Lolita

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Nabokov almost collaborated on the screenplay. Kubrick hired him, and he wrote a screenplay, but that wasn't what was used. If you look around, you should be able to find a copy of his screenplay with notes. There was one scene in the movie that had some relationship with Nabokov's screenplay, but I con't remember which one

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Really? I always thought Nabokov helped write the screenplay, guess I am wrong.

[QUOTE][Oh, Humbert was a manipulator and a nasty man, but he wasn't a very good manipulator, whereas Lolita was much better at it/QUOTE]

Not too sure about Humbert not being a good manipulator-he is, after all, the narrator of the story, he tells us what he wants us to hear and in a way (somewhat brilliantly) manipulates the readers. He also manipulates his wife into thinking he loves her and many of his neighbours and colleagues into thinking he was a normal, healthy stepfather-to say that Lolita is somehow more manipulative than Lolita simply because she does her best to (rightfully) get away from his tyranny is a rather weak argument given that Humbert himself manipulates a lot of the characters in the novel-notice that the one character who is unable to manipulate is his 'fellow pervert', Quilty.

Nabokov better developed the concept of 'unreliable narrators in the form of Kinbote in Pale Fire, another (possible) sociopath who fits the story and the actions of other people into the narrow prism of his own imagination. Yes, Humbert had his "good points", he was not a complete monster after all, and yes Lolita could be manipulative too, everybody is and can be manipulative to an extent, and everybody sees only what they want to see-like in In Search of Lost Time, when the narrator complains that one of the characters, Bloch, only views the actions of others in relation to himself, that Bloch thought that if a friend didn't send a letter to him for a week then it was because that friend disliked Bloch, rather than because the said friend was sick or busy. Humbert is kind of like a more neurotic, obsequious and perverse Bloch. We rarely see the more positive sides of the characters who Humbert despises (namely most of the characters in the novel)-they are all idiots or frauds.

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There are a lot of unwanted children and a lot of orphaned children as well, however, most of them aren't manipulators, most don't end up loving a pedophile, and most turn out okay. No child really has "freedom." All children under the age of eighteen have some lack of freedom

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Really? Lolita "loved" Humbert? Did she? Yes, she flirted with him, even prior to her mother’s death, but love is too strong a word for what Lolita may or may not have felt for Humbert-as I have already mentioned Humbert is a highly unreliable narrator, he only sees what he wants to see and so he is able to con himself into believing that Lolita is somehow in love with him, thus alleviating his guilt. He doesn't really talk about Lolita's desire to be a normal teenager with a normal boyfriend (he derides teenage boys as being all "muscles and gonnera(sp?)" and fails to dwell upon Lolita’s sobbing in the night-even when he does he tends to dismiss it. It is kind of like his 'trick' of using the actions of other men (Poe, Dante) to justify his actions-hey Dante loved a 12 year old, so why the hell can't I? In a sense he is right, societal norms and vales are entirely arbitrary, but it is a sign of severe moral immaturity and apathy to use the actions of others to justify your own.

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In an autocratic society, Lolita wouldn't have been allowed to receive mail from Quilty, which she did, or leave with him, which she did.

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I agree-she could have and should have gone to someone else (i.e. the police), and I was wrong on the 'autocratic' point.

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I don't really judge any character in the book and don't feel Nabokov was doing so, either. He has written that he believed art should be aesthetic only, never moralistic, so I don't feel Lolita is truly a tale of a child molester. Nabokov always said that literature should plunge its reader into "aesthetic bliss." He wasn't concerned with making a moral statement of any kind. I see Lolita as much more about verbal eroticism than physical eroticism.

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Yes, Nabokov favoured the 'aesthetic' reading of the novel to the political (which he found banal) and the moral. But if we were to judge Lolita purely from Nabokov's perspective then we would have little to talk about-apart from the fact that it is a beautifully written novel.

Nabokov, in his literary criticism, also 'criticised' or commented on the 'morals' of the characters. Dostoevskii's heroes are sociopathic 'sinning their way to Jesus', the Samsa family are insects, Chichikov works for the devil etc. In Madame Bovary, Homais was a 'philistine', Emma and Léon are terrible readers-in many ways Nabokov's thoughts are echoes of what Flaubert, who also wrote for aesthetic bliss (until he was corrupted by George Sand), wanted to say about his characters-no novelist, no matter how strongly her or she propagates the idea of 'art for arts sake' wants his characters to be one dimensional and entirely free of moral judgement, and in many ways Nabokov is a reflection of his own aesthetic and to a certain point moral views. He thought that nature was a great deceiver, and that books, or fairy tales (as he called them) were extension of this-they frequently deceive and manipulate readers, and the prevalence of unreliable narrators in Nabokov's novels reflects this-unreliable narrators are choc-a-bloc in Nabokov's novels.

Nabokov's favourite characters in his novels were (I think) Lolita and Cincinnatus C-both characters have certain things in common, for example Cincinnatus's imprisonment is a reflection of Lolita's (perhaps less tangible) imprisonment and our own (partial) imprisonment to Humbert's narration. Cincinnatus is imprisoned for no reason (or for having his own opinion) and is told that he can not dream, that he cannot think sexually about other people, and that is he does, it could be considered as construing rape. Like Cincinnatus, Lolita is subject to the depravities of her jailer(s).

[QUOTE][Whatever one takes from the book, I think Lolita is a brilliant masterpiece./QUOTE]

I agree-it has been nice talking about Lolita with you. :)

Lolita is next on my reading list. I have read Granita, a story by Umberto Eco which depicts a young man who falls in love with old and decrepit grannies! It is in the collection titled Misreadings. Good laugh:

http://everything2.com/title/Misreadings

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Originally Posted by Kafka's Crow

Lolita is next on my reading list. I have read Granita, a story by Umberto Eco which depicts a young man who falls in love with old and decrepit grannies! It is in the collection titled Misreadings. Good laugh:

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One should read Lolita before reading "Granita", because "Granita" was a parody of Lolita.

