Text/Book, the Toronto Standard‘s books column, is written by Emily M. Keeler and Chris Randle, plus occasional guests.

My neighbours recently caught me reading Lolita at dusk. I was in our shared front yard, and there was just enough mauve light bouncing off the clouds for me to pick the lines off the page. Even though I am an adult, and even though this is by all contemporary accounts venerable literature, it somehow still felt like I had been caught doing something I shouldn’t, my thumbs on each side of Lolita like much younger hands in a cookie jar. Even though my neighbours are rad and conversation quickly turned toward anecdotes from our experiences with this particular volume in Nabokov’s enduring work, there remained in the air some small echo of that illicit thrill.

The last time I read Lolita was (already!) ten years ago. I was fourteen. Which is the exact age of Delores Haze when she finally escapes the legendary pervert Humbert Humbert. Which is just one of the reasons I probably should not have been reading it then, and one of the reasons I felt last week like I maybe should not have been reading it even a decade’s worth of birthdays later.

While calling up the impressions I was left with after that first reading would of course only serve as reconstruction, I can’t help but try to wander back in time. My memories of the book’s plot were surprisingly coherent: I could trace out the structure of Lo and Hum’s first meeting, of their journey across America, and of the ludicrous murder towards the end. I remembered the tender associations between rose and honey tones, the pinks and golds and soft browns of imaginary woodland critters (or sunbathed children). I remembered a few descriptions of limbs, an elbow or a knee, and the scene in the first hotel where Lolita climbs atop her captor without really knowing the rules of the game she’s planning on playing.

Looking back I find, much to my horror, that I didn’t know to read Humbert’s journals with my eye askance; I didn’t know any better than to take his narration straight. I trusted him. I trusted that he was talking about love. And though I didn’t think to look too deeply at Lo or the humming sense of tragedy and slowly building terror that her character is made to endure, I did feel a kinship with her, if only because we were both teen girls. But mostly I fell for creepy old Humbert Humbert, and because he was my guide for the first trek I took through this particular text I found myself looking through his eyes.

When I pulled my copy off the shelf last week, I found that I had played some kind of sick joke on myself. Between pages 126 and 127, right when the recently orphaned Lolita is in a mildly drugged slumber at that first hotel, where two old and rather pretentious men have a portentous conversation about death and deceit, I had long ago stuck a picture of myself as a little girl. There I was, around eight years old, smiling goofily around a snorkeling mask, staring out into the camera, into the future. Into this future, now the very recent past, where I take down Lolita and literally find myself there, and now feel so disgusted and disturbed by the very idea of a little girl trapped in this story. Good one, past self.

After being so viscerally reminded to look out for the little girl in this book, to be wary of the sociopathic charms of ol’ Hum’s hyperliterate narration, I dove back in. If I was unbearably naïve the first time, there were parts that felt just a touch tired, or even old hat, the second time around. In the beginning, of course, there’s the famous incantatory opening, almost worn down for all the times I’ve read those lusciously alliterative lines tripping up other people’s tongues or engendering epitaphs and essays. Lo-lee-ta and loins, life and teeth and all that. So on the re-read, armed with a photographic call for empathy and critique, with the filtered foreknowledge of so many commentaries or cultural references, I engaged the text as I would a traveling bingo game. Oh, look, there goes the oft-quoted quip about a murderer’s fancy prose style, and look here how many times not-so-humble Hum waxes lyrically on the merits of his own handsome visage.

Luckily for me, once I got into the rhythm I could forget about the map, the ephemeral annotations my brain was building onto Lolita out of ten years of life and reading. So once I found my footing, I was surprised to discover a distinctly mortuary scent wafting from the text: the death of Humbert’s first child lover, the death of Lolita’s mother, the climactic murder that closes the book. Everywhere it seemed that that unknowable thing, that final end was blowing over the pages. Where I had remembered seeing mostly sex I now found a great deal of death.

Which makes a certain sort of sense, really. Lolita was, according to Nabokov’s own afterword, written in the late 1940s and early ’50s, shortly after Freud’s death and during the wild flowering of psychoanalytic practice in America. The book is littered throughout with nods to the talking cure, and to the delectably bizarre mythology that informs its practice. At one point Humbert enrolls his hapless charge in a girls’ college that describes her general sense of distraction and inability to apply herself in her studies as the result of her arrested psychosexual maturation: “’She is still shuttling,’ said Mrs. Pratt, showing how with her liver-spotted hands, ‘between the anal and genital zones of development.’” At another point Humbert refers to his own incidences of psychiatric hospitalization, though they take place adjacent to the narrative of criminal lust he relays. That Nabokov so subtly mixed the strains of sex and death into his anxious love letter, for America in all of her strident youth, now struck me like a gong. In commingling Eros and Thanatos throughout Lolita he urges his reader towards a revelatory repulsion.

Because this story is told in the form of a fictional manuscript, it’s worth noting that Humbert’s hand is sometimes the one overtly directing his reader. During my first reading I was blind to the maestro’s manipulations, and though I kind of fell for it again this time around, at least I could recognize my own capitulation. He makes it so easy, calling out to you as his story unfolds. And it’s charming how he can take you in on the act, occasionally addressing his readers as a group of persecutors, or as some projected apparition of a nameless future scholar. He calls you everything from “Sir” to “Gentlewomen of the jury,” and by the end, the seduction now all but complete, he’s dropped the “dear reader” and given you the only name that remains: he calls you Lolita, and he promises that history will reverberate forever with those three syllables, the ones he has pressed on you. And because you’re still alive, and because you’re not fourteen anymore, you can choose to shudder and shrug them off.

_____

Emily Keeler lives in Toronto, Tumblrs for The Millions, and edits book stuff at The New Inquiry. Follow her on Twitter at @emilymkeeler if you please.

For more, follow us on Twitter at @torontostandard, and subscribe to our newsletter.