Is Lolita Porn?

[JBI]

Honestly, he explicitly talks about her reaching out to touch his "scepter of passion," and he reaching out to fondle her under her night-dress. Is that not sexual? What is it then - mere curiosity? Who is to say they aren't pubescent? Who isn't to say that had her mom not gone calling for her, Humbert would have had his desire, and the episode would have passed on, as any other early-teenage fling.

That's where the book bends - the almost consummated relationship. As he says in the opening paragraphs, he has a knack for creating an imprint of a person in the back of his mind - a perfect picture. It isn't until the end of the book, that he can shake that notion, and that is what brings about the plot. It is the idea that his concept of perfection in a woman is shaped by his focus on Annabel as the ultimate object of his love.

He of course, breaks this, as he says he did in the opening chapters, by transferring the image over to Lolita, and then destroying her. That knocks out his pedophilia, and allows him in the end to propose to Lolita that they run away together, even though she has, as he described, become her mother - no longer the 13 year old girl.

[kelby_lake]

I loved the end

[blazeofglory]

I repeat time and again it is a matter of value and nothing else. When I read the story to others or to my senior ones I come across many instances that will shame me.

Ugliness is covered and the seeming beauty is what we can see. I do not want to be ethical in point of fact. For in my part of the world such books can not be recommended by seniors to juniors. A father in my part of the world does not recommend this book or such books to his daughters and sons even if he may appreciate its magniloquence, enhanced literary style and philosophical factors.
If it can be recommended to youngsters in your part of the world I will stop arguing for values are relative to time and locale. Like what were tabooed in the Victorian era is deemed normal today and what we call perverted or vulgar in one part of the world may sound day to day matters that does not require censorship at all.

I have argued from this lens, and if you use a different lens to look through at it I may not debate or counter-argue for that matter and I may end up concluding that value changes with respect to time and space.

[Petronius]

Values are based on sedimented knowledge, discovery, and culture. If they differ, it is because different peoples were marked by different experiences, of which even Lolita (like every other great book) is one.

I value cultural diversity, but I don't think such things as local morals are supposed to be unquestionable. To the question "why is erotism ugly and shameful?", "because my peers deem it so" is not a valid answer.
The grandiloquent mask around the events in Lolita is not meant to mask a crime, to fool the juries or to mock. It is an ediffice of Humbert's love for Lolita, a work of eternal rememberance dedicated to the percieved beauty of their lives together, which stands at the core of art.
The world was always a wretched place, where claimed virtue is born from idiocy or even more poignant flaws. Why not be appalled by the art of the Renaissance, grandoise vanity in an age of plague, or the Victorian snobism, so much education, so many words and ultimately such a childish understanding of the world. How about the modern cultures? How worthy are we to pave the way for future generations. Oh, it's always easy to avoid conflicts by stifling whatever we think may lead to them. But what will we know when they finally catch up?

Lolita's beauty does not stand solely in the choice of words, but in the deep understanding and the minute reconstruction of humanity - not just the mind, or soul, or bodily character, as Man so often and so childishly gets divided, but in its entirety. The words themselves do not hide but evoke, and I believe Nabokov's choice to avoid explicitness wasn't born of revulsion or prudeness, but from the necessity to separate the phenomenon from deep-rooted preconceptions and put it under a clean lens.
The book itself is elegantly free of moral conclusions, and on the whole so too should be the reader. If some deem it one way or the other, it is their duty to provide the why.

I did approach the book from the erotic theme perspective in order to discuss your point. Perhaps you too should ponder again if the take on Lolita dictated by your culture is of any constructive merit. As far as seniors go, on the large scale they're just as clueless as the young. If they think enjoying and learning something from Lolita is shameful, it's them who need a cold shower.

[PeterL]

They didn't, but there were plenty of things to stop them other than just physical incapacity, of which I didn't notice any signs. Please quote the passage/ explain why you would think so.
They weren't prepubescent (since they experience sexual emotions), merely preadolescent.

I got the impression the Humbert was prepubescent at that time.

[JBI]

I got the impression the Humbert was prepubescent at that time.

