Re: Catching up with 'Lolita' — 50 years later

[Mark Kohut]

Lotsa wrongness in this "review".

VN wrote Lolita on index cards........

That Lolita was a 'wilfull temptation' is just wilfully distortive and almost evil. She is 12 years old!!

--- On Mon, 8/11/08, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
> Subject: Catching up with 'Lolita' — 50 years later
> To: "P-list" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Monday, August 11, 2008, 9:32 AM
> Catching up with 'Lolita' — 50 years later
> By Colette Bancroft, Times Book Editor
> Sunday, August 10, 2008
> 
> 
> If Dolores Haze and Humbert Humbert were alive today, she
> would be 73,
> he 98, and that 25-year age difference wouldn't mean a
> thing. ¶ But 50
> years ago this month, when Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita
> was first
> published in the United States, its tale of a 37-year-old
> man obsessed
> with a 12-year-old girl was such a scandal that its title
> character's
> name entered the language as shorthand for a seductive
> teenager. ¶
> Poor Lo. Always misrepresented. ¶ Nabokov's Lolita is
> nothing like the
> bottle-blond, lollipop-licking sex kitten played by Sue
> Lyon in the
> 1962 film directed by Stanley Kubrick (who, as was his
> habit, based
> his movie on the novel in only the very loosest sense). Nor
> does she
> bear much resemblance to the show-biz pop tarts and
> tramp-stamped bad
> girls often compared to her today. ¶ The Lolita of the
> novel is a
> 12-year-old with unwashed auburn hair and grubby jeans, so
> uninterested in being seductive with Humbert that she picks
> her nose
> while sitting in his lap. ¶ Humbert doesn't desire
> Lolita because
> she's a highly sexualized teenager but because
> she's a child. He is,
> as he tells the reader plainly if in high-flown language, a
> pedophile.
> He wants her not because she's a little hottie but
> because he believes
> she's an innocent.
> 
> The lascivious Lolita
> 
> Yet today the name Lolita evokes for most people a girl who
> knows
> she's sexy and uses it. Half a century of such
> misperceptions about
> Lolita and the novel that bears her name have inspired a
> new book,
> Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov's
> Little Girl
> All Over Again, by Graham Vickers.
> 
> Vickers, who has written books about architecture and a
> biography of
> another mid-20th century icon, Neal Cassady, surveys
> Lolita's many
> offspring: films (Kubrick's and a 1997 version by
> Adrian Lyne), plays
> (a musical by Alan Jay Lerner and John Barry, a drama by
> — no kidding
> — Edward Albee), operas, novels, comics, paintings, even
> a bizarre
> Japanese fashion cult called Lolita Gothic.
> 
> Vickers also looks at the book itself. Often decried as
> pornography,
> usually by people who haven't read it, Lolita contains
> not one
> explicit sex scene — not even an obscene word. Its
> subject matter is
> certainly sexual, but it's sex veiled by the most
> elegant language.
> 
> Although banned for a time in England and France, Lolita
> was published
> in the United States by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 1958
> without legal
> problems and became an immediate bestseller, garnering
> glowing
> reviews, selling 100,000 copies in the first three weeks
> and giving
> Nabokov his first and biggest commercial success after
> decades of
> writing fiction.
> 
> Vickers brings together many fascinating facts about
> Lolita's lasting
> influence, but he doesn't finally answer two questions:
> Why did the
> title character undergo such a dramatic change in the
> public's
> perception? And why, in the supposedly uptight and
> family-friendly
> 1950s, did the flamboyant tale of Humbert's seduction
> and exploitation
> of his subteen stepdaughter become a cultural phenomenon?
> 
> And the moral — isn't
> 
> Certainly it must have seemed an unlikely subject for
> Nabokov. The
> aristocratic, multilingual Russian expatriate was a
> legendary
> professor of literature at Cornell and an erudite devotee
> of chess and
> lepidoptery, the study of butterflies and moths.
> 
> Nabokov's theories of literature were controversial
> even before Lolita
> was published. He rejected the idea that novels ought to
> teach moral
> lessons; he considered ridiculous the notion that readers
> must
> empathize and identify with its characters for a novel to
> succeed.
> 
> To him, structure and language — the art of the novel —
> were far more
> important. His fiction, which also includes Ada, Pale Fire,
> Bend
> Sinister and Invitation to a Beheading, is marked by highly
> complex,
