![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
John Ray expounds a bit more on the issue of separating the art from the man, the pedophile from the author of “Loliita”. However, it may be worthwhile to pause for a clarifying observation that may seem obvious but which some readers could be confused about. Namely, a pedophile is not the actual author of “Lolita”.
As I recall an interview with one of Nabokov’s students about the great man, it was said that he may have liked young girls but he did not have a sexual interest in little girls - meaning, I guess, that he fancied college coeds, young women of maybe eighteen or nineteen or early twenties, but certainly not girls of nine or twelve years old. Nabokov’s personal life was exemplary, I take it, and it is the lurid subject of this novel that raised some delicate questions about the man, that made people wonder. In other words, in real life (as opposed to the fictional world between the covers of “Lolita”), it was unsavory art that cast some dark shadows on the man, rather than a reprehensible man that should be discounted in appreciation for the exalted piece of art that supposedly came from him, our Humbert Humbert.
It is perhaps a sad statement on human nature that it took a work about having sex with little girls to get a genius recognized and rewarded, our Vladimir Nabokov. This is the work of his that most of us love the most, and very few of us are truly interested in his lepidoptera. So, maybe we can at least be spared some self-righteous judgmentalism. We may not be proud of it, but we sometimes like it a little dirty. It can be a little exciting to get provoked, to wander down the dark, twisted alleyways of the soul. Let’s just enjoy this! No one was hurt in the writing and reading of “Lolita”.
_ _ _
This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that “offensive” is frequently but a synonym for “unusual”; and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise. I have no intention to glorify “H.H.” No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author!
-- “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov
As I recall an interview with one of Nabokov’s students about the great man, it was said that he may have liked young girls but he did not have a sexual interest in little girls - meaning, I guess, that he fancied college coeds, young women of maybe eighteen or nineteen or early twenties, but certainly not girls of nine or twelve years old. Nabokov’s personal life was exemplary, I take it, and it is the lurid subject of this novel that raised some delicate questions about the man, that made people wonder. In other words, in real life (as opposed to the fictional world between the covers of “Lolita”), it was unsavory art that cast some dark shadows on the man, rather than a reprehensible man that should be discounted in appreciation for the exalted piece of art that supposedly came from him, our Humbert Humbert.
It is perhaps a sad statement on human nature that it took a work about having sex with little girls to get a genius recognized and rewarded, our Vladimir Nabokov. This is the work of his that most of us love the most, and very few of us are truly interested in his lepidoptera. So, maybe we can at least be spared some self-righteous judgmentalism. We may not be proud of it, but we sometimes like it a little dirty. It can be a little exciting to get provoked, to wander down the dark, twisted alleyways of the soul. Let’s just enjoy this! No one was hurt in the writing and reading of “Lolita”.
_ _ _
This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that “offensive” is frequently but a synonym for “unusual”; and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise. I have no intention to glorify “H.H.” No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author!
-- “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov
