Speaker 1: Trigger warning. This podcast discusses sexual assault and child abuse,
Speaker 1: as well as strong language. Listener discretion is advised. M
Speaker 1: I first learned about Lolita when I was twelve, and
Speaker 1: that's the same age as Dolores Hayes or Lolita, whichever
Speaker 1: of them you're familiar with. At the beginning of that book,
Speaker 1: it was two thousand five. I was in the seventh
Speaker 1: grade in Massachusetts. I wore a back brace to school,
Speaker 1: which put off any hope of getting my first kiss
Speaker 1: until two thousand and eight. But in two thousand five,
Speaker 1: I had an obsession with lemony snicke ats a series
Speaker 1: of unfortunate events, I had a school picture wearing a
Speaker 1: T shirt that said too young for Ashton, and I
Speaker 1: read Vladimir in a Bulkos Lolita for the first time.
Speaker 1: But it was not a random selection off the shelf.
Speaker 1: It had been recommended to me by children's author Lomani Snaket. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick journey if you're not familiar. Lolita
Speaker 1: is a ninety novel by Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov. That
Speaker 1: is Nabokov, But if you correct anyone for saying it Nabakoff,
Speaker 1: you're a jerk, But it's a book about a middle
Speaker 1: aged European pedophile named Humbert Humbert who falls in love
Speaker 1: with heavy quotes there then abducts and sexually and psychologically
Speaker 1: abuses twelve year old American girl Dolores Hayes or Lolita,
Speaker 1: then abducts and rapes her across the US in the
Speaker 1: late nineteen forties. And there's no shying away from the
Speaker 1: reality here, in spite of how it's been romanticized over
Speaker 1: the years. Lolita tells the story of a pedophile who
Speaker 1: abuses a twelve year old that he's supposed to be
Speaker 1: the caretaker of. It is horrifying and one of the
Speaker 1: most controversial text of the last century. And it's what
Speaker 1: this podcast is about, sort of. And if you are
Speaker 1: also not familiar, Lemony Snicket, the pseudonym for author Daniel Handler,
Speaker 1: wrote the series of Unfortunate Events books in the early
Speaker 1: two thousands. There is an adapted movie starring Jim Carey
Speaker 1: from two thousand four, and there's also a more recent
Speaker 1: Netflix adaptation with Neil Patrick Harris. To this day, these
Speaker 1: books are my favorites in the world, not just because
Speaker 1: I love the stories, but because Lemony Snicket references a
Speaker 1: number of famous books and movies and shows to his
Speaker 1: young readers that they probably wouldn't know about, leaving twelve
Speaker 1: year old with nothing but time and Google to dcode
Speaker 1: his writing and find this whole new media list spanning
Speaker 1: Moby Dick to Monty Python just by reading the books.
Speaker 1: Handler has written a number of books targeted at adults
Speaker 1: as well, with pretty sexual plots, but the majority of
Speaker 1: his audience, especially in the mid two thousands, were from
Speaker 1: Lemony Snicket and were children, And because he was my
Speaker 1: favorite author, I would frequently boot it up the family
Speaker 1: Gateway computer to look up interviews with him. The interview
Speaker 1: I remember reading very clearly is no longer online, but
Speaker 1: I have something close. This is from an interview he
Speaker 1: did with I g. N in two thousand four, in
Speaker 1: which he recommends the following to his fan base, The
Speaker 1: wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, Mr Show, the
Speaker 1: movie Saboteur, a song called Chlorine Bacon Skin by Prince,
Speaker 1: and Lolita by Vladimir and a book. Mr Handler was
Speaker 1: not available to be interviewed for this podcast, but he's
Speaker 1: been talking about Lolita in interviews for nearly twenty years. Now,
Speaker 1: and I want to be clear, I am not trying
Speaker 1: to cancel Daniel Handler or a Lemony Snicket over saying
Speaker 1: his favorite book is Lolita to a majority young audience.
Speaker 1: If you want to scrutinize his politics for different reasons,
Speaker 1: feel free to google his name and then the word
Speaker 1: controversy and arrive at your own conclusion. There's valid discussions
Speaker 1: to be had, but that's not what I'm here to
Speaker 1: discuss on this podcast. The thing is that recommending a
Speaker 1: book like Lolita was very in the wheelhouse of Lemony
Speaker 1: Ticket at this time, and the fact that he answered
Speaker 1: what his favorite book was without a filter was a
Speaker 1: huge part of what I really liked about his work
Speaker 1: As a kid, Unlike a lot of y A authors
Speaker 1: of this era, reading a Lemony snicketbook made me feel
Speaker 1: like I was an adult, and that by referencing all
Speaker 1: these fancy vocabulary words and great works of literature, I
Speaker 1: was given the tools to be seen as an equal
Speaker 1: to him, be in on it. So Lemony Snickett saying
Speaker 1: he liked Lolita stuck out to my twelve year old
Speaker 1: brain for a lot of reasons once I found out
Speaker 1: what it was about. Because Handler slash Snickett had already
Speaker 1: made a number of references to Lolita in his own
Speaker 1: book series. One of the references is a character in
Speaker 1: the series that is a reference to Lolita's protagonist, Humbert Humbert.
Speaker 1: Another references a plot point from the first book where
Speaker 1: villain and acting guardian Count Olof tries to steal a
Speaker 1: fourteen year old orphan named Violet Boudelaire's fortune by abusing
Speaker 1: his parental powers to marry and abduct her. And in
Speaker 1: my opinion, the biggest reference to Lolita is in the
Speaker 1: framework and narration style of A series of Unfortunate Events.
Speaker 1: Lemony Snakett is Daniel Handler's pseudonym, and Snakett, like Humbert,
Speaker 1: is a middle aged man following and tracking down the
Speaker 1: history of children who may or may not be alive
Speaker 1: anymore without any of their input. The big important difference
Speaker 1: here is that Snakett is not the villain of the story.
Speaker 1: He is merely the documentarian, and that was how I
Speaker 1: got to Lolita in two thousand five, I should introduce myself.
Speaker 1: My name is Jamie Loftus. I am a writer, comedian
Speaker 1: and podcaster. Those jobs are not listed in order of
Speaker 1: how embarrassing they are. And this is Lolita Podcast, a
Speaker 1: series exploring the confused cultural legacy of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.
Speaker 1: We're gonna be talking about a thesis is worth of
Speaker 1: stuff here. How did this story come to be in
Speaker 1: the first place? How has it morphed into the pentapod
Speaker 1: monster of a cultural artifact it stands as today? And
Speaker 1: when Lolita comes up in conversation as a reference, how
Speaker 1: far exactly from the source material is the reference? Because
Speaker 1: the meaning of Lolita has evolved over time, whether we're
Speaker 1: talking about the movies from Vladimir Nabakov's masterpieces a story,
Speaker 1: or the music, which ranges from weird metal songs to
Speaker 1: the police's teacher student relationship. In Don't Stand so Close
Speaker 1: to Me. You know the lines, It's no use he
Speaker 1: sees her, he starts to shake and cough. Jed Light
Speaker 1: the oh Man in that book by a book off
Speaker 1: you can tell. We can't we can't license to the song,
Speaker 1: so I just have to sing it. There's a song
Speaker 1: by Australian duo The Veronica's called Lolita that features a
Speaker 1: love story between an older man and an apparently consenting teenager.
Speaker 1: There's Katie Perry singing I studied Lolita religiously in her
Speaker 1: single One of the Boys. And then there's, of course,
Speaker 1: all of Lana del Rey's early catalog. She's got a
Speaker 1: song called Lolita, She's got another called Off to the Races,
Speaker 1: whose chorus calls light of my life, fire of my Alloince,
Speaker 1: be a good baby, do what I Want, and other
Speaker 1: songs we don't have the licensing rights to. There is
Speaker 1: hours of Lolita themed music, or this line from a
Speaker 1: failed nineteen seventies Broadway musical that ruined my entire summer.
Speaker 1: Who is that piper who likes them post Sniper? I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: let's hear that again. Who is that piper who likes them? Post?