I think that is perhaps a misreading, I urge again for you to look at the whole Scepter of Passion bit - he seems pubescent.

[SleepyWitch]

Even embryos in their mother's womb can have an orgasm and little toddlers can have erections. although the production of semen only starts with puberty, boys can have erections much earlier. Kindergarten-age children of both sexes masturbate.
So it's irrelevant whether Annabel and Humbert were pre-pubescent, pre-adolescent or whatnot. Children are not 'innocent' little angels or incapable of erotic attraction.

[kelby_lake]

True, true.

[blazeofglory]

In fact I am un-tired to indulge in argument and open a discussion. I untiringly and doggedly persevere with my ideas for I have read this book, Lolita when I had little knowledge of what literature was. When I read for the first time with no fixed mindset, I am afraid, as everyone critiquing my point has. The fixation that the book is stylistically grand. Maybe it is majestic and superb from a philosophical lens, maybe thru a critical approach the writer is rhetorically unexcelled and for its idiomatic quotients it is matchless and you can crown the book with all kinds of candor and candidness. Maybe that is what modern readers want a concoction of sex and philosophy and brew of newness and perversion.

Not caring about all these spices and if you are a child and read the book innocently with the values you have been hardwired into by your elders you will needless to say come across a plethora of obscene and perverse.

All of you critiquing this idea have already passed thru stages of pubescence and you know what sex is and do not give it a damn but the world is not full of the you-type of people and the values you live with and there are Asiatic values and all are not westernized. In Nepal this is utterly a book of perversion and no decent elders recommend it to youngsters and still if you argue to prove your point for the contrary you have biases.

I am apologetic and the outright argument must be limited to discussion and not to be stretched to a personal level.

[SleepyWitch]

blaze, I totally agree with you that pedophilia is a perversion and I'm sure most people in here agree.
But that does not make Lolita a badly-written book. Nor does the book's dealing with perversions or obscenities mean that it encourages perversion.
The question of values is neither here nor there. A novel is not a self-help guide or religious scripture or a code of laws (even though many authors to take a didactic approach). Just because a book contains obscenities and perversities does not mean that you have to identify with them, let alone imitate them in your own life.
I think Lolita is literature (vs. porn) precisely because it plays with readers' habit to identify with the main character. Getting drawn into the book, like you do with books that you read 'only' for pleasure would make you identify with Humbert. So that shows how easy it is to give up our moral standards and get taken in by the pervert just because he uses flowery language and styles himself as an artist. On the other hand, you can read (or try to read) the book from a more detached point of view, so you will not identify with Humbert but the interplay of different perspectives will still be there. Even when you read it in this way, some readers may feel sympathy for Humbert as a child, or they may pity him because he cannot control his urges or because he deceives himself while at the same time condemning his pedophile acts.
I think what's interesting about Lolita is its ambiguity and that's something that no amount of porn can offer. Porn reads like: "There was this hunky,
6 '3" stud and this racy red-head DD-cup goddess of lust..... He thrust his throbbing red-hot cruise missile into her insatiable furnace ...... (then he produces so much semen that an elephant would be envious and the stuff flies all over the room and of course the woman screams endlessly and has at least 3 orgasms. they do this 75 times in a row. The end.)".
Ok, I'll admit I have no idea whether porn reads like this, never having read any myself.

[mona amon]

Not caring about all these spices and if you are a child and read the book innocently with the values you have been hardwired into by your elders you will needless to say come across a plethora of obscene and perverse.

All of you critiquing this idea have already passed thru stages of pubescence and you know what sex is and do not give it a damn but the world is not full of the you-type of people and the values you live with and there are Asiatic values and all are not westernized. In Nepal this is utterly a book of perversion and no decent elders recommend it to youngsters and still if you argue to prove your point for the contrary you have biases.

I am apologetic and the outright argument must be limited to discussion and not to be stretched to a personal level.

I was about thirteen when I read Lolita for the first time, ie. about Dolores' age, I'm Asian, and the book was lent to me by an elder- my english teacher. I mean she didn't actually put it into my hands, but she used to allow us to borrow books from her house, and she made no objection when I selected this. She knew that just reading about criminal acts wasn't going to make a youngster bad, and she obviously thought it was a good book because she had it in her bookshelf.

