图书作者与内容简介

Following the perspective and narrative of Humbert Humbert, a highly educated and self-proclaimed victim of pubescent "nymphets", the book Lolitaㅡnamed after the nickname of Dolores Haze given by her stepfather, who claimed to be seduced by her alluring fruitㅡtells the journey about the abduction of a twelve-year-old.

Despite its initial difficulties of publishing and the ban posed afterwards until the 1960s, a feverish dreamlike trip across the USA and also its hidden monstrosity underneath the illusions are to be revealed.

我的观点

Reading Lolita can be described as walking through a garden made of thousands of pieces of glass, mosaic-like and mesmerizing, all reflecting dazzling lights hitting from different angles. Everything is painfully bewitching and dreamlike until one tries to caress the petals, only to be cut bloodily by the crooked edges and abruptly awakened from the hazy illusions by the horrifying realization. Embroidered by Humbert’s European style of fancy wordings and sophisticated linguistic skills, it’s criminally easy to get lost in his carefully weaved web of delusion and manipulation. It was so often that I found myself indulging in the enthralling language between the lines, until a glimpse of escaped monstrosity brutally ripped open the kaleidoscopic phantasm and exposed the repulsive nature of Humbert’s sick obsession and helpless narcissism.

Disguised in his self-mocking and somehow ironic tone, our unreliable narrator embellished his abhorrent crimes with a silver tongue and poor sophistry. Eager to justify his pathology, he compared his desire for premature girleens to historical figures who courted young girls back in the Renaissance era such as Dante and Petrarch, and even old men in uncivilized regions that copulate with girls barely one-tenth of their age. And in spite of his constant self-loathe and occasional self-beratement from general morality, he proceeded to defend himself by stressing how hard he had tried to resist, arguing how he was more of a defeated mortal rather than a puppet stringed by his impulses.

Being contradictorily delusional and self-conscious at the same time, Humbert tried to persuade both himself and the readers that he genuinely cares about Dolores as a father would, but was just a poor soul seduced by a cruel and mercurial nymphet, irresistible to her deadly charm and tantalizing touch. And interestingly, while being powerlessly attracted by her childish vulgarity and stubbornly interpreted her foul manners as some sensual shrewishness, he insisted on role playing a strict European father, desperately trying to convince himself as the dominant, as if he was not the *** that had the obvious upper hand. He even sent her to a private women’s college and restlessly tried to 「educate」 her just like an old-fashioned caring papa, worried about his daughter’s concerning behaviour especially when it comes to boys一as if any father of sound mind would deny his daughter coffee unless she practiced her 「morning duty」.

Although we as the readers, can often see his ravishing expression of undying love and endless tenderness for Dolores, it is important to note that Humbert was never truly in love with her: he saw her as the reincarnation of his childhood love Annabel, the prototype of Humbert’s nymphets whose beauty and youth was made immortal by sealed breath and nailed coffin. Instead of seeing through the veil of lost love, he clinged to the idea of Dolores. All of his wishful sentiment and amorous passion were the result of the romanticized version of Dolores: his Lo, his Dolly, his Lolita. It was anything but love. His jealousy and hatred towards any male Homo sapiens other than him that Dolores showed minimal affections to was far from the protective nature stimulated by fatherly love, or some noble sense of loyalty. It was envy, not some actions from an honorable knight that swore to defend the chastity of his ward, but the consuming rage that a paramour with fragile ego would be fueled with. 

He saw her as his possession: his maidenish harlot, his pubescent Carmen; his bratty sweetheart, his youngish Phryne. He referred to her as an enchantress and seductress, despite her being only a twelve-year-old girl. Sexualized and objectified, Humbert fancied her the way an emperor favors his adolescent concubine, the way a high lord adores his Babylonian childwhore. Humbert claimed he loved her, yet excused himself of molesting her by stating that she was already spoiled by another and showed no modesty, implying that he wasn’t her first lover. Sparing all the irritating equivocating, he alibied himself by saying she was already a dangerously sluttish girl before he stretched out his claws.

However, stripped away of all his self-indulgent elegance and gimmick, Humbert was merely a distorted paedophile and murderer. A stepfather who shared an ***uous bed with his plundered bride, a slavish fanatic who worshipped his own lust incarnated in a raped girl. In short, a self-victimizing abuser. Furthermore, even if his self-consciousness and little sense of guilt beheld any essence, it aggravates his atrocities, for he had the audacity to find comfort in the supposed torment or even see it as an atonement. Despite her obvious childish behaviour and painfully innocent attachment that may have resulted from a deceased father and narcissistic mother, he took advantage of Dolores’s absent father figure and short-lived teenage daydream, continuously manipulated her by soft coercion, and threatened her by saying that no one would believe her accusation, and would send her to correctional school instead. As his control over her began to slip with growing time, he changed his lure from soft ice cream and pretty dresses to the deprivation of freedom, although he quickly resumed his offer of lavishments afterwards.

「I was a daisy-fresh girl and look what you've done to me. I ought to call the police and tell them you raped me. Oh, you dirty, dirty old man.」 Although silly-sounding and in a childishly mocking tone, a subtle sense of disgust and reluctance was implicitly voiced. From an extremely unreliable narrator as previously stated, it is hard for us to truly uncover Dolores’s character through Humbert’s biased and twisted account: a prey of a child predator, robbed of her childhood, her right to a normal life and even her own identity. 

Dolores was a woeful Persephone, I would say, whose Demeter was murdered, leaving her trapped in the underworld with a lurking abomination that boasts himself as Hades, a pretender who wishes to plant his pomegranate seeds into the womb of  his groomed wife as soon as her charms fades without Hebe’s blessing. Humbert fantasized about Dolores bringing him another nymphet after she grew out of adolescence, and the same to her predecessor until the third generation, when he could finally practice playing a loving grandfather only because of his inability out of old age. Even her promised freedom was tragic: escaping a paedophile through another of his kind, only to fall into abduction once again. And finally when she seemed to have the opportunity to start her new life with the joy of bringing her own child with a decent husband to this world, she died of childbirth on Christmas. No amount of glittering snowflakes or carols sung by jolly children could bring her back from Annabel’s resting place.

Needless to say, Lolita is an absolute masterpiece. Although it’s painful and even traumatizing to finish, the exquisite beauty of its language and the vividness of characters left me speechless and stunned. Being confident to refute any comments that condemn Lolita as a sinful piece to promote paedophilia and should not be published, it is literally the exact opposite if one cares enough to open it and read. Instead of encouraging any form of child sex abuse, it allows us to glimpse through the morbidity and pathology inside a creature of paedophilia, and the tragedy of its victim. In a world full of nonconstructive and even destructive criticism, and also extremely twisted ideas of conservatism and religion, Lolita is an easily misunderstood literature. Nevertheless, I insist that burning books and burying the accused evil would only lead to further evil and ignorance, and books like this need to exist. And ironically, books that were once or are currently being banned, such as 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale, are the ones that expose the ugliness the most. After all, it is always a warning sign when the government chooses to prohibit books that write about evil, instead of the written evil itself.

At last, disturbingly beautiful and hauntingly poetic, but also horrifyingly soul-crushing and agonizingly tragic— I would leave this as my closing remark.