Tips on Teaching Lolita

The following remarks were originally posted on Scott Rettberg's blog in response to comments he made about teaching Lolita this semester. Scott's reflections were prompted, in part, by his reading of Mark Edmunson's essay "All Entertainment, All the Time."

Scott,

I taught Lolita last spring and experienced the same difficulty you describe: getting the students to get beyond their impulse to condemn Humbert Humbert's reprehensible behavior and to reflect upon Nabokov's artistry.

Here’s what I found worked well to overcome this obstacle.

1. Read the annotated edition. We read The Annotated Lolita, edited by Alfred Appel Jr. Appel's introductory essay and his useful annotations cue students in to things such as Nabokov's intricate wordplay. This edition costs a bit more, but is worth every penny.

2. Beware the Morality Fallacy. Explaining why reading literature for a moral lesson is lame. Every semester, I typically give a lecture in which I explain what I like to call the 'morality fallacy,' which is based on the premise that art and literature differ from a sermon and that it is a critical error to evaluate art or literature as though they were merely models for right, proper or 'politically correct behavior.

3. Explain your affective reaction. I asked students to reflect carefully upon their feelings toward Humbert. In which passages did they find him most reprehensible, and where did they find themselves feeling some pity for him? After pinpointing some of these passages, including, of course, the account of the first seduction, we discussed how the narrative strategies Nabokov deployed via his unreliable, pompous, but nonetheless rhetorically savvy narrator, encouraged particular emotional or affective responses.

4. Read smart literary criticism. We read several essays from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: A Casebook, edited by Ellen Pifer that do a great job of addressing issues such as (1) how the novel can be read as a romance in a parodic mode ("Parody and Authenticity in Lolita) (2) why Humbert is only partially successful in his rhetorical manipulations ("The Art of Persuasion in Lolita") and (3) how Humbert's attempts at self-exoneration lead him to denigrate America ("The Americanization of Humbert Humbert").

5. Screen both versions of the film. We watched both Stanley Kubrick's and Adrian Lyne's film versions of Lolita and discussed how the two movies approached the novel differently, particularly in the extent and manner in which each film leads us to identify with Humbert. I argued that Kubrick treated the book as a black comedy and emphasized the outrageous humor in the novel, whereas Lyne emphasized the more melodramatic aspects of the narrative. The result, as I saw it, was that Lyne's Humbert, played by Jeremy Irons, seemed more authentic and elicited more pathos from viewers, due in part to his awkwardness, whereas Kubrick's Humbert, played by James Mason, emphasized the cultivated aloof, somewhat arrogant European. I highly recommend screening both versions, in part because doing so will demonstrate how time constraints and the need for a certain cinematographic consistency require filmmakers to adhere more strictly to one genre than novelists, who are more free to vary the 'tone' of their work.

6. Discuss Lolita as a popular culture phenomenon. We also read Michael Wood's essay "Revisiting Lolita (also in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: A Casebook) which was written as a response to the 1997 media controversy surrounding Adrian Lyne’s film. Wood addresses important issues including how filmic constraints are both limiting and enabling when remediating a work of fiction into a film and how the term "Lolita" has entered our vocabulary and why the colloquial use of the term signifies something vastly different from Humbert and Nabokov's use of the term.

7. Let the master have his say. Finally, before beginning the novel, I familiarized students with some of Nabokov’s views on aesthetics and literature.

• “I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere.”

• “Now if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know.”

• “Let me suggest that the very term ‘everyday reality’ is utterly static since it presupposes a situation that is permanently observable, essentially objective, and universally known.”

I look forward to hearing or reading more about your students’ responses to Lolita. Good luck!