Mika Kennedy, University of California, San Diego
Since its publication in 1955, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita has been variously labeled: it is "the most American of Nabokov's works." It is also "the supreme novel of love in the twentieth century." Others contend it is not a romance, but a parodic tragedy of imitations and inauthenticity, wherein protagonist Humbert Humbert "succeeds in creating only a renewed sense of loss wherever he turns." Is their relationship, then, monstrously romantic, or the imagined romance of a monster? The unanswerability of this question suggests that inauthenticity need not be the harbinger of tragedy, in the same way that a kiss does not necessarily prove supreme love. Humbert pursues Lolita the original, "the real," but only because he has lost the hyperreal. His romance is with fiction. But Humbert Humbert continues to conceptualize his potential relationship with Lolita in terms of a hyperreal fiction, a fiction critic Umberto Eco recognizes as quintessentially American. Lolita's inherent "Americanness" provides the key to reconciling both its romantic and parodic designations, and reformulating our prevailing interpretations of authenticity in the American novel.