my main form of transportation and the resulting outcomes such as tiredness, timeliness and more t words. These big changes were little to do with the reading, but a closer observation might conclude that biking is something to do with fear induced from the road trips Lolita and H,H go on.

Maybe a look at smaller subtle changes might be more appropriate. After reading this book I questioned morals, should the self indulge in thy self to satisfy ones desire? I am tempted to agree, but is it this temptation that makes me aware of the outcomes. Why does one feel guilty when they succumb to temptation? does it come from a spiritual awareness within? or is it a reaction to years of psychological damage from conservative teachings? I am justified to state that as long as ones actions only do good, least post neutral, to all people they influence that they might deem appropriate. In stark contrast to the narrator, "Unless it can be proven to me—to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction—that, in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, life is a joke) I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art." - Humbert Humbert.

One last thing one might think of is destiny. Throughout the book there are signs of a destiny for HH to be with a nymphet that he was designed for. From his first encounters with Annabel to the occurrences within the Hazes house where he knew it was no accident that one such object of his affection would be somehow become his and only his, and a solid example; the houses street number is 342, the room they stay in The Enchanted Hunter is 342. In my own life I feel slightly more open to destiny, if it is a possibility. For example, the job I started took no effort to obtain. I was approached by someone in need, was free to start without any issues and have enjoyed it so far. Maybe there is an underlying thread of things all working together to produce outcomes that are even romantic in the way they fit together. The final sign being a recent news article about a 13 year old boy becoming a father, link. A twisted fate that must be born from the loins of Lolita.