My AP English class started reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita this week. I was excited that we finally arrived here in our journey through the course. The year began with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and, as it is integrated with a history course on post-colonial Africa, traveled to South Africa and the Congo before returning to the United States.
On our way back to New England, this time with Humbert Humbert’s European perspective, we traversed the townships of Cape Town and Johannesburg, along the Western Cape’s coastlines, and deep into the Karoo. Our guides were journalists and their nonfictional depictions of the final years of apartheid rule and the months after. We also traveled back in time with Joseph Conrad and into the deepest and darkest corners of man’s soul. Coming out of the Congo alive but jarred by a maniac’s murderous crimes, we encountered Humbert Humbert’s peculiar malady with a sense of relief.
If The Great Gatsby is a good friend, which is how I receive it each time, then Lolita is that favorite professor who always enthralls me and accosts my confidence in my own knowledge only to release me from my own inability to understand. I have the privilege of teaching two of my favorite books in the same class and hope to be able to do this for many more years.
To introduce the novel, we met Humbert Humbert together as a class, reading out loud the short first chapter, skipping for the moment the “Foreword.” I wanted the first voice that the students heard to be that of the artist and madman himself. Pausing and reconsidering the first paragraph, each of our tongues took the prescribed trip to the tapping of the teeth, as I instructed my students to give sound to the name Lo-Lee-Ta. When asked for their reaction to the exercise, students laughed and squirmed uncomfortably, and one said that she felt “creepy.” That initial sense of relief did not last long.
In the following class meeting, after the first out-of-class reading, students returned with surprisingly much enthusiasm. Unlike last year’s class, in which many students found the novel disturbing and the narrator monstrous, this year’s group embraces both. I attribute that difference to the fact that the AP veterans have shared their holistic reactions to the novel with these newbies. Having heard about the taboo relationship between the 37-year-old man and his 12-year-old victim, the current students are able to suspend their judgment and sense of propriety to comprehend the character who has been the subject of many of their conversations outside of class.
During faculty orientation in August, when we mapped out the integration plans for the year and paid particular attention to the new pairings, including this English-history pair, someone asked me to explain a potential connection between post-colonial Africa and Lolita. (Last year’s pairing was with a course on Middle Eastern policy and diplomacy, and the same question was asked then.) The history teacher and I had discussed beforehand the thematic connection that we would echo throughout the English class’s reading of the novel: the desire of one human to possess completely another human being, and the impact that it has on both. Humbert Humbert calls it “solipsism.” In every way, his narrative is an attempt to “solipsize” the object of his demented fantasies.
In the course, H.H. has a precedent in Jay Gatsby, although the earlier character spent only five years idealizing and idolizing a real woman, who aged along with him, living and breathing never far away. Humbert Humbert spent 23 years metamorphosing a dead Annabel Leigh and a teenage sexual frustration into an unjustifiable pursuit to own every aspect of another human being, including her name and thoughts. What she is, as she exists to the reader’s cognizance, can be seen only through and in terms of H.H.’s character. Like H.H. himself, we see and know Lolita as a manifestation of his fantasy. She does not exist otherwise, and she does not speak her own thoughts. We can argue about one or two instances when we might be hearing the girl’s actual voice, but even then it comes out as quiet sobbing and not spoken words.
To a degree (greater than one might think initially), the western colonizing powers that entered Africa, one after another, took the same approach and wanted the same results as does H.H. Africa is a resource. Africa is regret and guilt. Africa is a dream or a nightmare, or both. Africa’s landscapes are extensions of the outsiders’ imagination, while its voices are manic projections of the possessors on the possessed.
Humbert Humbert explains that 12 percent of American adult males (an actual figure in contemporary psychological studies) are inflicted with the same sickness as he, which he coins “nympholeptic,” but only “the artist and the madman” would act on it with such self-awareness and control.
Many more of us, all over the world, exhibit the very same symptoms. We just suffer from different illnesses and seek other objects.
I. Want. To. Be. In. This. Class. Again. Enough said.