My Dad Published Lolita
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I slogged through it the first time, and didn't particularly enjoy it. All I remember from the first reading is that HH seemed kind of icky. I was barely older than Delores was in the first half of the novel, and I didn't really understand all the implications. I probably skimmed a great deal of the book without paying attention to it. Much of the subtlety of the story and all of the brilliant writing went right over my head.
Then I happened to pick up The Fued, about the friendship and subsequent falling out between Nabakov and Edmund Wilson. It mentioned several times that Lolita was a runaway success, and it made Nabakov famous.
I thought there must be something more to Lolita than I remembered, so I picked up a copy at the library. It was a whole different book. This time, I found the story both riveting and disturbing. On the first read, I knew that what he was doing would be called abuse, but I didn't really understand how he took advantage of her trust and naivety and adolescent rebelliousness. Or how awful it is to dehumanize pre teen girls and characterize them as sexual objects called nymphets.
HH claims to know that he took something irreplaceable from her and ruined her childhood. But - and I think this is why they say he is an unreliable narrator - it's not clear if he really believes what he's saying, or if it's a calculated ploy to garner sympathy.
The writing is incredible. The story is troubling and fascinating, and stayed in my mind a long time after. RIP Delores Schiller.
all my favorite films and books had me thinking about them months after the fact. even if it was just one part.
I don't think anyone is ready to read this as a child, not because it is going to corrupt children (who are routinely exposed to exactly this sort of manipulation in their teen years), but because there are so many levels you'd miss.
Truly a masterpiece, in spite of the icky subject matter, some parts are really dark in retrospect, but it's handled with such a light touch it's hard to look away.
Now I understand what he meant and I agree with him. I understand so much more of literature now that I am well into adulthood.
This is an interesting situation, because it creates a reading list that is a "projected aspiration". We hope, I guess, that kids will read precociously. Education is, after all, the teaching of civilization's most important messages compressed into a fixed, very short time-span. School gets kids "caught up" on the civilizational conversations about things. But so much of the art and literature of humanity is like Lolita, in that it requires lots of actual living to appreciate (unlike algebra), so its position is...odd.
I wonder if, by being exposed to these things at a young age, we give kids a "shared coordinate system" to interpret and express their world, and so shape their choices in it.
I honestly don't know if that really works, or if it's just cargo cult. I do know that I considered my English classes, and now I run a Shakespeare theater troupe. Much of my goal there is to present the Shakespeare that would have appealed to me at the time. I can't tell if I'm here because, despite, or totally disconnected from my education.
I think there's something to this idea. I remember we first read the apology in translation sometime in early highschool. everyone thought it was boring af and no one cared. totally different when we read it later in my ancient greek class. the teacher really knew how to play to her audience, and at every bit of (mostly untranslatable) wordplay she would stop to point out how socrates was roasting his interlocutors. to be fair, it's a certain kind of student that self-selects into highschool ancient greek, but the class definitely got a lot more out of it that time around. you might not like to teach the apology as "the story of socrates the chad", but you gotta meet your audience where they are.
Certain things like Shakespeare I'd contend will appeal at least on a surface level to children too. Something like Lolita not so much.
As a writer, I have an extremely vivid imagination. Same with my friends who are writers. We all joke that our Google searches have us on every FBI watchlist that exist and a few that don’t.
The same goes with many artists. Embracing creativity involves some degree of getting rid of self-censorship.
I can imagine entire worlds of horrible things. In my head, I can examine human nature unbound by cultural norms, design whole societies based on different rules.
There is an unfortunate belief that a person’s writing is representative of their personal beliefs and moral codes. Such things influence someone’s writing, of course, but you’re examine things from the wrong direction if you try to apply the writing back to the author.
Every reader has their own interpretation of a text and the author's intent. Personally, looking back on Lolita I can say I'm a little uncomfortable with the level of empathy and identification the writer shows with Humbert Humbert, but I know the intention is to discomfit the reader by making them identify with a horrible character, so...
That's not the intent of the author. Nabokov has absolutely no moral or social points to make.
I didn't realize this until I read Eugene Onegin, which I take as the genesis of Nabokov's general perspective. Onegin is funny and ironic while still being emotionally affecting. Nabokov is much more in the "art for art's sake" camp than most people today are comfortable with.
But, you're citing a book by Pushkin (or the anti-hero within?) as illustrative of Nabokov's worldview? While he affected amused disdain I think Nabokov did care about the world. Doesn't Onegin too?
I think it's hard to square writing a book about a manipulative child abuser with being utterly disinterested in moral or social issues, because the book probes deeply into both (even if it is a little fantastical and hyper-real). I agree Nabokov has a very dry, aristocratic and distant style, but he wouldn't write about such things if he didn't want to provoke debate. Art has meaning and his has a lot more depth than surface. His position is of course very ambiguous but there is a lot of empathy for Humbert in Lolita, which is partly why it is so entrancing and discomfiting.
