Lolita, it is often said, is a beautiful book about an ugly thing. Nabokov writes in a manner so as to groom and demoralize his readers, making us complicit in the crimes that the novel describes. Thus, as Martin Amis says, Lolita leaves us 'ravished, overcome, nodding scandalized assent'.
But just what is it that we say Yes to: deceit, murder, and child abuse; or simply to the event of literature?
It's arguable that, ultimately, we are encouraged to say Yes to all of the above - and to everything - as belonging to what Nietzsche terms a general economy of the whole. For the world is as it is and the strongest individuals are those who not only accept it, but affirm it, as it is; embracing the tragic character of life and loving fate.
That said, from somewhere comes a growing dislike for Humbert Humbert and an increased sympathy not only for the girl-child, but for her mother, the Haze woman. One doesn't want to become John Ray Jr., full of paper mâché pieties, but perhaps Richard Rorty might have a point when he suggests that Humbert is a monster not only of perversity and of cruelty, but of incuriosity.
That is to say, Humbert is not merely nymphet-desiring, but intensely self-obsessed and self-idealizing; he is very little interested in the thoughts and feelings of others, even those he claims to love. Thus, writes Rorty, despite the author's insistence to the contrary, the novel does have a moral in tow:
"But the moral is not to keep one's hands off little girls but to notice what one is doing, and in particular to notice what people are saying. For it might turn out, it very often does turn out, that people are trying to tell you they are suffering."
- Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (CUP, 1989), p. 164.
(Of course, Sade might well point out that there is no good reason why someone else's suffering should in any way infringe upon or prevent one's own pleasure; indeed, it might usefully serve to heighten the latter. Or, as Nietzsche would say: pain is not an argument.)
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