On How a Mormon Reads Lolita

I read Lolita over Christmas break, and found it to be one of the most heartbreaking, beautiful books I've ever read.

It makes me nervous to admit this, admit I read it. It's one of those books you hear whispers about before you ever read it, especially when you're a good little Mormon girl, as I am/was/will forever be. (As a sidenote, check out this article on a kid's bed misguidedly named, "Lolita Bed." So not cool.)

You see, Mormon folk are careful what they read/watch/see. When I was growing up, I wasn't allowed to watch PG-13 movies, and I remember trying to read a book by Joyce Carol Oates and feeling like God told me not to read it anymore. Which, I sort of think He did, because it was ugly and negative and boring. So I grew up thinking that there was such a think as "moral" literature, books we "should" read and books we should not. And I still suspect that's true, I just don't know what they are anymore. The line seems blurry.

Take Lolita: the main character is Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man who is basically a pedophile, who seduces (or is seduced by, some critics say) a 12-year-old girl. Do I find the thought of this character disturbing/disgusting? Yes, yes I do. Take him out the walls of literature, and I hate him, I say lock him up; tell me he lives on my street and I'll move to another neighborhood to protect my kids. I think about my niece who is nearly twelve and I just shiver.

But the book tells this man's story, and makes you feels stuff about him, stuff for him. At the end I wept for him, this man. I find I'm sort of offended when I (or someone else) boils the plot down and calls him a pedophile. And so maybe the book, therefore, is "bad." Do we really need books that redeem pedophiles?

That's one way to see it. The other way takes me to something C.S. Lewis said:

"[I]n reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."

There's more to it than that, but I can't find it. He says something about wishing the dung beetle could write books, because he'd want to read those too. And Humbert is a dung beetle; he basically says so himself.

Nabokov, in a essay at the back of my edition, talks about the seed for the book. He says he felt the first stirrings of it when he read in the paper about an ape they taught to draw, and how they painstakingly, over months and months, tried to teach it, and when they finally succeeded, what it drew were the bars of its cage. What's the implication here, the connection to Lolita? Humbert is writing the book from prison, so I assume the book is, in a way, the bars of his cage. And it feels like the bars of the cage. As I said, it's heartbreaking.

So maybe it's like something Yeats says, in a book of essays I can't remember the title of. He argues that literature is the purest Christlike act, because in a sense we do as Christ did, forgive, redeem. We take something dispicable and are made to understand it, to see the man as a man, not just a sinner who should be locked up. Which is how Christ sees us, right, with love no matter what we've done? I was talking about this with Sam, trying to figure it out, and I asked him if there was ever a limit what we should forgive, if there are people we simply should not read/write books about, and he said, "I don't know. Not according to Jesus." Point taken.

And there is a barrier between art and life, and of course this doesn't apply in the courtroom because laws against pedophila and murder are important and meant to keep us safe and maintain order. And Nabokov never says the bars of Humbert's cage shouldn't be there, he just shows you what they are.

And still, I'm nervous. Isn't there a limit, a line, a point we shouldn't cross? Or maybe all the lines are personal, none superior to the other?

Two sides, and I find myself straddling them. Do I want my nieces/nephews/future children reading Lolita? Maybe in a long long while. If I met my twelve or even twenty-year-old self, would I recommend the book to her? No, no I wouldn't. I wouldn't have been ready for it yet.

But now, I love it. At the end, when Humbert is driving down the wrong side of the road, and they put up a roadblock and pull his despairing, limp, apathetic body from his car, I wasn't sorry I read. Oh, I wasn't.