Why I dislike interpretation

[Rev. Rye]

I've always thought that it was more a metaphor for being Jewish in a Christian society that hadn't quite figured out that anti-Semitism was a bad thing (though, apparently he was pretty alienated from the Jewish tradition for most of his life, although the writing of the original novella does line up with his cultural awakening, and Prague was actually pretty decent to the Jews at that point in time). Of course, that's one guy's take on it. And, of course, there are severe limits to this line of reasoning (seriously, does the dude not know that Montenegro is an actual fucking country? I wonder what would happen if someone gave him a Nero Wolfe book; he'd probably be calling everyone in the Brownstone black because Wolfe was born in Montenegro.)

[Silver]

Not going to lie, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is one of my favourite novels, and the biggest reason it is so is because of what happens once you read between the lines and realise that Humbert is completely full of shit and is bending over backwards to justify his abhorrent desires. Don't blame me, I have a disease that makes me want to fuck little girls! Besides, it's perfectly normal to want to fuck little girls; Petrarch became enamoured of Laura when she was 13 (note: one of the key points in my figuring it out is that this is flat-out wrong and Humbert, as a lit professor specialising in European poetry, should probably know this). And who said anything about little girls? I'm only attracted to nymphets! There's a difference, even if it does exist only in my own head! Hell, Lolita seduced me! And yet he still plays the reader like a fiddle.

Sadly, this is probably why neither of the two film adaptations really succeeded in capturing the essence of the book, even if one was directed by Stanley Fucking Kubrick, and the other didn't have the Hays Office to dilute the content, because to pull that off, you'd probably need to change the book's structure pretty radically, probably making it more akin to Fight Club or Election, because there's no moment of realisation like in the former and no room for alternate perspectives like in the latter.

When I first read the book, I was young and rather naive to the many harsh truths of the world, which is why the meaning of their relationship had to be explained to me.

[Rev. Rye]

I think I had a similar feeling the first time I watched the Kubrick version. Having to kowtow to the Hays office required Kubrick to make the implications a Hell of a lot more subtle, and as an autistic boy in his very early teens, I found myself asking, “so, did they do it or not?” Fortunately, a minimum of 15 years’ more life experience made what Kubrick was trying to get across when He made it a Hell of a lot clearer.

[Belacqua]

I remember in school we always had to read classic literature and give our opinions on what we read. The teacher would tell us what experts had interpreted in relation to the literature.

If your teacher told you that in every case there is one correct interpretation of a book, and the experts know it, then he wasn't a very good teacher. 

The important thing is that interpretation is different from de-coding. In a cryptogram, each letter or figure corresponds to one correct meaning. Art doesn't work that way. 

That said, interpretations may be better or worse, more or less justified, and when you're a student it makes sense to see how more experienced people have done it. 

For example, experts can make a good case that Lolita is to be interpreted as Nabokov's demonstration of how beauty in literature is separate from personal morality. He has intentionally set up a disgusting immoral character and made a beautiful literary work to display him. The de-coupling of aesthetic pleasure and morality has been a big theme in the arts since at least the middle of the 19th century. (And part of the joke is that Humbert Humbert is well aware of this.) Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde in England, the Decadent writers in France, make much of this, and Nabokov is in that tradition. 

If someone tried to argue that Lolita is to be interpreted as an allegory of the hydrological cycle, he'd have to work hard to make his case and I suspect a lot of us would laugh at him. Not every interpretation is justified. 

The study of interpretive methods is called hermeneutics. It has a long and subtle tradition in Europe thanks to the Bible, since Bible interpretation has been important to a lot of people. The traditional four-level method of Bible reading says that each sentence should be read in four different ways, and while some of these may be more pertinent than others, all are true in some way.