Although I probably missed about 9/10ths of it, I loved the book, which I thought was very witty and funny. I'm afraid the fact that Humbert was molesting Dolores bothered me not at all. I was about her age and didn't consider myself a child. I was a lot more horrified by that aspect of it when I re-read it many years later.

Anyway, I think we cannot classify a book as porn merely because we are shocked by it. We'll have to take the official definition of porn (not sure what it is) and see if the book fits that definition.

[blazeofglory]

I hold with your idea and of course there are elements of truth in what you said that merely because we are shocked by a book we can not classify it as porn. However I have my reservation that a book can have degrees of porn and some are ninety percent porn and others are less than that may be thirty or ten percent in point of fact. To settle on whether or no a book is porn is rooted in the personal idea of the reader and the critics and his or her upbringings. I said time and again that all that depends on the socio-cultural settings you have grown up on. I was born in a different traditionally knot social setting and we never could openly discuss sex.

Lolita is by all standards in our part of the world has dialogues, accounts that have obscenity and erotica and definitely the writer through decorous idioms eclipse the central theme. There is perversity and the writer has perfectly phrased the book masking the theme.

We have classical discussions over the matter and most take a liking and few disliking to it out of affectations. But I try distance myself from affectation and pretentiousness that this book has definitely some elements of perverseness that can put the innocent to shame if not most of us who are the experienced.

Sex and romance rubber-stamps beauty more often than not and by that notion this book has got more literary acclamation and approbation in point of fact, but go the very bottom of it unaffectedly and neutrally you will come upon plenty of instances that speak of it self.

Do not back up the book with your notions and there are plenty of instances to endorse its obscenity.

[Petronius]

Which brings us to what originally concerned me about your post, and what I've been repeating throughout my interventions.
I agree we can call Lolita porn, by the standards of chaster cultures, by the investment in sexual themes and by the potential arousal the raw plot can bring to impressionable readers. So, given that it's porn, what is the problem and how does this make of it a lesser work of art (or a lesser intellectual read for the matter)? Are other themes free of negative sides, with only the erotic/psychological ones being flawed? Are the "morally safe" tomes the only ones of value, although their worldview is more often than not imature?

Wether Lolita arouses its readers simply does not concern me. It is not really a book for children, simply because they would have a hard time understanding most of it (though it would be interesting to see how they react to it). And if I have reasons to belive it may have a negative effect on a young reader, I will not recommend it.
I can see your point if it is pre-highschool compulsory literature in your country... not just because it's sexual, but because it's claimed to not be, and so a very important theme will not be proprely adressed, yet still allowed to ramble aimlessly among the unexperienced readers. Moreover, quality books should be discovered, not imposed.

Other than that, books can be loved/loathed for whatever reasons, subjective more than all, and if a culture imposes a certain reaction, that reaction defines the culture, not the book - and that's not, by all means, meant to say anything bad about Asian values. I myself simply prefer carnal art (by which I mean "living" art, not necessarily or even particularly sexual) over spiritual art (or should-bes' art), which I have come to consider infatuated, tiresome, and inefably subordinated to the former... if that makes any sense at all, let alone the intended one. Given my choices, and although carnality is ultimately inclined towards universal objectivity, I can see no angle from which Lolita, porn or no porn, can justifiably and in itself be reprehensible.

[blazeofglory]

I agree considerably and of course it has other themes that are intellectually appealing as there are sexually. Of course books of porn too have ideas that can have quotients of intellectuality. I do not speak whether or not this book good or bad. All I am trying to put forth is a acceptance that the book is porn. More than this I have to say nothing else.

[Etienne]

I agree considerably and of course it has other themes that are intellectually appealing as there are sexually. Of course books of porn too have ideas that can have quotients of intellectuality. I do not speak whether or not this book good or bad. All I am trying to put forth is a acceptance that the book is porn. More than this I have to say nothing else.

You have yet to provide a single sequence that you consider should be called porn.