Lolita is not a moral test

No-one knows what an unreliable narrator even is

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.

It’s worth quoting Nabokov himself to get us started. When the Paris Review said to him that his sense of the immorality of the Humbolt-Lolita relationship was very strong, compared to the lack of public outrage when, for example, men in Hollywod married girls little older than Lolita (i.e. middle-age men marrying nineteen year olds). Nabokov replied,

No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert’s sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying men in their teens or early twenties have no bearing on Lolita whatever. Humbert was fond of “little girls”—not simply “young girls”.

What matters here is Nabokov’s disavowal of the importance of his moral stance. What matters is the gap between the reader’s idea of Nabokov and Humbert. To explain further, I will quote John Wasmuth.

The term unreliable narrator was famously coined by Wayne Booth in his seminal Rhetoric of Fiction. It has been of notable importance in narratological studies ever since its introduction in 1961… Booth defines the reliable and unreliable narrator in the following way: “I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not” (158-59). In other words, when a narrator expresses values and perceptions that strikingly diverge from those of the implied author he is deemed unreliable.

What this means is that the narrator is unreliable when the implied norms of the book create an ironic gap with the narrator. We as readers must see a gap between what the narrator tells us and the facts of the story. Lolita is set in a world (i.e. our world) where a grown man loving a twelve-year-old girl is unacceptable; therefore, Humbert’s narrative is unreliable because he diverges from that norm. As Aaron Gwynn pointed out on Twitter, “Humbert isn’t “unreliable” because we find his actions repellent. He’s an unreliable narrator because of the distance between his values and those of the Implied Author.”

You might think the concept of an “implied author” is vague and confusing—I agree. Wasmuth gives another, and, in my view, better, definition.

When a narrator is unreliable there is a conflict between the narrator’s presentation and the rest of the narrative which makes us suspect his sincerity. We read between the lines and come to the conclusion that the narrator is either withholding the true version of the story or is lacking the ability to tell it… if the implied author does not share the narrator’s moral values then his morals are considered questionable. If they do share moral values then the narrator is unequivocally deemed reliable, no matter how morally reprehensible his views may seem.

Those readers who understand that the narrator is unreliable are thus in a collusion with the implied author—they are in on the irony. It is this collusion that Ruby and Kempner leverage to describe themselves as morally superior to Rowling even though, as we saw, someone like Trilling can both understand the unreliability of Humbert and hold Rowling’s view that this is a tragic love story.

Now, how useful is this idea? The novelist Brandon Taylor, an accomplished fiction writer and critic, has said on Twitter that the idea of the unreliable narrator makes little sense to him. Taylor said he was “fundamentally unable to distinguish between that and the rest of narrative art and indeed life itself.”

I think this is probably the most sensible point of view. Humbert is clearly ironised but it is not clear enough, in Taylor’s words “what is distinct about this quality of narrator.” I don’t think the “implied author” means much beyond saying that the narrator is ironised against the implied moral norms of the book. Well, sure, that’s what irony is.

In this debate the literary jargon “unreliable narrator” was cover for expressing moral or political views in a literary guise. Disagree with Rowling all you like, about whatever you like. But to pretend this is a literary matter is, well, unreliable.