The following poem written by Vladimir Nabokov goes a long way in explaining the frustrated passion of his protagonist Humbert Humbert in his controversial and infamous novel of pedophilia and incest, Lolita:
“Let me in!” I shouted, noticing with horror
that I again stood outside in the dust
and that obscenely bleating youngsters
“Let me come in!” And the goat-hoofed,
copper-curled crowd increased. “Oh, let me in,”
I pleaded, “otherwise I shall go mad!”
The door stayed silent, and for all to see
writhing with agony I spilled my seed
and knew abruptly that I was in Hell.
The above poem by Nabokov reveals the passion and frustration of Humbert Humbert for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Despite the book’s subject matter and its being banned upon publication in many countries including the U.S., critics, scholars, and professors found the book to be a masterpiece with tragi-comedy its reason for being not titillation or pornography. As Charles Rolo noted in the September 1958 Atlantic Monthly, “The novel’s scandal-tainted history and its subject-the affair between a middle-aged sexual pervert and a twelve-year-old girl—inevitably conjure up expectations of pornography. But there is not a single obscene term in Lolita, and aficionados of erotica are likely to find it a dud” (78).
Certainly the story of a vulgar barely pubescent teen that loses her childhood and maidenhood to her stepfather, a sexual pervert (Quilty) and dies in childbirth to a simple man who loves her is tragic. However, Nabokov’s virtuoso command of the English language and his injection of extremely funny black humor into the novel distance us from its erotic and pornographic contents. It is the tragedy, the poetry, and the human comedy that are the focus of this work of art, with its contents being relegated to an inferior position in the hands of Nabokov. Pornography, comedy and irony are blended together ...