Speaker 1: Someone had to sing that? Let's and and there's more,
Speaker 1: And for me, it's the third Pew Pessant where I
Speaker 1: draw the line. Now, I have a lot of opinions
Speaker 1: on the legacy of Lolita, but in listening to the series,
Speaker 1: I want you to form your own. I'm going to
Speaker 1: be speaking with fans, detractors, literary scholars, experts on and
Speaker 1: survivors of abuse, directors, authors, and a lot of the
Speaker 1: women who have played the titular character in these adaptations,
Speaker 1: and I also recognize that discussing this book at all
Speaker 1: is a mine field. I'm going to be too close
Speaker 1: minded for some, too permissive for others. But I'm going
Speaker 1: to try and show you every perspective on this story
Speaker 1: that I can. But god damn, there is really a lot,
Speaker 1: because this is an inherently politicized text, and I can't
Speaker 1: even guarantee that how I feel about this book now
Speaker 1: is how I will always feel about it. If the
Speaker 1: many people I've spoken to for this show or any indication,
Speaker 1: I probably won't. Lolita is a terrible and complicated story
Speaker 1: with a complicated legacy, but I think it is one
Speaker 1: that's still worth examining today. As a survivor of abuse
Speaker 1: myself that has been haunted by this book since it
Speaker 1: was recommended to me by my favorite children's author, I
Speaker 1: want to understand that. And as a feminist, I struggled
Speaker 1: to say that Lolita is a feminist text, or even
Speaker 1: that Nabulkov is a feminist writer. So why am I
Speaker 1: so stuck on it? I've been finding that there are
Speaker 1: two huge conversations to be had when it comes to
Speaker 1: the adaptations and the cultural influence of Lolita. There's one
Speaker 1: conversation that's more connected to the sexualization of young girls
Speaker 1: in media, which is more connected to the movies and
Speaker 1: the aesthetic, and then there's a conversation more connected to
Speaker 1: the book, which we're going to talk about today, and
Speaker 1: that conversation is the ethics of pedophile as protagonist and narrator.
Speaker 1: So for me, there's really no gut reaction to the
Speaker 1: cultural topic of Lolita that you can discredit. It makes
Speaker 1: sense that people have very strong reactions to this text
Speaker 1: because the topic of pedophilia and assault of miners is
Speaker 1: a hugely upsetting, large issue that has been with humanity
Speaker 1: for at least all of recorded history, and it remains
Speaker 1: a huge issue now. The year this podcast is released,
Speaker 1: the Jeffrey Epstein story is still being reported on detail
Speaker 1: by excruciating detail. The Q and on conspiracy Theory details
Speaker 1: false allegations about current public figures being pedophiles, specifically targeting
Speaker 1: that same fear that many people have of children being
Speaker 1: preyed upon. Here's some recent statistics from rain the Rape
Speaker 1: abew Sin Incest National Network on this topic. One in
Speaker 1: nine girls under eighteen experienced sexual abuse at the hands
Speaker 1: of an adult, and of these victims, two out of
Speaker 1: three are between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Percent
Speaker 1: of victims know their assaulter at the time of their assault,
Speaker 1: and these are just statistics for cases that are reported.
Speaker 1: And on top of that, according to the National Center
Speaker 1: on Violence against Women in the Black Community, one in
Speaker 1: four Black girls are sexually abused by age eighteen. Sexual
Speaker 1: violence and abuse is disproportionately high against Indigenous women and girls,
Speaker 1: with one in two experiencing sexual violence at some point
Speaker 1: in their lives, according to a UN report from two
Speaker 1: thousand fourteen. Another little discussed issue is how pedophilia affects
Speaker 1: young boys, something according to Brian Boyd's biography of him,
Speaker 1: Nabokov experienced as a child at the hands of an
Speaker 1: uncle at a really young age. While still living in Russia.
Speaker 1: One in five boys are sexually abused by the age
Speaker 1: of eighteen, according to the Advocacy Center. So Lolita the
Speaker 1: book has always warranted a huge response because it's one
Speaker 1: of the few major literary works, especially up until it
Speaker 1: was published in nineteen fifty five, that attempts to grapple
Speaker 1: with this theme and reality exclusively at all, and like literature,
Speaker 1: students don't come for me. I know it was not
Speaker 1: the first book to deal with this. All this to
Speaker 1: say that the sexual assault of girls is a gigantic
Speaker 1: issue and an issue that sexualization of girls and media
Speaker 1: is in direct conversation with, and the difference between how
Speaker 1: publicly these issues are discussed between nineteen fifty five and
Speaker 1: now is gigantic. So yeah, reactions to Lolita are big,
Speaker 1: and it makes total sense that they are. But if
Speaker 1: you're not familiar with the book itself and are mostly
Speaker 1: acquainted with the sexualized cultural figure that is Lolita, you
Speaker 1: may be surprised to hear that Nabokov's book is, at least,
Speaker 1: for my money, as anti pedophile as a book can
Speaker 1: possibly be while still being narrated by Humbert Humberts. So
Speaker 1: I want this dialect to not just be with people
Speaker 1: who are experts on the topic. I wanted to be
Speaker 1: with you two, because I feel that so much of
Speaker 1: how this book affects you has to do with what
Speaker 1: your experience with the story is coming in and at
Speaker 1: what point in your life you first encountered it. With
Speaker 1: that in mind, I bravely set up a phone line.
Speaker 1: It's six to six eight, seven, two, four, four or
Speaker 1: five eight, if you want to weigh in, And I
Speaker 1: asked people what their experience with Lolita was. Had they
Speaker 1: read the book, had they seen movies, had they just
Speaker 1: heard Here's what some of you said. And these voicemails
Speaker 1: have been edited for clarity. My history with Lolita You're
Speaker 1: fraud is complicated and also the best. UM. I first
Speaker 1: encountered down the Cobs writing, UM, we read an Estate
Speaker 1: is in my ap lit class in junior year of
Speaker 1: high school. UM. And then I read Lolita, and I
Speaker 1: think it's probably the most beautifully written book I've ever read. UM,
Speaker 1: setting aside the you know, molestation of it all. Somebody
Speaker 1: picked Lolita for our book club book. I've never seen
Speaker 1: the movie, never read the book, had a vague idea
Speaker 1: of what it was about. I tried to read that
Speaker 1: damn book and I read five pages of it and
Speaker 1: I gave up. I I think I threw the book away.
Speaker 1: I didn't want anything to do with it. It was
Speaker 1: the nastiest growthest thing I've ever even tried to read
Speaker 1: is way better. I have always found the book Lolita
Speaker 1: incredibly offensive. I was raped as a child, and it's
Speaker 1: pretty hard for someone, especially an English professor, to look
Speaker 1: at you and tell you that it's any about anything
Speaker 1: other than the kidnapped and right but a child. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm pretty closed up to anybody else's opinions. Um, it's
Speaker 1: I think it's pretty funked up. It's a really important
Speaker 1: book because it's rare. I feel like you only see
Speaker 1: kind of leering man at girls and it's either just
Speaker 1: like their monsters and they're not realized people, or it's
Speaker 1: like okay, and they're good guys. And the reason why
Speaker 1: this book is important is because you see this man
Speaker 1: completely misunderstand like a girl navigating her like burgeoning sexuality,
Speaker 1: and he prays on like I don't know, we've all
Speaker 1: been there when PRET young. When I was the teens fourteen,
Speaker 1: I was extremely on Tumbler, and although I had never
Speaker 1: and I still have never read Lowly, though I knew
Speaker 1: that it was sort of glorified in this way that
Speaker 1: I really lusted. Still, my first experience, uh with it
Speaker 1: actually was hearing about it in nerdy like anime forums.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much to everyone who called in. I
Speaker 1: really really appreciate it. There were many more voice mails,
Speaker 1: but I tried to pick ones that represented a few
Speaker 1: perspectives that I saw cropping up again and again. There's
Speaker 1: the I love the book, but I think it's very
Speaker 1: misunderstood in culture. There's the book being framed to its
Speaker 1: reader in an extremely bad feet way. There's I read
Speaker 1: the book, but I was too young to understand what
Speaker 1: it was really about at the time. There's readers whose
Speaker 1: personal trauma is an understandably large factor. There's I haven't
Speaker 1: read the book, but I was very influenced by the
Speaker 1: stories cultural aesthetics. There's I haven't read the book and
Speaker 1: have no desire to based on the themes. There's anime
Speaker 1: guy and my favorite I am a member of the
Speaker 1: Lolita fashion community, and we would like to be excluded
Speaker 1: from this narrative. Thank you so much. I have been
Speaker 1: involved with Japanese Lolita fashion for about ten years. I
Speaker 1: have read the book and watched the film, and I
Speaker 1: just really really want to reiterate that Lolita fashion has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with either the book or the film,
Speaker 1: and these are all completely valid ways to approach both
Speaker 1: the text and the cultural Lolita. Personally. I definitely read
Speaker 1: Lolita before I understood what the book was really about.
