Is Nabokov responsible for Epstein?

by Vesna Main

At a recent dinner party, a guest mentioned that Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted paedophile, admired Nabokov’s novel Lolita, owning a first edition. Clearly, the guest said, Epstein would have used the book for titillation, nourishing his perverse, paedophile mind. Writers are responsible, she added, for their texts and the consequences that follow.

As someone who writes short stories and novels, I had to disagree or, at least, disagree to a point.

When it comes to non-fiction – newspaper articles, reports and the views expressed on social media – we are in very different territory. The narrator of the text, the ‘I’ doing the telling, is the same ‘I’ as the one writing the text. They operate on the same plane of ‘reality’. Therefore, with such a text, the writer is responsible for the message and the values it espouses.

However, the issue is very different when it comes to fiction. The views of the writer, a flesh and blood entity living in a particular cultural and historical context, are not necessarily those voiced by the characters, who are the writer’s fictional constructions. Nor can we assume that the text’s overall ‘message’ is that of the writer. If one of the characters in the novel, or even the narrator, expounds racist or sexist attitudes, it doesn’t mean that the text, let alone the writer, shares those points of view. In most fiction, such views are there to be criticised and exposed as unacceptable.

The world of fiction is liminal. On opening a novel, the reader subscribes to the contract that they are entering that liminal space that operates with its own rules. It is a world that, even when it is reminiscent of the quotidian, may have different codes which, with the best literature, interrogate our own positions. The author of that world cannot be responsible if the reader unwittingly or deliberately confuses the two worlds. I am reminded of the experience of Peter Brook’s travelling theatre company Conference of the Birds, performing for African villagers who had never seen a theatre performance and who were unable to recognise it as fiction. After the show, they refused to feed the actors who had portrayed the villains.

The word ‘novel’ under the title of a book signifies that threshold, that entry into a different space. It is an indicator of a ritual, rather like when a Christian enters a church and makes the sign of the cross. When we finish reading the novel, we leave that church, that sanctified place, and we repeat the gesture.

The main part of Nabokov’s Lolita is narrated by Humbert Humbert, whose self-conscious language and numerous meta-textual references, delivered with the sophistication of a Central European intellectual, are as seductive as his crime against the young woman is repulsive. And it is in that space of contradiction between attraction and revulsion that part of the genius of the novel lies. The reader is forced to feel uncomfortable about their own attraction to Humbert Humbert. That may not happen to a reader who enters the fictional world determined to judge the main character as if he were a real person. In other words, such a reader ignores the fact that Humbert Humbert and Lolita exist only in that liminal space which operates according to its own rules. That doesn’t mean that those rules legitimise paedophilia. Quite the contrary. They allow the attentive reader to be alert to the complexities of human character: the most obnoxious people can be erudite and successful across all spheres of human achievement. Unlike their fairy-tale version, human devils do not have horns. They can be beautiful and seductive. However, the reader who refuses to step into the liminal space of the novel, and who is solely guided by their revulsion at Humbert Humbert’s crime, cannot be attentive to the beauty of the language and the meta-textuality of the discourse. In their mind, the text is an account of a real world. That reader rejects as obnoxious the text they see as a celebration of paedophilia.

But Nabokov, the cleverest of writers, seems to anticipate such a scenario and, in order to pre-empt it, he introduces another narrator: a friend and relative of Humbert Humbert’s lawyer, a man asked to edit Humbert Humbert’s manuscript. The editor refers to the ‘crime’ and the ‘sorry and sordid business’ described in the manuscript. In his words, Humbert Humbert is horrible, abject, diabolical, cunning, and ‘a shining example of moral leprosy’. The reader cannot be in any doubt about the position of this narrator – a position that, I would claim, is also the position of the text, the position the reader is asked to take. Such explicit condemnation, presented to the reader in the Foreword, that is, before they read about Humbert Humbert’s exploits, can only be ignored by a wilful reader.

In 1933, US judge John M. Woolsey made a groundbreaking decision when he successfully argued against the censorship of James Joyce’s Ulysses. His argument was based on the literary merit of Ulysses, its importance as a work of art, and the need to judge it as a whole, rather than in terms of its individual parts. The same argument applies to Lolita.

Jeffrey Epstein was a wilful reader whose sense of power and self-importance, nourished by the flattery of those around him, made him arrogant enough to figuratively rip out the Foreword so that he could take pleasure in the descriptions of underage rape. Nabokov cannot be responsible for readers taking sections of his novel out of context and ignoring the rest of the text. In the Foreword, signed by John Ray – a fictional character, a friend and relative of Humbert Humbert’s lawyer, and the editor of the latter’s manuscript – he writes that ‘Lolita should make all of us – parents, social workers, educators – apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.’ As one of Nabokov’s two narrators, he could not be more explicit about the novel’s position.

Paedophiles and other violent individuals exist regardless of literature. Blaming fiction for their actions will only impoverish us all.

Vesna Main was born in Zagreb, Croatia. She has a degree in Comparative Literature and a PhD in Elizabethan Studies from the Shakespeare Institute. Her works include the short story collection Temptation (Salt, 2018), the novella Bruno and Adèle (Platypus Press, 2021), and the novels Good Day? (Salt, 2019), shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, Only A Lodger … And Hardly That (Seagull Books, 2020) and Waiting for A Party (Salt, 2024). Her writing explores the formal possibilities of the novel.