Humbert was a master manipulator, right from the word go-

Humbert's narcissism is apparent from the start, note for example his hilarious statement that the McCoo's house burned down due to the "the synchronous conflagration that had been raging all night in my veins"-ironic, perhaps, interesting nonetheless. Also note his description of the dog which is nearly run over by the car he is travelling in, the kind of dog that will always be at risk from being run over my cars, in any case he is tempting fate as his conclusion is an oddly prophetic summarisation of his own relationship with Lolita. (And ironic, considering the fact that the car that runs over Dolores tries to avoid a dog and thus hits her.)

He immediately sets upon Dolores-best get the description out of the way as quickly as possible-accusing her of philistine vulgarity, all American pretension and drabness a book-club bourgeoisie if ever there was one. Perhaps he was right, but he fails to notice the fakeness behind his own "old world politeness" how is equally constrained by the image of him as a old world intellectual and how he needs to keep this image up in order to hide his inner, perverse nature. Baudelaire once claimed that the devil's greatest trick was to convince the world he didn't exist and Humbert's trick echoes the devil's deceit.

He deceives Dolores into thinking he is in love with her-that is coldness is a old world idiosyncrasy, rather than being a manipulation of Dolores, supposed instantaneous, attraction to him. When she threatens to send Lolita to boarding school he knows that he cannot beat her into submission like he did to Valeria, twisting the wrist she once broke, he had to manipulate her, and make it out as if it was she who always made the decisions, that Dolores wore the trousers in the house and that Humbert lived in a state of perpetual acquiescence, poor, vulnerable Humbert! He tricks his rather bland next-door-neighbours, Jane and John (even their names are a reflection of bland, dour Americana!) into thinking that he had an affair with Dolores year before and that he was in fact Lolita's real father-not that he lets us see this in a negative light, it was an act of cleverness, rather than a string in the web of Humbert's deceit. But even the subtlest spiders have weak points!

He fails to differentiate the difference between a moth and a butterfly when he picks up Lolita and he convinces her that if she leaves him she will only end up in a cold, loveless home, where she will rot amongst the drudgery. He fails to see how much Lolita desires normality, how she wants a father figure in her life-instead he deceives us with his nebulous neologisms, he sexually manipulates Lolita when she is sick and constantly tricks a wide range of people-priests, psychoanalysts and naive neighbours and teachers-as well as Lolita herself in delaying the news of her mothers death.

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Originally Posted by Antiquarian

Oh, I agree! :) "Granita" was a terrific story, but made all the better if one has read Lolita first. It only makes sense, right? In order to understand the parody, one needs to be familiar with what's being parodied.

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Yes, I think that you are right. Parodies are only really funny when the reader knows the original work. I don't think that "Granita" would even make sense to someone who hadn't read Lolita.

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Originally Posted by PeterL

One should read Lolita before reading "Granita", because "Granita" was a parody of Lolita.

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I read Granita around 9 years ago but was quite familiar with Nabokov's work by that time. It did make sense and will, surely, make more sense when I go back to it after finishing reading Lolita. Started reading the book today and am already blown away by the style of it. Strange but today my sister-in-law told me that my long-time favorite song, Radiohead's 'Creep,' is about pedophilia! Never thought of it that way but then my liking of the song started after watching Yvan Attal's Ils se marièrent et eurent beaucoup d'enfants which featured it and had nothing to do with little girls:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxpblnsJEWM

The victims are the the constituents of the censors who really believed that by censoring the book they'd achieve their objective.

? Not sure what you mean

LOLITA was censored, deemed a menace to public morals, etcetera etcetera. Now if the censors had just shut up...who knows maybe they might've gotten what they really wanted.

I LOVE Lolita! Amazing, incredible, genius work of literary merit. I read the book and then saw the Kubrick movie, and I cried both times at the end...I felt so bad for Humbert. I mean, yes, he was a very sick man, but he was in love and Lolita just used him like that. Nabokov did his job of making me sympathsize with Humbert.

One of my favorite parts in the book was the scene of Humbert in the park and he's twitching from the pleasure of all the little girls around him and this lady comes up to him and says, "Are you all right?" Hahahaha. Oh man. It was an "ew" moment but a very funny one. I love black comedy.

Also I thought it was unfathomable that Nabokov wrote it that well in English when he wasn't even a native speaker. Absolute genius. Such imagery. It totally twisted my mind and made me look at things differently.

Granita by Eco is indeed quite funny, though I prefer his 'editorial criticsms' of Dante, Kafka and Proust in the same book.

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LOLITA was censored, deemed a menace to public morals, etcetera etcetera. Now if the censors had just shut up...who knows maybe they might've gotten what they really wanted

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Nabokov, I believe, was able to get the book first published via a French Erotica publisher, which could also boast of Henry Miller and Jean Genet! I also remember reading about how Graham Greene was one of the first people to recognise Lolita's genius-most people at the time thought that it was a pornographic book and ridiculed Greene when he named is in his lost of the three best books of the year. If it wasn't for Greene, Lolita may not have been recognised as a masterpiece.

Another point on the movie-I can't help but think that James Mason, talented actor that he was, was the wrong person to play Humbert. I think that somebody like Marlon Brando would have been a better choice, or maybe Montgomery Clift, though he may have looked a little bit too 'boyish'. Mason, for me, just didn't have that rugged, European handsomeness which Humbert claims he has.

I agree that Mason was the wrong choice. I don't know whether Humbert is actually good-looking but the other characters seem to think it. Jeromy Irons was aesthetically better, although still wasn't quite there.