Speaker 1: At twelve years old, I thought that being desired by
Speaker 1: older men was really cool, and a lot of that
Speaker 1: had to do with the kind of cultural messaging that
Speaker 1: existed at this time. We were all there. The mid
Speaker 1: two thousand's was a nightmare, but it also had to
Speaker 1: do with what I saw going on around me. And
Speaker 1: two thousand five, my older cousin was about to marry
Speaker 1: a teacher she started dating. In high school, my female
Speaker 1: gym teacher would confiscate my book of Lolita from me
Speaker 1: and then be forced to give it back later the
Speaker 1: next year, my junior high track coach would be fired
Speaker 1: for not what he did to the girls on my
Speaker 1: track team, but what he did to the high school
Speaker 1: swim team that he coached as well. A few years
Speaker 1: after that, when I was in high school, a teacher
Speaker 1: in his late twenties sent my best friend a picture
Speaker 1: of his penis on the day she graduated when we
Speaker 1: were both seventeen, and we didn't say anything, and he
Speaker 1: kept inviting high school girls to his house to get drunk,
Speaker 1: and then he I think he got promoted based on
Speaker 1: the messages all of you left. This is not an
Speaker 1: unusual list of things to be happening around a girl
Speaker 1: growing up, and in retrospect, I feel weirdly, depressingly lucky
Speaker 1: to have spent most of this time in a full
Speaker 1: body cast. My reading of Lolita has changed a lot
Speaker 1: over time, and it's kind of been a fixation of
Speaker 1: mine over the years, and to getting to the core
Speaker 1: of what I found so appealing about it in the
Speaker 1: first place. I'm going to use the rest of this
Speaker 1: first episode to talk about exactly what happens in Vladimir
Speaker 1: nabokov novel Lolita. We are going to spend the rest
Speaker 1: of this series tracing and speaking to its history and
Speaker 1: its influence. But I have been consistently surprised in conversations
Speaker 1: at how much of the general opinion on this book
Speaker 1: has very little to do with the book itself. So
Speaker 1: this explainer is going to be a bit long, but
Speaker 1: I can assure you that the details really matter here.
Speaker 1: Something that's really helped me and getting to the heart
Speaker 1: of the events in this book and to see around
Speaker 1: all the flowery, beautiful language, is to think of it
Speaker 1: as a true crime book and view Lolita as what
Speaker 1: it's presented to us, as a document of a criminal.
Speaker 1: And so that's the tack I'm going to take here,
Speaker 1: And you know, I would also recommend reading the book,
Speaker 1: but books are famously very long. I'm also going to
Speaker 1: be differentiating between Dolores, the girl who is abducted and
Speaker 1: raped by Humbert Humbert in the novel, and Lolita, the
Speaker 1: sexualized construct Humbert has created to justify these crimes. I
Speaker 1: don't really think that these are the same person, because
Speaker 1: Dolores is a kid. So listen carefully because a lot
Speaker 1: of what you're about to hear in this summary you
Speaker 1: will never hear about in subsequent adaptations. Again, the first
Speaker 1: ten or so of Lolita isn't remembered at all by
Speaker 1: anyone who hasn't read the book, and to me, it
Speaker 1: is a big reason why Humbert Humbert comes off as
Speaker 1: a misunderstood romantic hero instead of a clear cut predatory
Speaker 1: liar in most of the adaptations. So before that iconic
Speaker 1: opening paragraph Lolita, Light of my Life, fire of my loins,
Speaker 1: my sin, No I know, I get it. But before that,
Speaker 1: there is a fictional forward from the fictional John Ray Junior, PhD,
Speaker 1: an editor of psychology books, who is writing an introduction
Speaker 1: to Humbert Humbert's manuscript. He tells you that what you're
Speaker 1: about to read is the memoir of Humbert Humbert name changed,
Speaker 1: who died in legal captivity and nine two of heart disease.
Speaker 1: We also learned that someone named Mrs Richard F. Schiller
Speaker 1: has died in childbirth with a stillborn girl on Christmas Day,
Speaker 1: several weeks after that, John Ray Jr. Says this about Humbert,
Speaker 1: no doubt he is horrible. He is abject. He is
Speaker 1: a shiny example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity
Speaker 1: and jocularity that betrays supreme misery. Many of his casual
Speaker 1: opinions on the people in scenery of this country are ludicrous.
Speaker 1: He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how
Speaker 1: magically he's singing violin can conjure up a tenderus compassion
Speaker 1: for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while
Speaker 1: a pouring its author. I mean, if you're looking for
Speaker 1: a framing of an unreliable narrator before you even meet him,
Speaker 1: there you go. We are told explicitly that this was
Speaker 1: written half in a sanatorium, half in a jail cell
Speaker 1: under observation, and the text is basically unedited. John Ray
Speaker 1: continues in this poignant personal study their larks, a general
Speaker 1: lesson the way we'd child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac.
Speaker 1: These are not only vivid characters and a unique story.
Speaker 1: They warn us of dangerous trends. They point out potent evils.
Speaker 1: Lolita should make all of us parents, social workers, educators,
Speaker 1: apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the
Speaker 1: task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.
Speaker 1: And after that fictional forward Humbert. Humbert's text of Lolita begins, Lolita,
Speaker 1: light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin,
Speaker 1: my soul, Lowlyta the tip of the tongue, taking a
Speaker 1: trip of three steps down the palette to tap at
Speaker 1: three on the teeth, law Lee. She was low, plain,
Speaker 1: low in the morning, standing four ft ten in one sock,
Speaker 1: she was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school,
Speaker 1: she was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my
Speaker 1: arms she was always Lolita. His audience for this work
Speaker 1: is his jurors, and he asks leading questions while taking
Speaker 1: us through a sweeping look at his early life. He
Speaker 1: was born in nineteen to a well off European family,
Speaker 1: and his mother died in a freak accident when he
Speaker 1: was three years old. I love the description a book
Speaker 1: of gifts for what happens, it's just in parentheses picnic
Speaker 1: Comma Lightning. When he's twelve years old, he spends the
Speaker 1: summer on the French Riviera and meets a girl named
Speaker 1: Annabelle Lee who's the same age, and they fall madly
Speaker 1: in love. This summer he has a number of formative
Speaker 1: sexual experiences with Annabelle, but they are too heavily supervised
Speaker 1: to ever consummate the relation and ship, and she dies
Speaker 1: of typhus four months later before they can ever see
Speaker 1: each other again. According to Humbert, the quote certain magic
Speaker 1: unquote of Lolita began with this tragedy with Annabelle. And
Speaker 1: if your brain like mind has been absolutely torpedoed by
Speaker 1: the Internet, and you're thinking annabel Lee, that sounds familiar,
Speaker 1: but you can't quite place it. You are vaguely remembering
Speaker 1: and Edgar Allan Poe poem by that same name, maybe
Speaker 1: I'll recognize it. I was a child and she was
Speaker 1: a child in this kingdom by the sea. But we
Speaker 1: loved with a love that was more than love. I
Speaker 1: and my Annabelle Lee. I don't think I ever even
Speaker 1: studied it in school. It was just like hot topic canon.
Speaker 1: And this reference to Annabelle Lee is a deliberate choice
Speaker 1: on the part of the author whether the author we
Speaker 1: were talking about is Humbert or in a bulk off himself.
Speaker 1: Because Edgar Allan Poe married his cousin when she was
Speaker 1: thirteen years old and he was twenty six years old,
Speaker 1: there are a total of twenty references to Poe by
Speaker 1: Humbert in the book. There's also a few references to
Speaker 1: Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, made intentionally for a very
Speaker 1: similar reason. Carol real name Charles Dodgson, was a child
Speaker 1: pornographer who took a number of erotic photos of a
Speaker 1: ten year old named Alice Liddell. Now this is not
Speaker 1: very often discussed, as his story is still a billion
Speaker 1: dollar Disney property, but Dodgson had hundreds of nude and
Speaker 1: semi nude photos like this of children, and while sensibilities
Speaker 1: were different in the eighteen fifties, Ladell's parents had cut
Speaker 1: off Dodgson from seeing Alice before the book named after
Speaker 1: her was ever published, and it said that Carol, well
Speaker 1: into his thirties, had asked her parents to marry her,
Speaker 1: and a book off was well aware of Carol slash
Speaker 1: Dodgson's history, incidentally having translated Alice's Adventures in Wonderland into
Speaker 1: Russian in his mid twenties to pay the bills. And
Speaker 1: here is what he had to say of this behavior.