> But, you're citing a book by Pushkin (or the anti-hero within?) as illustrative of Nabokov's worldview? While he affected amused disdain I think Nabokov did care about the world. Doesn't Onegin too?
That's my view, yeah. The figure here is the disaffected noble (or intellectual) who disdains society, creates his own values, and eventually tragically fails partly because he can't totally leave society behind. I think Nabokov loves those characters. I don't think he's criticizing them.
I am of course not saying you have to agree with Nabokov.
Yes I agree he probably would have loved a character like that, though I think part of the attraction is the recognition of their inevitable tragic end (with the implicit recognition that they are mistaken about the world).
Humbert of course is not in that mould (or not entirely), and I'm not saying Nabokov would be so crass as to write himself into Humbert, but he shows a lot of sly sympathy for him in Lolita, and his other books also show a preoccupation with transgressive sexuality in children (Ada), it's a weird obsession.
English Versions of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: https://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/pml1/onegin/
It's hard to tell which one is the best, because I do not like the original ... too boring.
I've tried it again today and it's boring again but today I have found that a few primitive tricks were used many times when rythm doesn't work.
I think the common view about beauty of the poem is greatly exaggerated.
Art (big A) is designed to make you feel and think. It is an experience.
What a particular work communicates is hard to pin down, and of course open to interpretation which changes over time (for example views of Alice in Wonderland have shifted due to revelations about the character of the author and his relation with his Alice), but it's certainly not possible to discuss whether a book sympathises with the central character if you don't engage with what the book says and instead talk in generalities.
I think of Lolita as a puzzle of a story. There are quite a few clues that lead to a metaphor that make since of HH’s proclamations at the end. I think Nabokov was satirizing himself as an artist through HH’s character. This view makes Delores the incarnation of “art” and HH the artist. The artist “loves” art as it affirms his whole life and reason for being. He seeks to control art, own it, and manipulate it for his own purposes. HH does not realize till the end that art/Delores lives and breaths on its/her own and that this autonomy outside of his control is truly what makes her her and art beautiful. Her struggle becomes real to him in the end, even if only a glimpse he does to me seem to actually recognize her as something separate not something he owns. He sees that seeking to calcify art only kills what was special about it in the first place; something like worshiping a corpse.
It reminded me of a statement David foster Wallace said once. (I’m paraphrasing heavily here) when I’m done with a book I’m dead and the book lives on through the readers. I think he was trying to say that he does not control the ultimate meaning of his own work and if he did it would be the other way around his book/art would be dead.
Amy Hungerford has 3 lectures on Lolita this is the 2nd one given by a guest speaker. I suggest all of them (Hungerford is a great literary analyst) but this one is a compelling argument for the above. https://youtu.be/QPnxLNFzA8s
The difficulty I have with it is that you can use it almost anywhere to justify anything. Star Wars and Superman? Perhaps there are two Kansas farmboys named Luke and Clark next to one another in an asylum, living out their fantasies, and all we see is the fantasy they choose to relate. You can begin to cram all kinds of unlikely conclusions into places once you bring up the idea that the author is not being entirely faithful in relaying what has transpired to the text.
As such, I would love to see if anyone has covered Lolita pointing out "Oh, but over here he said something completely different," because the bulk of the N.U. focus I have seen approaches the topic from the axiomatically assumed lack of culpability of Lolita herself; Humbert must be lying because otherwise she is complicit in this part over here. I would rather see contradictions within the text, but I haven't found anything with that kind of focus.
1. Cut out things, overstepping and taking some of the best that humanity has to offer. 2. Avoid cutting out things, leaving many people offended for a wide variety of possible reasons.
The reason I believe Lolita is being questioned is because the pendulum has swung too far toward Type 1. The entire idea of a free society, though, is predicated on lots more Type 2.
Thus, I believe Western society is unsustainable as it stands. We'll either see much more censorship in the coming years, or a company/government will face such a huge public backlash on their censoring that the trend reverses course.
I remember it as a lesson on self-control, child mindset (they are in a phase where they can manipulate dishonestly but also quickly move on like nothing has consequences), a road trip of the US, a lesson on obsessive passion, on one-sided escalation of obsession.
I read it on the advice of my dad around 16, and I had to admit this was absolute beauty, the main character being French like me helped also. There is nothing to censor, there is nothing to discuss: it can be read by children as a warning, it can be read by teenagers as a disturbing challenge, it can be read by adults as entertainment.
Only in the US do people discuss these things like it's a big deal, it's just the story of a lost man who got manipulated by a airhead child and fell in a criminal trap of his own making to end up with absolutely nothing to show for.
