Lolita: Interpretative Fable Of Nabokov's View On Aesthetics And Art

Lolita, written by Vladimir Nabokov, tells us an abnormal story in which Humbert, a middle-aged man falls in love with 12-years-old Lolita. Since its publication, Lolita broadly aroused intensive disputation and was recognized an obscene work. Through years of discussion, the novel had finally been peeled off its vulgar, pornographic and commercial appearance and accepted as serious literature. In recent years, critics in China mainly focus on formalistic aspect of Lolita, such as style, structure, narrative skill, sarcasm, parody and paronomasia etc. They emphasize Nabokov's incomparable artistry and attribute his esthetic pursuits to "Life Tragedy", "Butterfly Aesthetics", "Time and Freedom" and even "Postmodernism ". However, more and more scholars become aware of the fact that Lolita possesses multiple subjects and could be interpreted from multiple viewpoints and facets.In this thesis, beginning at "reality" of Lolita, I would like to distinguish two different concepts of "reality", "normal reality" and "poetic reality". Then I analyze portraits of tragic characters and their conflicts in the novel in order to reveal that. In its unique and metaphoric style, Lolita discloses spiritual predicament facing human beings. Furthermore, the novel tries to show, with Humbert's artistic "meditation", an opportunity of salvation for modern souls from that predicament. It is precisely this underlying aspect of Lolita that gives us a solid proof of Nabokov's purpose: heintends his fiction to be an interpretive fable of aesthetics and art, and these two things could perform as human beings' final "salvation".This thesis is divided into six parts. Part one tries to explain Nabokov's view of "reality". While part two analyzes the novel in a sense of "normal reality", part three reveals a "poetic reality" within the "normal reality", giving close readings of various characters in the tragedy of Lolita. Extending from part three, part four probes three climaxes of the novel's tragedy, showing that confliction between the characters are actually centered upon metaphysical and aesthetic subjects rather than routine life. The fifth and sixth parts discuss Nabokov's view on aesthetics and art, demonstrating that Lolita is in fact a fable story that the writer employs to express his ideas about these eternal subjects.