A few days ago on Twitter, Sooz Kempner quoted a twenty-four-year-old interview in which J.K. Rowling said that Lolita is a great and tragic love story.
JK Rowling doesn’t understand Lolita. It is not a great and tragic love story, it is terrifying book written from the POV of a peadophile, a very obviously unreliable narrator, and at no point are you meant to say “this is so romantic”. She’s 12, Joanne. What the FUCK, Joanne.
Ryan Ruby then called Lolita a “moral test”.
Lolita is a moral test. Kempner passes it. Rowling does not. I will only add that the reason Rowling doesn’t pass--she is tricked by aesthetic quality into excusing cruelty and domination--is also part of Nabokov’s point, and what makes the novel the true masterpiece it is.
I dislike this neo-Kantian perspective in which the people who “understand” great literature are deemed to be superior, not just intellectually but morally. (Ruby has previously tweeted that he has made his peace “with all the idiots who don’t understand Lolita.” Well, it turns out that isn’t true! )
I do not believe that reading a novel is a “moral test” and I find it uncomfortable when prominent people like Ruby make these assertions. The moral worth of a person is not testable by their understanding of a novel. Nor is Lolita quite that simple.
Indeed, it’s worth noting that critics have disagreed about these issues. Ruby and Kempner must have forgotten that Lionel Trilling called Lolita a great love story. Trilling is not defending paedophilia or Humbert—it’s a genre point: as he says, all great love stories have been scandalous. The argument over whether Lolita is about love and sex is not the moronic invention of J.K. Rowling but a debate that began when Lolita was published, and which has been conducted by fine literary minds. You can believe Lolita to be a tragic love story and think that it is about a repellent, abusive paedophile. Of course, you might disagree with Trilling, but the idea that Lolita is an moral test isn’t right.
There is one point of literary interest amongst all this. The question of an “unreliable narrator” actually. Is, as Kempner says, Humbert obviously an unreliable narrator?
This concept is taught a lot at school (Kempner learned about it when she was sixteen) but I don’t think the idea is well defined or well understood—and that was especially true in this debate. As you will see, even once we lay out the real details of this idea, we may still not find it useful.
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