Speaker 1: He has a pathetic affinity with ageh But some odd
Speaker 1: scruple prevented me from alluding and Lolita to his wretched
Speaker 1: perversion into those ambiguous photographs he took in dim rooms.
Speaker 1: He got away with it, as so many other Victorians
Speaker 1: got away with pederasty and numphilepsy. His were sad, scrawny
Speaker 1: little nymphets, bedraggled and half undressed, or rather semi undraped,
Speaker 1: as if participating in some dusty and dreadful charade. But
Speaker 1: sure Tim Burton movies. Back to the summary, Humbred explains
Speaker 1: that losing Annabelle so young triggers a lifelong obsession with
Speaker 1: nymphets a term of his own creation, I'll let him
Speaker 1: describe it. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen,
Speaker 1: there occur maidens who, to certain be which travelers twice
Speaker 1: or many times older than they reveal their true nature,
Speaker 1: which is not human but nymphic, that is demonic. And
Speaker 1: why haven't we heard of these nymphets before? Humberd You
Speaker 1: have to be an artist and a madman, a creature
Speaker 1: of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in
Speaker 1: your loins and a super voluptuous flame permanently glow in
Speaker 1: your subtle spine. Oh, how you have to cringe and
Speaker 1: hide in order to discern at once the deadly little
Speaker 1: demon among the wholesome children. She stands unrecognized by them,
Speaker 1: an unconscious herself of her fantastic power. You know a
Speaker 1: lot of words, and none of them are pedophile. But
Speaker 1: that's Humbert's intentional approach here. He's taking the artist angle
Speaker 1: to objectifying children that we don't see infrequently in American
Speaker 1: culture before Lolita's publication, and a lot since here's a
Speaker 1: clip from Woody Allen's Manhattan What do you Do? Tracy?
Speaker 1: I got a really really to somewhere to back on
Speaker 1: this slow from Whatdy Allen to Roman Polanski to Rudy
Speaker 1: Giuliani and Borat too amazing. Yes, we got a Bora
Speaker 1: to reference into episode one of Lolita podcasts. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much, I'll be accepting my peabody now. But in
Speaker 1: framing his life, Humbert even manages to distance him self
Speaker 1: from his future crimes in his origin story by suggesting
Speaker 1: that pedophilia might be genetic and his family explaining that
Speaker 1: his father was once off quote touring Italy with Madame
Speaker 1: and her daughter unquote. So to justify this attitude, Humbert
Speaker 1: invokes the name of other perceived to be great man, James,
Speaker 1: the first Dante Petrarch, and he's already referenced Poe. Can't
Speaker 1: you see he's a very handsome artist, not a pedophile.
Speaker 1: And if you're me at twelve, with the general opinion
Speaker 1: that adults have no reason to lie to me, and
Speaker 1: in a world where Vickie Christina Barcelona hasn't even been released,
Speaker 1: you might take these words at face value. After he
Speaker 1: goes to university and becomes an academic himself, Humbert occupies
Speaker 1: his obsession by meeting with sex workers that look young,
Speaker 1: and eventually marries a woman named Valeria to keep up appearances.
Speaker 1: Humbert hates Valeria. He admires her ability to imitate young
Speaker 1: girls when they first start dating, but he describes her
Speaker 1: as grotesque. He calls her an animated mercin, a large, puffy,
Speaker 1: short legged, big breasted, and practically brainless baba, and he's
Speaker 1: still angry when she leaves him for another man four
Speaker 1: years into their marriage in nine, he considers killing her
Speaker 1: and her lover, but says that they leave before he
Speaker 1: can fight them. According to him, Valeria dies in childbirth
Speaker 1: in America in after being subjected to eugenic Nazi adjacent
Speaker 1: medical experiments, and seems to find the idea of this
Speaker 1: pretty funny. So after his divorce with Valeria, Humbert moves
Speaker 1: to New York right before World War Two, starts starts
Speaker 1: working on a textbook, and is sent to a sanatorium
Speaker 1: for over a year after what he describes as a
Speaker 1: dreadful breakdown. He does not get specific about what this
Speaker 1: breakdown was related to or what his time they're entailed.
Speaker 1: He then joins a scientific mission in the Arctic as
Speaker 1: a recorder of psychic relations, and after twenty months there
Speaker 1: and what sounds like a completely bullshit report on his part,
Speaker 1: he returns to America, only to be hospitalized in the
Speaker 1: sanitarium again, and even with the second visit, we can
Speaker 1: only sort of guess at the details here He describes
Speaker 1: it as another bout with insanity and marks the psychiatrist
Speaker 1: that he works with, and once he's at the second time,
Speaker 1: he decides to work on his textbook again and heads
Speaker 1: for small town, New England, where he will meet a
Speaker 1: girl named Dolores. So that's a lot of very relevant information.
Speaker 1: And this portion of Humbert's life is not especially cinematic,
Speaker 1: and on the surface might seem to have little to
Speaker 1: do with the subject of the story, but there's a
Speaker 1: lot of very relevant stuff here. We learn how Humbert
Speaker 1: views women, both as children and as adults. We learn
Speaker 1: about a very glossed over repeated struggle with mental health
Speaker 1: that he deliberately never brings up again, and in fact,
Speaker 1: he has a completely dismissive view of his sanatorium stays,
Speaker 1: describing the following, I discovered there was an endless source
Speaker 1: of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists, cunningly leading them on,
Speaker 1: never letting them see that you know all the tricks
Speaker 1: of the trade, inventing for them elaborate dreams, and never
Speaker 1: allowing them the slightest glimpse of one's real sexual comment. Now,
Speaker 1: I am a huge fan and very reliant on mental
Speaker 1: health support, but Humbert does not seem interested in working
Speaker 1: on himself, as he tells it. To say the least.
Speaker 1: He presents as massively confident from his first words, claiming
Speaker 1: that he's seen his own psychiatric records and has everyone fooled,
Speaker 1: and the reason his stays at sanatoriums get extended are
Speaker 1: just for fun, and we don't have access to any
Speaker 1: other information here, and he has the upper hand all
Speaker 1: the while because we have no way of cross checking this.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite broad claims he makes is when
Speaker 1: he calls himself an exceptionally handsome male, slow moving, tall,
Speaker 1: with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the
Speaker 1: more seductive cost of demeva. Now, as a reader, you
Speaker 1: can take his word for this or not, although if
Speaker 1: you have seen the movies, they seem to take your
Speaker 1: word for it. And it's here that the story you
Speaker 1: might remember begins. It's after the house he plans to
Speaker 1: move into burns down in the town of Ramsdale and
Speaker 1: the state of somewhere in New England. Humbert ends up
Speaker 1: boarding with Charlotte Hayes, a thirtiesomething year old widow seeking
Speaker 1: a tenant and keeping with his opinions of adult women.
Speaker 1: He calls her a quote simple but not unattractive and
Speaker 1: quote a weak solution of Marlena Dietrich unquote. He's ready
Speaker 1: to turn down the small lodging situation when he notices
Speaker 1: her daughter in the garden. Twelve year old Dolores Hayes
Speaker 1: is sunbathing outside, and then his obsession with nymphets is
Speaker 1: stirred up all over again, and for the first time
Speaker 1: in twenty five years, he claims he feels the same
Speaker 1: things he felt for Annabelle Lee. He describes it like this.
Speaker 1: A little later. Of course, she this nouvelle, this Lolita,
Speaker 1: My Lolita was to eclipse completely high prototype. All I
Speaker 1: want to stress is that my discovery of her was
Speaker 1: a fatal consequence of that princeton by the sea in
Speaker 1: my tortured past. So yeah, he stays at the house.
