Abstract

Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita, first published in 1955, in France due to fears of the censor, remains an established part of the literary cannon, and is still widely read to this day. Shockingly, in the 1950s and 1960s many readers, influenced by prevailing critical opinion, tended to identify with Humbert Humbert. In this, they interpreted his verbal virtuosity and erudition as an extension of the implied author, reading the novel as a plea for understanding of his monstrous creation. The twenty-first-century reader approaches the novel in a very different ideological and critical climate, being forewarned that they will be meeting one of the most famous paedophiles in literary history. Nevertheless, Nabokov still manages to get under the reader’s skin. My focus in this chapter explores what Phelan (2008) calls bonding unreliability, denoting the ways in which the narrator, Humbert, attempts to seduce the reader into colluding with him in the full knowledge that they might well loathe his worldview. Nabokov’s stylistic brilliance, employed on Humbert’s behalf, is multi-pronged. Not only does he employ an old-world snobbishness laced with sly irresistible humour, there is an insidious bullying undercurrent, mocking the female reader who dares to place Dolores—her real name, the name she was born with, not his name for her—at the centre of the text. The reinstatement of Dolores is vital, because only then does the impact of “seeing” from the author/narrator's point of view hit us with full force. Humbert’s story, for all his self-deprecating anguish, is essentially a celebration of the rape and exploitation of a defenceless child.