BTW western society doesn't exist. Americans should stop using this word to describe their own ways. We don't, everywhere west of China, agree on the definition of what is proper, what is censorship, what is society and how being west of China should impact how we group with others. So American society is unsustainable, but I'd like to argue that French society has an opinion on the balance of such things that works for us. It involves teaching limits openly and early, embrace free expression is a fantasy and explain why, and not shy away from re-discussing each instance of each issue together and publicly.
To the end of that, I believe almost everything in your last paragraph, with some clarifications as an American:
- Americans are highly ethnocentric relative to the rest of the world. It's because this country is the size of Europe, and its relative newness has made very little variance between, say, Kansas and Wyoming as opposed to, say, France and Germany. Thousands of years of horse-drawn travel have crafted your country's culture, while most of this country has had steam power, especially when you head westward. - The actual meaning of "Western Society", at least as I defaulted to using it, is to draw a political dichotomy to "Other Societies". Frankly, I think elements of all cultures are useful, but this two-party system over here removes any sense of subtlety to the dialogue. - I believe that protecting innocence is a losing bet, so I personally give my kids all the information as much as possible. To most Americans, that's offensive because they believe I'm somehow scarring them.
The article consists of the story of how Lolita was published in the US mixed with background on the political setting of the era it was published in.
The overall claim of the article seems to be that Lolita is still politically interesting and sparks debate.
I disagree with this conclusion. The world is all too fond of sexuality, and especially with controversial sexuality.
I am actually the author of a somewhat popular website involving written erotica, and what I've found is that controversial erotica is wildly popular regardless of the specific content. You could publish all manner of twisted crap today and it would mostly be met with praise.
There are, of course, puritanical haters that will go out of their way to whine and cry about it, but the world has reached a point where it is broadly understood that written erotica is freedom of speech and trying to ban it or make it stop is pointless.
Unfortunately, this isn't entirely true, even today.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/3a8nv3/canadian-author-charg... This is the most famous recent one.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/man-convicted-multiple-obscen... There is also a Texas Man, by the name of Thomas Arthur, who hosted far more disturbing things on his website who got convicted of obscenity.
He appears to have been trafficking in obscene drawings, however the text material is listed as charges as well.
Despite that, I don't think such sensitivity is unreasonable. I do believe that children are sexual from quite an early age, and that that should be accepted and encouraged from a sexual wellness perspective, but simultaneously I think children are abused very frequently even in this era and we should continue to do everything we can to protect them from abuse.
I still see plenty of "stories of my childhood" on erotica websites, and I don't see anyone going out of their way to shut them down. Example: solotouch ( not my website, but a common example with many such stories )
Another legal example that comes to mind is the man who was convicted for importing obscene hentai manga. I personally believe hentai should be considered free speech but that is certainly not the case in the legal arena right now.
My point remains that I believe the world is very accepting of many types of erotica that I had previously thought would be highly frowned upon.
I will point out that under the miller test ( the main law concerning this in the US ), textual material that is artistically meaningful as writing does not constitute illegal writing. I myself shy away from writing any erotica describing explicit sexual activity of minors, but I still believe it to be legal if written well enough... I does though fail 2 of the 3 prongs on the miller test:
1. The average person would agree that description of explicit child sexual activity is illegal. ( fiction wise at least; I think accounts of childhood activity may be deemed acceptable by many normal folk )
2. Description of child sexual activity is patently offensive.
In the case of Lolita, for the most part, the book isn't terribly explicit in nature. It also ensures its legality by being an instance of well written fiction.
Other applicable law is "activity contributing to the delinquency of minors". So, it isn't unreasonable for something that is otherwise legal to be illegal ( for good reason ) if it is used to encourage minors to engage in sexual activity ( with adults or for the entertainment of adults )
Essentially, the world is very accepting of erotica in many forms. The world simultaneously has many laws to attempt to protect children while maintaining the general acceptance.
wtf?
Something like this goes very quickly in direction of pedophiles.
But, committing a terrible act, and writing about it from a fictional perspective are completely different things. I don't think people are so brainless as to blindly follow what is happening in a hentai manga.
Someone doesn't simply "become" the sort of person who would do that, just by consuming fictional material, and if they're using purely fictional material, it could be even argued they're actively avoiding it.
The actual risk factors for abuse (and not merely creating / consuming prohibited content) I know of are:
Some people have poor mental health. Being unable to express yourself and having to shut things in would not help. Luckily, we have many ways to improve someone's mental health. Mental health can also improve if someone has supportive friends. This could be considered the main factor.
There are people who look for substitutes for a partner and unscrupulously pick that.
