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Lo (F) Confession of a White Widowed Male
The primary text of “Lolita”, comprising around 99.9% of the novel is a first-person account by Humbert Humbert, which is sometimes said to be his legal defense for the trial he was to undergo, and other times taken to be more of a confession for his tormented soul, and perhaps sometimes just a bit of emotional prattling. The novel begins with a foreword consisting of a few pages by John Ray, Jr., Ph. D., which opens thus.
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“Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male,” such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. “Humbert Humbert”, their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of the District of Columbia bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his client’s will which empowered my eminent cousin to use his discretion in all matters pertaining to the preparation of “Lolita” for print. Mr. Clark’s decision may have been influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work (“Do the Senses Make Sense?”) wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed.
-- “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov
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This beginning is not as artful as the one that kicks off the main narrative, but this suggestion of trials and perversions does pique the reader’s interest, no? And we now know going in that our narrator and protagonist is dead and was apparently in serious trouble. It is engaging.
_ _ _
“Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male,” such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. “Humbert Humbert”, their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of the District of Columbia bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his client’s will which empowered my eminent cousin to use his discretion in all matters pertaining to the preparation of “Lolita” for print. Mr. Clark’s decision may have been influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work (“Do the Senses Make Sense?”) wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed.
-- “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov
_ _ _
This beginning is not as artful as the one that kicks off the main narrative, but this suggestion of trials and perversions does pique the reader’s interest, no? And we now know going in that our narrator and protagonist is dead and was apparently in serious trouble. It is engaging.