Should we hate Lolita because we hate the immoral protagonist?

But subjectivity is limited. It can only go so far. There’s much we’ll never truly come to understand. Much that we’ll never experience, or never want to experience.

The driving principles of popular entertainment now rear their way into the reactions of work that require deeper consideration from outside our immediate, limited perception. There is a trend of black and white thinking, where art must align with our personal moral codes, and our modern sensibilities, and fit like a comfort blanket over our frame of mind.

In literature, the role of the protagonist takes up a weirdly significant chunk of discourse. Their motivations, their morality, and how their thinking aligns with our own. There is a casual assumption that the protagonist is an avatar, with direct access to interpreting their thoughts and actions. There’s little need to reach into the unknown because we can interpret with what we already know and feel.

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This mode of writing is all over modern fiction shelves, as expected as it is particularly in the casual reader market. Yet with works of merit, the ambiguous and complicated nature of a novel’s characters only serves to add complexity and depth, and bridges the gaps in understanding and perceiving things from outwith our own well-worn shoes.

There is something comforting in reflecting the reader back to themselves – it’s safer, simple, morally reassuring. But this reduces the work to a linear tale, where good and bad are steadfast binary choices, and a complicated, contradictive world is laid out flat.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one novel that dies in a void of misinterpretation, with a reduced extended grace to what the novel is functionally trying to portray and why. The morality that sits on its surface, the charm and justifications of protagonist Humbert Humbert as he grooms and kidnaps a 12-year-old girl, present a challenge to this mindset.

Lolita is at the mercy of one’s own preconceptions and biases, as Nabokov filters the novel’s perspective through such an objectionable character. Look at some recent reviews of the novel on book cataloguing site Goodreads and you’ll find many judging the work on what they personally feel toward Humbert’s thoughts and actions alone.

But it’s this uncertainty that gives Lolita its literary power, its ability to provoke curiosity in a character who would otherwise be ostracised outside of its pages. We are never intended to paint Humbert as straight good or bad – that’s much too simple, much too insulting to its subtext.

The reader knows his actions are reprehensible (I would hope) yet seeing Humbert’s life through his own words asks much grander, complex questions about interpreting another’s reality. Humbert is an unreliable narrator, where his words never quite match with the seriousness of his actions, where we cycle through charming facades that distract from his depravity.

It's not on Nabokov or his character to hand us what to think, and it’s not the job of literary titans to write to whatever moral codes make their way through society in perpetuity.

Vladimir Nobokov's Lolita is considered one of 20th-century literature's great works. But a modern sensibility that rejects it has grown in recent years. (Image: Commons)
There is a strong predilection to combine art and morality, where our own moral codes are reflected back at us as reassurance. We’re more concerned with having the right answers than pondering an abstraction where there are no right answers. But in looking for the right answers, tunnel vision forms. We fail to see the complexity of something in our pursuit of tying it to what we already know and feel.

The world itself is not a simple moral tale, and the art that is born from it is stronger when diving in and exploring all possible perspectives. Humans are not creatures of linear thought, as much as we believe so. We are a mass of contradictions. Our morality might maintain strength in some areas but struggle or be completely ignorant in others. There is no need for art and literature to act as an instruction manual for how to live life or how to relate to the thoughts of others.

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The modern rejection of works like Lolita has been unfairly painted as a generational divide, a blindly woke younger generation looking at ‘bad thing’ and forming their judgement from there. But that’s not the case. Many students and younger readers are more than capable of understanding and engaging with works like Lolita in a thoughtful and considerate manner.

This morality mindset is much more universal than that, it lacks such categorisation. It’s a reflection of a society that looks at art and literature and asks, “What does it have to do with me?”. It’s a symptom of an atomised existence, where our minds have turned inward, and we are preoccupied with the self. What we see and feel in front of us is the final thought. But it’s never final, there’s always more to learn and understand and benefit from – if we so choose.