Someone may be physically incapable of feeling anything to adults and only to children. A recent scientific paper said that some address their loneliness by creating dolls and talking to them to keep them company. Banning and prohibiting things might frustrate them, but it wouldn't actually solve anything, other than making it clear that they have nothing to lose.
I am sure there are other possible factors, but I don't think I have ever seen "I saw it in a book" mentioned as one. Even Dr. Seto, who is a leading expert in this area, believes that those who would abuse, are those who would have abused either way, irregardless of this content being available.
It's also not a belief. The science has put it clearly that such people exist. Saying otherwise is to deny the science. Not only can the science measure someone's response to material, but even their neuronal response to it. It _is_ a spectrum, so there are types who aren't that bad off, and perhaps, even ones who are lightly touched by it. But, the idea that it is purely a form of deviance and twisting is flawed.
There are pieces of anecdotal science (studies on small samples of people who report it helping them not have to commit crime), a country level study on crime in the Czech Republic, and expert opinions from half a dozen experts which would suggest that at worst it is neutral and at best it reduces crime.
Most importantly, there has never been evidence that it causes crime. This property has largely been assumed, and has never been tested in such a fashion, despite a lot of people assuming it has been tested and produced such results. There is an exception where prisoners wanting to get early parole / better conditions play along with flawed studies.
According to Dr. Seto, those who commit crimes are largely antisocial individuals who were leaning and moving in that direction to begin with. And that they ultimately would have reached that conclusion.
At most, I might advise putting a content warning on a site or a piece that explains that it is a piece of fiction, and that it should be not be enacted. But, I've never seen actual evidence, only conjecture, that that it could be a problem. It's just not listed in actual psych profiles.
And while I will condemn someone acting out the crimes, condemning someone for consuming / producing a piece of media is going to feel like an adversarial attack on them (which fuels in-group bias, meeting up with like-minded people, distancing, and conspiracy theories), and it ultimately just deprives them of pleasure, without any real gain (and that is in the best case).
If someone does feel it is making them really likely to do something that they shouldn't, I would strongly advise that they don't read it, and I don't feel that a level-headed individual would just run all the way to doing a crime.
As for those reviews, I would have to know what they actually say. But, people say all sorts of things when they're "horny". And critics will critic.
That is, arguably, the system working. Unfortunately, when things go to court, the system working often involves people getting hurt.
The other case is also going up for appeal, from what I've read, although I don't know how the higher court will respond to it.
Vouch gets rids of it if other people find it unnecessary.
This does not allow you to do whatever you want.
In germany for example it is written like this: "These rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons, and in the right to personal honour."
And its not different in the USA, you have limitations as well as the general good is more important than your personal.
"The world is all too fond of sexuality, and especially with controversial sexuality." And what distrubs me the most on your comment: Just because their are pedophiles, doesn't make pedophiles okay. Yes i used here the extrem form of 'controversial sexuality' but to be clear: you should know your boundaries in comparison to the normal society. Just because you are part of that sub group of people, in my circles 'controversial sexuality' is not typical at all.
You have a responsibility and just because you can and some other are having the same moral compass as you have, doesn't make your niche okay on a moral/society point of view.
And it could be that your 'controversial sexuality' is actually okay but how you express yourself, it feels already that you crossed a line i wouldn't.
You seem to imply that controversial written erotica shouldn’t be covered by freedom of speech protections, as it would be in the name of protecting children. Do you think censoring it would reduce the incidence of child abuse? If so, would banning videogames like GTA reduce the incidence of shootings or traffic rule violations?
> in my circles 'controversial sexuality' is not typical at all
It seems like the author of the comment you’re replying to might be in a unique position to gauge what controversial sexuality might be of interest to your circles even if yourself aren’t privy to it due to its controversial nature.
Fictional stories and images on the internet have no relationship with reality. There are no victims, there is no one harmed. You don't have to like the content, that is fine, but there is no good argument about bad morals or government intervention unless you're proving actual harm.
It's an unpleasant form of collective punishment. And it means that all of them have to suffer for something which has nothing to do with them.
How Would the Publishing World Respond to Lolita Today?
"Thank Heaven For Little Girls: [2]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/theater/vanessa-hudgens-i...
If they make a cent from users who visit but then leave when they see this giant form, they should be fined into a smoking hole the ground.
What's particularly funny about this form is that the "legitimate interests" they claim, meaning they don't require consent, can be disabled.
Luckily uBlock Origin blocks the stupid form along with 44 other elements.
Why this comment? If you don't know, please check out the fantastic Conversations with Tyler podcast. And if you are looking for a very diverse, entertaining and informative podcast, try it.
Also the "Complete Review". Wow what a website! Proper 90s feel and still delivering value. If you think Lolita is one of the best books to read, you are probably having a similar taste and the reviews might work for you.
[1] https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/nabokovv/lolita1.htm [2] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/