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.