The Use and Abuse of Reading in Lolita

Perhaps more than any of Nabokov’s other works, Lolita (1953) thematizes and explores the subject of reading relations. It parodies a number of familiar types of narratee, castigates inappropriate expectations and responses to the events, provides a running commentary on the values of a variety of authors and genres, and shows how individuals variously attempt to gain cultural capital or enhance their social position through the books they read or claim to read. Above all, the work is a sustained drama of reading and misreading. Humbert, commenting on a word, “mask,” that he has just written, wonders suggestively: “Is ‘mask’ the keyword? Is it there because there is always delight in the semitranslucent mystery, the flowing charshaf, through which the flesh and the eye you alone are elected to know smile in passing at you alone?” (55). This depiction could be applied to all of Nabokov’s works, and is especially resonant for a discussion of Lolita. The book is filled with codes, disguised words, and hidden messages, as well as language and behavior designed to produce systematic misinterpretations. Humbert invents “elaborate dreams, pure classics in style,” in order to mock the psychoanalysts who attempt to interpret them (36). His damning diary is written in a “microscopic script” that “only a loving wife could decipher” (44). Humbert constantly acts in a way to simultaneously disguise and satisfy his criminal desires, creating as it were a kind of semiotic polysemy that allows him to be one thing while appearing another, as when he speculates on the physical possibilities that would attend his marriage to Lolita’s mother.

Charlotte Haze is an naive reader who has “blind faith in the wisdom of her church and book club” (77–78), though the novels Humbert found her reading when he arrived are quickly replaced by illustrated catalogues and homemaking guides as their relationship progresses (80). Humbert knows exactly how to manipulate such an uncritical sensibility: while listening to accounts of Charlotte’s past love life and inventing stories of his own, Humbert notes that the two sets were technically “congeneric since both were affected by the same stuff (soap operas, psychoanalysis and cheap novelettes) upon which I drew for my characters and she for her mode of expression” (82). Lolita is her mother’s progeny in regard to reading though she is even more the lineal descendent of Gerty McDowell: “She believed, with a kind of celestial trust, any advertisement or advice that appeared in Movie Love or Screen Land… The words ‘novelties and souvenirs’ simply entranced her by their trochaic lilt. If some café sign proclaimed Ice Cold Drinks, she was automatically stirred, though all drinks everywhere were ice-cold. She it was to whom the ads were dedicated: the subject and object of every foul poster” (150). Her only use for books seems to be as a repository for hiding dollar bills, as she does with Treasure Island (186).

The most elaborate attempt at reading concerns the most prominent set of clues in the book, the ever changing fictitious names and addresses that Humbert’s nemesis provides in the motel guest books as he had followed Humbert and Lolita around America. This “cryptogrammic paper chase” (252) haunts Humbert, who is never able to accurately interpret his antagonist: “His main trait was his passion for tantalization. Goodness, what a tease the poor fellow was!” (252). But Humbert is never able to decipher this private, taunting code; he does not learn the name until he wrests it from Lolita years later. This encounter is extremely revealing: “she emitted, a little mockingly, somewhat fastidiously, not untenderly, in a kind of muted whistle, the name that the astute reader has guessed long ago” (273–74).

There is an interesting ethical interplay between reading and misreading in this text, as poor readers are able to make major discoveries and the most sophisticated reader (“Well-read Humbert” [72]) is regularly confounded. Charlotte Haze does find and read Humbert’s diary and ignores his attempts to narrativize them in a less incriminating manner by pretending they were part of a novel he was inventing...