Speaker 1: Howard begins keeping a journal that he claims this manuscript
Speaker 1: of photographic recollection of Again, we really only have his
Speaker 1: word to go on here, but he spends days writing
Speaker 1: down every small interaction he has with Dolores, documenting everything,
Speaker 1: speculating whether she has her period or not, keeping track
Speaker 1: of her measurements, her coloring everything, and he finds any
Speaker 1: opportunity to make physical contact with her. It is seen,
Speaker 1: I will never forget reading. For the first time, Dolores
Speaker 1: gets something caught in her eye and he licks it
Speaker 1: off her eyeball, and once it's out of her eye,
Speaker 1: he tells her he's just going to lick the other
Speaker 1: eyeball anyways, he describes her again, what drives me insane
Speaker 1: is the twofold nature of this nymphete, of every nymphete,
Speaker 1: perhaps this mixture in my Lolita of tender, dreamy childishness
Speaker 1: and a kind of eerie vulgarity stemming from the snubnosed
Speaker 1: cuteness of ads and magazine pictures. Charlotte Hayes, as Humbert
Speaker 1: tells it, struggles to connect with her daughter and doesn't
Speaker 1: really seem to like her, calling her rude and defiant,
Speaker 1: sullen and evasive. Then out of nowhere, Humbert mentions that
Speaker 1: if he ever seriously considers committing a murder, it would
Speaker 1: only be during a quote spell of insanta unquote, and
Speaker 1: then he just returns to the diary more close calls,
Speaker 1: he almost kisses Dolores. He fantasizes about a natural disaster,
Speaker 1: killing Charlotte and leaving him and Dolores alone. He worries
Speaker 1: that he'll be sent back to a sanatorium. He rubs
Speaker 1: Dolores's legs so hard at one point that she has
Speaker 1: a bruise on her thigh the next day, and then
Speaker 1: I will place an extra trigger warning here. In one
Speaker 1: of the most excruciating scenes in the book, Humbert pleasures
Speaker 1: himself while bouncing Dolores on his lap, convinced that she's
Speaker 1: none the wiser, but there are some narrative indications, her
Speaker 1: legs twitching, the hairs on her legs, bristling comments she
Speaker 1: makes later in the book that indicate that this may
Speaker 1: not be true. She's singing her favorite song as this happens,
Speaker 1: but Humbert can't really remember what it is, only how
Speaker 1: he felt blessed be the Lord. She had noticed nothing,
Speaker 1: he says at the end of this passage, noting to
Speaker 1: the reader how kind and smart he was about it,
Speaker 1: how careful, how chaste. The whole wine sweet event is
Speaker 1: if viewed with what my lawyer has called in a
Speaker 1: private talk, we have had impartial sympathy. He says this
Speaker 1: to us before the anecdote and afterward. Quote the child
Speaker 1: knew nothing. I had done nothing to her unquote. What
Speaker 1: is certain is that Charlotte is none the wiser to this.
Speaker 1: Dolores goes to summer camp, and before she leaves, she
Speaker 1: runs up the stairs to Humbert's room and kisses him
Speaker 1: for the first time. She then leaves for Charlotte to
Speaker 1: drive her upstate, and Charlotte has left behind a letter
Speaker 1: for Humbert. It says that Charlotte is deeply in love
Speaker 1: with Humbert, and if he doesn't want to marry her,
Speaker 1: he should leave the house immediately. This letter is so
Speaker 1: over the top and again pulled only from humbert memory,
Speaker 1: but some parts of it still make me laugh. Quote
Speaker 1: I am a passionate and lonely woman, and you are
Speaker 1: the love of my life. Unquote. It's all very you know,
Speaker 1: one life to live. Back to the horrifying part, Humbert
Speaker 1: realizes that his only way to stay near Dolores permanently
Speaker 1: without giving away his plan to continue to assault her
Speaker 1: is to agree to mary Charlotte. And then he says
Speaker 1: again apropos of nothing. He's definitely not thinking about murdering Charlotte,
Speaker 1: You guys, He's not I did not plan to marry
Speaker 1: poor Charlotte in order to eliminate her in some vulga
Speaker 1: gruesome and dangerous manner, such as killing her by placing
Speaker 1: five by chloride of mercury tablets and upper prandial sherry,
Speaker 1: or anything like that. But he does admit to planning
Speaker 1: to experiment on slipping her and Dolores sleeping pills so
Speaker 1: that he can rape Dolores without her or her mother knowing.
Speaker 1: He fantasizes about black marylyn Charlotte into accepting it if
Speaker 1: she ever finds out. But of course Charlotte doesn't know
Speaker 1: any of this, and so when she gets home and
Speaker 1: he accepts her proposal, she is thrilled and they're married
Speaker 1: very soon after. So again Humbert. Humbert is married to
Speaker 1: a woman he hates, and he spends the summer experimenting
Speaker 1: with sleeping pills and imagining her daughter during sex with her.
Speaker 1: Charlotte continues to speak ill of Dolores, calling her everything
Speaker 1: from distrustful, too aggressive to negativistic. On a worksheet about
Speaker 1: her daughter's personality, says that she plans to send her
Speaker 1: to boarding school after camp to free up the home
Speaker 1: for her and Humbert. This, of course, is the opposite
Speaker 1: of what Humbert wants, and he's furious, but he doesn't
Speaker 1: show it because he's afraid that arguing with Charlotte will
Speaker 1: hurt his position and access to Dolores. And again he
Speaker 1: discusses considering killing Charlotte at length, this time calculating whether
Speaker 1: he could drown her in the local lake without anyone
Speaker 1: witnessing it. He ultimately decided against doing it and convinces
Speaker 1: her to let Dolores come home. So he's definitely not
Speaker 1: going to kill our guys. But shortly after that, Charlotte
Speaker 1: figures out Humbert's game while snooping around his space and
Speaker 1: reading one of his journals, journals that describe his fantasies
Speaker 1: about Dolores and calling her things like quote the big bitch,
Speaker 1: the obnoxious mama unquote, and his intention to prey on
Speaker 1: Dolores indefinitely. And I think that Melanie Griffith, playing Charlotte
Speaker 1: Hayes plays this really well in the movie You're a monster.
Speaker 1: You're a despicable criminal monster. If you near me, I'll
Speaker 1: scream out the window. Get away from me. Humbert goes
Speaker 1: into full gaslight mode. She's hallucinating. Let's have a drink,
Speaker 1: and he leaves the room to go prepare some drinks.
Speaker 1: But a few minutes later, once the drinks are prepared,
Speaker 1: he gets a phone call. Charlotte has been hit by
Speaker 1: a car trying to get to a mailbox to mail
Speaker 1: someone a letter revealing Humbert's treachery. And that's it. She's dead.
Speaker 1: As Humbert tells it in the story, he got lucky,
Speaker 1: he definitely didn't kill her, you guys. After a swift
Speaker 1: funeral and convincing the neighbors that he had secretly been
Speaker 1: Dolores's biological father all along and was reuniting with Charlotte
Speaker 1: as opposed to meeting her less than ten weeks ago,
Speaker 1: Humbert leaves Ramsdale to pick up Dolores from camp. He
Speaker 1: manages to get her from the camp without Dolores learning
Speaker 1: that her mother has been killed, and immediately brings her
Speaker 1: to a lodge that he and Charlotte had discussed going
Speaker 1: to for their honeymoon, the Enchanted Hunter's Hotel. Dolores teases
Speaker 1: Humbert once she's in his car, saying that she's been
Speaker 1: quote revoltingly unfaithful to him on quote and mentioning that
Speaker 1: he hasn't kissed her yet, and they kiss again, him
Speaker 1: noting her lack of experience. She asks him if they're lovers,
Speaker 1: because her mother, she says with a sense of satisfaction,
Speaker 1: would be so angry if they were. He says no,
Speaker 1: and when they get to the hotel where they're sharing
Speaker 1: a room, the following exchange takes place. You're crazy, why
Speaker 1: my darn because my darling and my darling mother finds
Speaker 1: out to divorce you and destroying me. Now we're not rich,
Speaker 1: and so when we travel, we're we're we're we're we're
Speaker 1: sure to be. I mean, we'll be thrown together. Sometimes
Speaker 1: two people sharing the same hotel room abound to enter
Speaker 1: into all How can I put it into it? Into
Speaker 1: a kind of incest. Unbeknownst to Dolorus, Humbert drugs her
Speaker 1: that night, assuring the reader that he only ever intended
Speaker 1: to rape Dolores while she was drugged. While he's waiting
Speaker 1: for the drugs to take he goes of the lobby
Speaker 1: and runs into a very drunk man who seems to
Speaker 1: be onto his scheme, and this reads as innocuous, but
Speaker 1: this guy is important later Humbert returns upstairs, but Dolores
Speaker 1: isn't sleeping that heavily, so instead he decides to just
Speaker 1: sleep beside her, and again pretty heavy trigger warning here.
Speaker 1: The next morning, Humbert tells us they have sex with
Speaker 1: Dolores fully conscious, and to be clear, this is absolutely rape,
Speaker 1: but Humbert of course begins deflecting to his jury immediately.
Speaker 1: He says, quote, I'm going to tell you something very strange.
