Wednesday
Jeffrey Epstein, whose money and high connections have up until now kept him out of jail for pedophilia, looks as though he may finally answer for his crimes. One sordid detail is that the plane used to shuttle underage girls between New York and Palm Beach was nicknamed “the Lolita Express,” so there’s a literary angle to this.
Since the novel is a devastating expose of the mind of a pedophile, let’s apply it to Donald Trump as well as to Epstein since the president too has a history. I’m thinking of his alleged rape of a 13-year-old and his self-confessed habit of walking into the dressing rooms of teenage beauty contestants. Regarding the latter, he boasted to Howard Stern in a 2005 radio show, “You know they’re standing there with no clothes. Is everybody OK? And you see these incredible looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that.”
There’s also his endorsement of Epstein in a 2002 New York Magazine article. As he told the writer,
“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it – Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
To be sure Epstein resembles Humbert Humbert more than the president does. Nabokov’s narrator is cosmopolitan, complex, and well-read, characteristics that do not fit Trump. But there are things that our predator-in-chief does share with Nabokov’s narrator.
Among them is his ability to pull other people into his own world. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Lolita is the spell that Humbert casts upon the reader, getting us to sympathize with his statutory rape of the 12-year-old Dolores Haze. In their early history, novels came under attack for how they get us to sympathize with even lowlifes and criminals (e.g. Moll Flanders, Tom Jones). Because of his magic with words, Humbert turns a horrifying crime into a passionate love story and invites our complicity. Trump doesn’t have Humbert’s eloquence but he has his own magnetism.
If ever there was a novel that called for readers to recognize an unreliable narrator, it’s Lolita. It’s easier to identify if you actually share Dolores’s situation. In her fascinating work Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi said her students identified with Dolores while regarding Humbert as akin to the tyrannical mullahs. Speaking of the Ayatolla Khomeini and the other fundamentalists, Nafisi writes, “They had tried to shape others according to their own dreams and desires, but Nabokov, through his portrayal of Humbert, had exposed all solipsists who take over other people’s lives.”
Nafisi’s students saw through Humbert “because he lacked curiosity about other people and their lives, even about the person he loved most, Lolita. Humbert, like most dictators, was interested only in his own vision of other people. He had created the Lolita he desired, and would not budge from that image.”
Both Epstein and Trump regard their victims as instruments for their own egos and desires. Only because of the determined efforts of a Miami Herald reporter does it appear that Epstein will finally be brought to justice. Whether Trump is held accountable remains to be seen.
Humbert gets jail time only because he shoots the man who stole Lolita from him, not for statutory rape. I’m not betting on any jail time for Donald Trump.