> experimental plot structures, a brilliantly polished prose
> style and
> intricate wordplay.
> 
> Lolita is his masterwork and most influential novel,
> shaping the work
> of generations of fiction writers, from John Updike and
> Thomas Pynchon
> to Michael Chabon and Zadie Smith. But Nabokov himself had
> doubts
> about it; his wife, Vera, snatched the manuscript from the
> flames
> after he tossed it into a backyard incinerator.
> 
> Nabokov knew its subject matter was incendiary, but he saw
> the book as
> a parody of romantic and confessional novels (Humbert tells
> us he's
> writing it from his jail cell). The author called it his
> most
> difficult book; it was an exercise in both his mastery of
> English and
> his ability, he said in a 1962 interview, to convincingly
> create a
> story "which was so distant, so remote, from my own
> emotional life
> that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational
> talent to
> make it real."
> 
> The seduction of art
> 
> He did indeed. Humbert is one of the most dazzling examples
> of the
> unreliable narrator in all of literature. The novel comes
> to us
> entirely in his voice, which is cultured, witty, playful,
> observant
> and quite mad — he mentions offhandedly his many stays in
> various
> mental asylums.
> 
> Humbert doesn't just seduce and carry away Lolita; he
> does it to the
> reader as well. He is such an accomplished storyteller that
> his
> obsession begins to sound plausible; outrageous as it
> seems, he even
> makes himself sound like a victim.
> 
> The novel begins in 1947, when America teetered on the
> brink of
> becoming the youth-obsessed culture it is today. The term
> "teenager"
> had been coined just three years earlier, and the baby
> boom, which
> began in 1946, was in its infancy.
> 
> The first tremors of that youthquake didn't escape
> Nabokov's notice.
> Although he claimed to disdain literary symbols, it's
> hard not to see
> Paris-born, scholarly Humbert as the old world and Lolita
> — born in
> the Midwest and raised on movie magazines, pop music and
> junk food —
> as the new. And the novel's meandering, yearlong,
> 27,000-mile car trip
> all over the United States is certainly Nabokov's paean
> to the
> undeniable (if sometimes vulgar) energy of his beloved
> adopted home.
> 
> It's also Humbert's report of his abduction of
> Lolita, whom he keeps
> under control, and in his bed, by alternately showering her
> with
> treats and threatening to send her to foster care or reform
> school.
> 
> More sinned against?
> 
> That phase of their relationship — what happens after the
> ideal that
> Humbert is obsessed with becomes real — is analyzed at
> length in
> another bestseller engendered by Nabokov's novel, Azar
> Nafisi's
> Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, published in
> 2003.
> 
> Nafisi, an Iranian professor of literature who now teaches
> at Johns
> Hopkins University, writes about a private class she taught
> in her
> home in Tehran. Her students, all women, find freedom
> there, not just
> to remove the veils they must wear in public but to speak
> openly about
> books and about their lives.
> 
> The relationship between Lolita and Humbert does not shock
> Nafisi and
> her students as it does American readers. In Iran, she
> writes, the age
> of consent for girls is 9, and marriages between girls
> Lolita's age
> and men two, three or more decades older are legal and not
> uncommon.
> 
> That does not mean Nafisi's class approves of Humbert;
> indeed, they
> abhor him as a tyrant who selfishly robs the girl of her
> identity — a
> plight they can identify with.
> 
> "The desperate truth of Lolita's story,"
> Nafisi writes, "is not the
> rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the
> confiscation of
> one individual's life by another. We don't know
> what Lolita would have
> become if Humbert had not engulfed her. Yet the novel, the
> finished
> work, is hopeful, beautiful even, a defense not just of
> beauty but of
> life, ordinary everyday life, all the normal pleasures that
> Lolita . .
> . was deprived of."
> 
> Perhaps, in an American culture that equates beauty and
> desirability
> with youth, it's inevitable that Lolita the little girl
> was
> transformed into Lolita the siren. Perhaps we have to see
> her that way
> because it's too heartbreaking to see her as she really
> was. Or
> perhaps Humbert, that elegant monster, has persuaded us to
> see her as
> he did, as a willful temptation responsible for her own
> fate. Victim
> or vixen, she haunts us still.
> 
> http://www.tampabay.com/features/books/article759975.ece