Speaker 1: It was she who seduced me, he says. He describes
Speaker 1: the crime in typical flowery Humbert detail and calls Dolores
Speaker 1: quote the wincing child unquote. Before moving on, he assures
Speaker 1: us again that he loves her and reminds us that
Speaker 1: marrying twelve year olds was still legal in some states
Speaker 1: and sensitive gentlewomen of the jury, I was not even
Speaker 1: her first lover. Afterward, Dolorus tells Humbert that she had
Speaker 1: had sex with a boy at camp over the summer,
Speaker 1: and for Humbert not taking her virginity when raping her
Speaker 1: makes the crime easier to cope with. After they leave
Speaker 1: the hotel, Dolores is in physical pain all day, and
Speaker 1: Humbert tells the reader that in the space of just
Speaker 1: a morning, he had had strenuous sex with her three times.
Speaker 1: Later in the day, Dolores says, you chump, you revolting creature.
Speaker 1: I was a daisy fresh girl, and look what you've
Speaker 1: done to me. I ought to call the police and
Speaker 1: tell them you raped me. Oh, you dirty, dirty old
Speaker 1: man unquote. Her pain continues as they continue to drive,
Speaker 1: and it is only then that Humbert tells Dolores that
Speaker 1: her mother is dead. The first section of the book
Speaker 1: ends with just a devastating passage. At the hotel, we
Speaker 1: had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night
Speaker 1: she came sobbing into mine and we made it up
Speaker 1: very gently. You see. She had absolutely nowhere else to go.
Speaker 1: And this ends the first section of the book. Dolores,
Speaker 1: for the little dialogue we get from, calls Humbert a
Speaker 1: rapist twice in this book, and there are many moments where,
Speaker 1: in a larger context it's basically impossible to say that
Speaker 1: she does not have a semblance of what's going on.
Speaker 1: She's telling us that she does, even through all these
Speaker 1: walls of prose that Humberts putting up in front of her.
Speaker 1: In part two of the novel, Humbert takes to Lauris
Speaker 1: around the United States and continues to rape her on
Speaker 1: a nightly basis and motels. Floras finds a semblance of
Speaker 1: routine and things she likes, jazz square dancing Sundays, going
Speaker 1: to movies, and reading magazines. When she got restless or
Speaker 1: misbehaved on the road, Humbert with threaten to prolong her
Speaker 1: quote exile for months and years unquote, employing every tactic
Speaker 1: he has at his disposal, from the ancient precedent of
Speaker 1: adults marrying children to long winded speeches like this, I
Speaker 1: would not advise you to consider yourself my cross country slave,
Speaker 1: and I deplore the Man Act as lending itself to
Speaker 1: a dreadful pun. What humbreds referring to here is the
Speaker 1: Man Act which made transporting girls and women across state
Speaker 1: lines for the purpose of debauchery against the law, which
Speaker 1: is good. It was also webinized against black men in
Speaker 1: interracial relationships and against Jewish people, which we will talk
Speaker 1: about in later episodes. Later on, he plays Devil's advocates, saying,
Speaker 1: let us see what happens if you, a minor, are
Speaker 1: accused of having impaired the morals of an adult as
Speaker 1: a respectable in what happens if you complain to the
Speaker 1: police of my having kidnapped and raped you. Let us
Speaker 1: suppose they believe you, you become a ward of the
Speaker 1: Department of Public Welfare. This is the situation, This is
Speaker 1: the choice. Don't you think under the circumstance, Dolores Hayes
Speaker 1: had better stick to year old man. She is trapped
Speaker 1: for a full year August ninety seven to August. At
Speaker 1: one point, she asks him how long they'll be traveling
Speaker 1: like this quote, doing filthy things together and never behaving
Speaker 1: like ordinary people. Unquote. He describes their months primarily as
Speaker 1: a vacation, harping longer on roadside attraction descriptions than on
Speaker 1: their arguments, and we catch a few of Dolores stray
Speaker 1: words quote, I'd be a sap if I took your opinion. Seriously,
Speaker 1: you can't boss me. I despise you, and so on.
Speaker 1: Humbert is lightly paranoid, but mainly elated. He goes so
Speaker 1: far as to fantasize about getting Dolores pregnant with a
Speaker 1: baby girl and doing the same thing to her years later. Finally,
Speaker 1: Humbert chooses a place for them to settle down a
Speaker 1: different New England town a safe distance from Ramsdale called Beardsley,
Speaker 1: where Dolores is enrolled in a private school and he
Speaker 1: gets a job at a local university, and for the
Speaker 1: first time since her mother's death, Dolores is allowed to
Speaker 1: make friends and go to school to an extent because
Speaker 1: a round this time, Humbert tightens his control on her
Speaker 1: considerably by creating a monetary system for having sex with him.
Speaker 1: He describes it like this, This was more than a
Speaker 1: generous arrangement, considering she constantly received all kinds of small presents,
Speaker 1: and had for the asking any sweetmeat or movie under
Speaker 1: the moon, although of course I might fondly demand an
Speaker 1: additional kiss, or even a whole collection of assorted caresses
Speaker 1: when I knew she coveted very badly. She was, however,
Speaker 1: not easy to deal with. Only very listlessly did she
Speaker 1: earn her three pennies or three nickels per day, and
Speaker 1: she proved to be a cruel negotiator whenever it was
Speaker 1: in her power, which I could not live with more
Speaker 1: than a few days in a row, and which because
Speaker 1: of the very nature of love's languor, I could not
Speaker 1: obtain by force when she's not paying attention. Humbert steals
Speaker 1: her money back and blames it on the neighbor. He
Speaker 1: monitors her communication forbids her from being with boys without
Speaker 1: his supervision, but insists on her girlfriends around so he
Speaker 1: can ugle them, and he only allows her to join
Speaker 1: the school drama club when the headmistress of Dolores's school,
Speaker 1: who interprets his bad attitude as being a strict European parent,
Speaker 1: asks him to. In that same meeting, the headmistress mentions
Speaker 1: that Dolores is doing worse in school and his quote
Speaker 1: morbidly uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, represses
Speaker 1: her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self
Speaker 1: denity unquote. And while the head mistress fails to ever
Speaker 1: ask Dolores why this is, it scares Humbert nonetheless, and
Speaker 1: he allows Dolores to play a part in the Hunted Enchanters.
Speaker 1: Promptly after this meeting with her head mistress, he finds
Speaker 1: Doloris in a classroom and gives her sixty five cents
Speaker 1: to give him a hand job. Dolores is excited to
Speaker 1: be in the drama club and the Hunted Enchanters is
Speaker 1: a recent play about a nym fete of sorts played
Speaker 1: by her who falls in love with the poet. She
Speaker 1: forbids Humbert from spying on her rehearsals, but starts bringing
Speaker 1: up that the hotel quote where you first raped me
Speaker 1: unquote was called the Enchanted Hunters, where Humbert had met
Speaker 1: at strange drunk man. I told you to remember the
Speaker 1: night before the first performance. Humbert realizes Dolores has been
Speaker 1: keeping the money for her piano lessons instead of going
Speaker 1: to them, and he confronts her about it. Per Humbert,
Speaker 1: she said I had attempted to violate her several times
Speaker 1: when I was her mother's rumor. She said, I was
Speaker 1: sure I had murdered her mother. She said she would
Speaker 1: sleep with the very first fellow who asked her, and
Speaker 1: I could do nothing about it. On this night, he
Speaker 1: yells at her, grabs her arms so hard she's injured,
Speaker 1: and she flees from the house. Humbert's afraid that she's
Speaker 1: gone for good, but not quite yet. He finds Dolorous
Speaker 1: later in a better mood and tells him that she
Speaker 1: wants to leave the school and the town at once,
Speaker 1: and returned to the road. Humbert is thrilled back on
Speaker 1: the road. It doesn't take long for humbert suspicion to escalate.
Speaker 1: He's convinced Dolores is communicating with another man. Whenever possible,
Speaker 1: He sees her talk to a man in the car,
Speaker 1: but Dolores insists it was a stranger. This happens a
Speaker 1: couple different times, until somewhere in Colorado, Dolores gets sick
Speaker 1: and needs to go to the hospital. She recovers, but
Speaker 1: this brief separation from Humburg gives her the opportunity to
Speaker 1: make her escape. When Humbert returns to bring her back
Speaker 1: from the hospital, he's told that she has been taken
Speaker 1: already by her quote uncle. Finally, at age fourteen, Dolores
Speaker 1: has escaped. Humbert searches for her. For years. He traces
Speaker 1: their steps back across the country, trying to figure out
Speaker 1: who Dolores was communicating and left with, and fails to
Speaker 1: do so. He dreams of her, but she takes the
Speaker 1: form of his dead wives, Valeria, Charlotte, or both. He
Speaker 1: mentions in the space of a sentence that he spends
Speaker 1: another winter in spring in a Quebec sanatorium not focusing
Speaker 1: on his mental health but writing long poems about Lolita.
