Lolita is a book that is replete with elusive undertones of language.  There is a subtle superimposition of the ridiculous on the serious; the ordinary on the extraordinary. Nabakov holds his audience in a thrall while he fascinates and repels .  All the while, he laughs at his characters, himself and his readers with impunity.  No screen rendering of Lolita can hope to capture this or convey the rich experience of the printed version of the book.

The power of book is not the story line. The story line in Lolita is just an excuse. The writer hangs multi layered challenges to established concepts that the reader has to grapple with. The story is not anchored to the book at all. It jumps out of the book and becomes the tale of the reader as he gradually loses awareness of demarcations between the imaginary and the real.  The cinematic scenes are played out excruciatingly with sidelights and insights into the readers own responses to situation.

Humbert as the cuckolded husband watches helplessly as his childlike wife’s “taxi colonel” outlines his plans for her life with him.  The scene is amusing, witty, frustrating and supremely painful.  Humbert admits “The situation was preposterous and became even more so when the taxi-colonel, stopping Valeria with a possessive smile began to unfold his views and plans.”  He is horrified and indignant but can do nothing about it as the Colonel “with an atrocious accent to his awful French, …delineated the world of love and work into which he proposed to enter in hand with his child-wife Valeria…I can swear he actually consulted me on such things as her diet, her periods, her wardrobe and the books she had read or should read….”

The scene becomes even more farcical as the lover “reverting to his professional state” drove the Humbert’s to their residence so that he could escort Mrs.Humbert out of it. While the cuckolded Humbert dwells lovingly on the possibility of shooting the lover or hurting his wife, the escort hangs around being gallant and helpful, visiting the toilet and leaving a stinking urinal for Humbert to clean and a thwarted desire to land him a facer as he realizes that the taxi Colonel is made of pig iron and “the void of the street” reveals nothing of his wife’s departure.  He says with wry humor that the “void of the street” may have “spared me a bloody nose….”

From this point on the normal and the abnormal blend and flow with horrifically amusing episodes. ‘Lolita’ becomes the story of a step father who is obsessed with nymphets and one specific nymphet—his step daughter–Lolita.  Nymphets, Humbert explains–with seeming scientific precision–refers to maidens “between the age limits of nine and fourteen…who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphatic (that is demoniac)”.  He goes on, to lovingly dwell on the specific characteristics of nymphets as distinguished from ordinary girls.  The nymphets have “certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, elusive, shifty, soul shattering, insidious charm..” It is possible to discern them by the “slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices…” Humbert cannot but help defile his step daughter. The language forces the reader to nod his consensus.  He cannot help it if his convoluted logic must lead him on to marry the mother to get at the daughter.  The reader is left suspended between horror of his own consensus to the flow and hysterical laughter!

So, while Humbert wallows in his feelings in the various scenes and waxes eloquent, Nabakov winks at the reader, and invites him to share with him a sense of the ludicrous. He frames the ridiculous in perspective with aplomb, as he makes Humbert request the reader participate in the scenes that are replayed for their benefit. Among the innumerable examples that litter the book is the scene of stolen sexual bliss with the pre-pubescent daughter of his landlady and later his wife.  Humbert with a matter of fact, tongue in cheek introduction says: “So let us get started; I have a difficult job before me”.  The purpose is to prove to the reader that he (Humbert) is not a monster. Fascination holds the reader spell bound while Nabokov and Humbert draw for the reader a scene that filled with comically baroque pleonasms but no explicit pornography.

“She was musical and apple-sweet. Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I stroked them; there she lolled on in the right-hand corner, almost asprawl, Lola, the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet, against the pile of old magazines heaped on my left on the sofa—and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty—between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock …”

The reader cannot close the book with the feeling of satisfaction.  The powerful stream of consciousness sucks in the reader and he becomes part of the flotsam in the whirlpool of the Humbert’s thoughts till he is suspended in hysterical appreciation of the ridiculous and the horrific and gradually begins act and react to the forces within the novel.  The reader is caught between fact and fiction; horror and hysterical laughter while the bizarre is made to seem painfully crooning and tender. Ridiculous statements are made with absolute conviction and complete blatancy that makes the reader totter on the edge of belief.  Humbert the character is in seeming control of situations and Nabakov the writer is in complete control.

Lolita is witty and heartbreaking. Humbert is fascinating. He stands teetering on the edge of madness; completely aware of the condition and its implications.  He is a lover extremis; a coward; self critic. He is ridiculous; he is obsessed. He is amusingly self confessed and charmingly frank. He holds up a mirror to the shallowness of American culture and cans all truths and values without distinction. He toys with the reader’s expectations and leaves them ridiculously floundering while he moves on to the next level of perversion. Humbert becomes more real than reality as the books grows on the reader.

Adrain Lyne’s movie is faithful to the story of the book (though the story is an excuse to hang the narrative in the book).  The narrator is crazy and fact and fiction are inseparably interwoven in his mind.  The point at which the fact emerges as fiction is never be fully captured on the screen.  The point at which the horrific is seen as the ridiculous is not adequately expressed nor the shifts of perspective displayed for the viewer.  The subtlety, the ambivalence defies capture and Lyne is left grappling with shadows and has decided to stick to the realities he could actually hold down.

The story in the film makes complete sense.  This is exactly the “opposite of the reason the book exists”.  It is not confusing, unerotic and unresolved.  It tries to make the unexplainable explainable.  In the process it kills the imagination, destroys the kaleidoscope of impressions, the sense of the ridiculous and renders the whole story specific.

Kubrick’s film “Lolita” was labeled as a betrayal of a great work of art.  It failed to create an equivalent style or satisfy the demand for a titillating erotic experience. Nabokov in his foreword to the screenplay writes, “At a private screening I had discovered that Kubrick was a great director that his Lolita was a first-rate film with magnificent actors and that only ragged odds and ends of my script had been used . . . . My first reaction to the picture was a mixture of aggravation, regret, and reluctant pleasure.”  The transformations were all directed towards the dark humor and the sense of grotesque.  Clare Quilty becomes an alter ego of Humbert Humbert and there are several scenes that are imbued with macabre irony before Quilty is murdered.  The social satire is also not missed in the rendering as the European Professor describes the small town American life. However, the subtle humor that pervades the book and makes the reader laugh hysterically is missing.

While we may agree with Nabokovs fans that “Lolita” the book is powerful, castigating the movies as pale imitations would be an injustice.  The movies have their own reach and power, but they are not screen renderings of the book in the true sense. They fail to capture the essence, the language and the highly developed sense of the ridiculous that pervades the book and makes it an experience worth crying and laughing over.