Speaker 1: He meets and starts a doomed relationship with a young
Speaker 1: alcoholic named Rita for two years nineteen fifty nineteen fifty two,
Speaker 1: who he promptly abandons. The moment he hears from Lolita
Speaker 1: for the first time in three years, and her letter
Speaker 1: breaks my heart every single time. Dear Dad, how's everything.
Speaker 1: I'm married, I'm going to have a baby. I guess
Speaker 1: he's to be a big one. I guess we'll come
Speaker 1: right for Christmas. This is a hard letter to write.
Speaker 1: I'm going nuts because we don't have enough to pay
Speaker 1: our dats and get out of here. Dick has promised
Speaker 1: a big job in Alaska. Pardon me for withholding our
Speaker 1: home address, but you may still be mad at me,
Speaker 1: and Dick must not know. Please do send us a check, Dad.
Speaker 1: We can manage with three or four hundred or even less.
Speaker 1: Anything is welcome. You might sell my old things, because
Speaker 1: once we get there the dolls start rolling in. Right. Please,
Speaker 1: I've gone through so much sadness and hardship yours expecting Dolly.
Speaker 1: Mrs Richard F. Schiller Humbert finds out where she is
Speaker 1: by tracking her down against her explicit wishes, thinking that
Speaker 1: the man she's married to was the same one she
Speaker 1: took off with back in nine and arrives with a
Speaker 1: pistol at a rundown house on Hunter Road Enchanted Hunters,
Speaker 1: Hunted Enchanters, Nice Touch and a book off to find
Speaker 1: a seventeen year old Dolores, pregnant, poor with a husband
Speaker 1: close to her own age, the sweet mechanic Dick Schiller.
Speaker 1: Humbert realizes that Dick is not the guy he's looking
Speaker 1: for and pushes Doloris on the identity of the man
Speaker 1: from It's Clear Quilty, the drunk man from the Enchanted
Speaker 1: Hunter's Hotel, the playwright of the Hunted Enchanters who directed
Speaker 1: Dolores and Beardsley, and the nephew of the dentist from Ramsdale.
Speaker 1: It's here where Dolores says that she'd known clear Quilty
Speaker 1: and had been pursued by him before she ever met Humbert,
Speaker 1: since she was ten years old, and that she'd heard
Speaker 1: that he'd almost been thrown in jail for molesting young
Speaker 1: girls when she first met him, and it was this
Speaker 1: clear quilty that had followed them from Beardsley to Colorado
Speaker 1: and planned her escape. Where was he now? Dolores didn't
Speaker 1: know she, at fourteen, was in love with him and
Speaker 1: thought that he wanted to be with her, but quickly
Speaker 1: realized he was much more interested in putting her in
Speaker 1: hardcore pornography. When she refused, he kicked her out of
Speaker 1: the house, and a dejected Dolores began making her own
Speaker 1: living as a waitress before meeting Dick and getting married.
Speaker 1: After extracting the information he wants from her, Humbert realizes
Speaker 1: as he tells it that he's still in love with her.
Speaker 1: There she was, with how ruined looks, and her adult
Speaker 1: rope veined narrow hands, and her goose flesh white arms,
Speaker 1: and her shallow is and her unkempt armpits. There she
Speaker 1: was my Lolita, hopelessly worn at seventeen. And I looked
Speaker 1: and looked at her and knew, as clearly as I
Speaker 1: am to die, that I loved her more than anything
Speaker 1: I had ever seen or imagined on earth. He begs
Speaker 1: to her is to leave with him. She asks him
Speaker 1: if he'll give her the money if she doesn't go.
Speaker 1: He says no, he'll give her the money either way,
Speaker 1: and hands her four thousand dollars of his own money
Speaker 1: and what's left from selling the old house in Ramstock,
Speaker 1: the one thing Charlotte was really able to give her daughter.
Speaker 1: In the end, Dolores is so excited and Humbert asks
Speaker 1: her to come with him one last time. She says no, no, honey, no.
Speaker 1: And she does not say this, but Humbert projects this
Speaker 1: final thought on her, referring to clear Quilty. He broke
Speaker 1: my heart, you merely broke my life. Laura's is excited
Speaker 1: to have the money, and she sees him off. Humbert
Speaker 1: leaves tracks down Clerk Quilty, murders him, and is arrested
Speaker 1: for nothing he ever did to do Laura's hayes, but
Speaker 1: for murdering Quilty. Just one last humberd quote as he
Speaker 1: overhears a group of girls playing towards the end quote,
Speaker 1: I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty
Speaker 1: slope to those flashes of separate cries, with a kind
Speaker 1: of demurror murmur for background, And then I knew that
Speaker 1: the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side,
Speaker 1: but the absence of her voice from that concorde. Unquote.
Speaker 1: The book ends here. But remember we were told in
Speaker 1: the foreword that Mrs Richard Schiller dies in childbirth in nWo.
Speaker 1: That's Dolores dying at only seventeen years old. And that's Lolita,
Speaker 1: the account from an admitted predator of his rape and
Speaker 1: kidnapping of a twelve year old girl, with a smattering
Speaker 1: of murders depending on how much you believe him. I
Speaker 1: know this was a very long description, but I really
Speaker 1: feel that knowing what happens in the book exactly makes
Speaker 1: it a lot easier for you to see how far
Speaker 1: away many adaptations get away from the very difficult source
Speaker 1: material the book of who we really haven't gotten to
Speaker 1: talk about yet, was pretty clear on his feelings about
Speaker 1: Humbert Humbert from the moment of publication, saying the following quote,
Speaker 1: Humbert Humbert is a vain and cruel wretch who manages
Speaker 1: to appear quote touching unquote. Now, why he chose to
Speaker 1: write this story is something we're going to talk about.
Speaker 1: Who he's pulling inspiration from for these doomed characters is
Speaker 1: something else altogether. But as far as the book goes,
Speaker 1: Lolita is designed to lead its readers astray. You were
Speaker 1: told before the narrative even starts that you were reading
Speaker 1: the heavily biased, often ridiculously inaccurate account of a child
Speaker 1: molester and murderer who is appealing directly to his jurors.
Speaker 1: From the first words, Humbert says, you learned that Lolita
Speaker 1: is not even a name anyone else in her life
Speaker 1: uses except for him. But then, well, god damn, he's
Speaker 1: a pretty good writer. Imagine me. I shall not exist
Speaker 1: if you do not imagine me. Humbert says. He is
Speaker 1: extremely manipulative. And by the time we learn who Mrs
Speaker 1: Richard Schiller is, and there's Dolores still being named based
Speaker 1: on the dominant man on her life to the very
Speaker 1: end that there is no one else alive to give
Speaker 1: their account of these events. Charlotte Hayes is dead, Dolores
Speaker 1: Hayes is dead. Humbert is the only person to tell
Speaker 1: us his version of the events, and even so, with
Speaker 1: this deeply biased account of what he claims to be loved,
Speaker 1: even though Dolores assures him just months before her death
Speaker 1: that it was not. There are glimmers of Dolores inside
Speaker 1: of this story. She has raped hundreds of times by Humbert,
Speaker 1: She's abducted by him, she's lied to, hit, spied to,
Speaker 1: stolen from, and those facts are referenced inside of all
Speaker 1: this fancy murderer prose, and still with no adult on
Speaker 1: earth that she can trust, she gets away, and still
Speaker 1: she only changes hands to her next abuser. A problem
Speaker 1: a lot of readers bump up against in reading Lolita
Speaker 1: is that, in spite of how much is talked about
Speaker 1: Lolita from Humbert, her exact measurements horrified in details of assault,
Speaker 1: we don't get to know Dolores all that well, aside
Speaker 1: from what Humbred shares of mostly their arguments. But even
Speaker 1: through the severe limitations that come with a heavily unreliable
Speaker 1: narrator trying to talk you out of thinking what you
Speaker 1: think about him, this is not the story of a
Speaker 1: precocious girl seducing an older man, as he describes it,
Speaker 1: and the reality is right there in the pages. It's
Speaker 1: the story of a girl having her life taken from
Speaker 1: her by a horrific, if well spoken pedophile and all
Speaker 1: of the other adults in her life who failed to
Speaker 1: help her along the way. At the time of publication,
Speaker 1: this was a topic that was completely forbidden to discuss
Speaker 1: in the United States and in most of the Western
Speaker 1: world in spite of its reality becoming increasingly common. And
Speaker 1: we'll be discussing the real life case that inspired Lolita
Speaker 1: in a future episode. But then, as now, I think
Speaker 1: that your interpretation of this book is a bit of
Speaker 1: a mirror. My first read of it was very impacted
Speaker 1: by my age, my experience is up until that time,
Speaker 1: and the aesthetics surrounding not just the movie adaptations, but
Speaker 1: around sexualizing young girls in general. And after reading this
Speaker 1: book back four times to prepare for this show, I'm
Speaker 1: now far more aggravated with how it was presented to
Speaker 1: me than by the work itself. For me, a close
Speaker 1: read of this work reveals that Nabokov is not glorifying
Speaker 1: the predator. I believe it's our culture that has There's
Speaker 1: a quote from Vera Nabokov, Vladimir's wife who will be
Speaker 1: talking about in future episodes, on her feelings about Doloris,
Speaker 1: the character. They all missed the fact that the horrid
Speaker 1: little brat Lolita is essentially very good. Indeed, or she
Speaker 1: would not have straightened out after being crushed so terribly
Speaker 1: and found a decent life with poor Dick more to
Speaker 1: her liking than the other kind. Another take on to
Speaker 1: Luras I found really impactful in my research was reading
Speaker 1: Lolita in Tehran, a memoir by Iranian author and professor
Speaker 1: Azar Nafisi. It's the account of an undercovered book club
Speaker 1: that she made for her the students after leaving as
Speaker 1: a teacher at an Iranian university. From n Nafisi and
Speaker 1: her group analyze Western literature through the lens of students
Speaker 1: who haven't known anything but the oppressive gender roles of
Speaker 1: revolutionary Iran. Per the title, they read, Lolita and Dolores's
Speaker 1: plight really affected the whole group and got them discussing
Speaker 1: their own girlhoods. Forty years after the book's publication, one
Speaker 1: member of the group, Mascheid, said this, it is hard
Speaker 1: for me to read the parts about Lolita's feelings. All
Speaker 1: she wants to be as a normal girl. Now goes
Speaker 1: on to say, Lolita belongs to a category of victims
Speaker 1: who have no defense and are never given a chance
Speaker 1: to articulate their own story. As such, she becomes a
Speaker 1: double victim. Not only her life but also her life
Speaker 1: story is taken from her. We told ourselves that we
Speaker 1: were in that class to prevent ourselves from falling victim
Speaker 1: to this second crime. And as will continue to discuss,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of very valid criticism are around Lolita
Speaker 1: the book, like in Rebecca salm It's wonderful essay men
Speaker 1: explain Lolita to Me, which she wrote after getting some
Speaker 1: extremely condescending feedback while making the argument that the literary
Speaker 1: canon that in a book golf is very much a
Speaker 1: part of is perhaps dominated by straight white guys with
Speaker 1: a tendency to harp on the suffering of their female characters. Huh.
Speaker 1: Here's what Salnick says. So much of feminism has been
Speaker 1: women speaking up about hitherto unacknowledged experiences, and so much
Speaker 1: of anti feminism has been men telling them these things
Speaker 1: don't happen. You were not just raped, your rapists may say,
Speaker 1: and then if you persist, there may be death threats,
Speaker 1: because killing people is the easy way to be the
Speaker 1: only voice in the room. Non white people get much
Speaker 1: the same rubbish about how there isn't racism and they
Speaker 1: don't get treated differently, and race doesn't affect any of us,
Speaker 1: and this is all very much in the wheelhouse of
Speaker 1: how Humbert Humbert represents Doloras, and the tendency to take
Speaker 1: this information at face value from Humbert is a huge
Speaker 1: contributor to why Lolita has come to popularly mean the
Speaker 1: sexualization of young girls instead of the story of a
Speaker 1: young girl's life being destroyed when she is sexualized and abused.
Speaker 1: And I'm not saying that every appreciator of the book
Speaker 1: feels this way. I'm not saying that at all, but
Speaker 1: I do think you'll recognize this condescending, missing the fucking
Speaker 1: point tone that Solnett is describing here. A nice liberal
Speaker 1: man came along and explained to me this book was
Speaker 1: actually an allegory, as though I hadn't thought of that yet.
Speaker 1: It is, and it's also a novel about a big
Speaker 1: old guy violating a spindley child over and over and over.
Speaker 1: Then she weeps. And then another nice little man came
Speaker 1: along and said, you don't seem to understand the basic
Speaker 1: truth of art. I wouldn't care if a novel was
Speaker 1: about a bunch of women running around castrating men. If
Speaker 1: it was great writing, I'd want to read it, probably
Speaker 1: more than once. Of course, there is no such body
Speaker 1: of literature. And if the nice little man who made
Speaker 1: that statement had been assigned book after book full of
Speaker 1: castration scenes, maybe even celebrations of castration, it might have
Speaker 1: made an impact on him. One of the main problems
Speaker 1: people have with Lolita as a cultural figure is how
Speaker 1: she's shown in advertising. The heart shaped glasses, gazing at
Speaker 1: the viewer, the school girl close about to pop off
Speaker 1: that we've seen a million times, But that's not the
Speaker 1: Lolita that Nabokov writes about. The subject of all of
Speaker 1: the abuse of this story is Dolores, a twelve year old.
Speaker 1: So before we continue into the rest of the series,
Speaker 1: I want to remind you the age Dolores is when
Speaker 1: Humbert first violates her. Here's Amanda Buydes at twelve. I'm twelve,
Speaker 1: al yes, I can. Here's Marseille Martin at thirteen. It
Speaker 1: was amazing, Like, if you know, Beyonce is like my
Speaker 1: favorite person. Like we are talking about a twelve year
Speaker 1: old girl. And throughout the show, I'm going to continue
Speaker 1: to call the character as we know her, Dolores, and
Speaker 1: the book and the idea surrounding it as Lolita, because
Speaker 1: they are two different people. Dolores is present in slips
Speaker 1: of Humbrid's pen, but he doesn't let us get too
Speaker 1: close to her by design, the Lolita we meet at
Speaker 1: subsequent points and pop culture require taking Humbred's word at
Speaker 1: face value. When in the book, before you hear a
Speaker 1: word that he says, you know that that's the first
Speaker 1: thing you absolutely should not do. The cultural legacy of
Speaker 1: Lolita has just as much to do with Dolores's absence
Speaker 1: as it does with the presence of Humbrid's distorted fantasy.
Speaker 1: So if you've gotten this far into the episode and
Speaker 1: had some hesitation at that reading or rereading Lolita the
Speaker 1: book beforehand, and your will to give it another shot,
Speaker 1: I'd be interested to talk to you on the show.
Speaker 1: So if you like, I'm going to be cobbling together
Speaker 1: a book club of listeners to discuss the book on
Speaker 1: discord over the next eight weeks or so as this
Speaker 1: series continues to come out. And for the link on that,
Speaker 1: I will leave it in the show notes, as well
Speaker 1: as a pint to my Twitter account over at Jamie
Speaker 1: Loftus Help. So that's episode one, and it does require
Speaker 1: some addressing that this book was written by someone whose
Speaker 1: life experiences are way more aligned with Humbert's than Dolores's.
Speaker 1: So nibulkof Why the funk Did You write This? Next
Speaker 1: week on Lolita Podcast. This has been a production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio. My name's Jamie Loftus. I right and
Speaker 1: host the show. My producers are the wonderful Sophie Lichterman,
Speaker 1: Miles Gray, Beth and Macaluso and Jack O'Brien. My editor
Speaker 1: is the amazing Isaac Taylor. Additional research and transcription work
Speaker 1: from Ben Loftus. Music is by Zoey Blade, and our
Speaker 1: theme is from Brad Dickert. Thank you so much to
Speaker 1: my guest voices on this episode as well, Aziz Vora
Speaker 1: as Humbert Humbert, Robert Evans as Vladimir nabuk Off, Julia Claire, Anna,
Speaker 1: Josnie Sharene, Lanni Units, Grace Thomas, and Miles Gray. We'll
Speaker 1: see you next week.