Ha! I just grabbed it from my bookshelf, and I really do have two bookmarks sitting in it!
Yup, that’s how I read it, too
Not untrue, but there’s also a strand of “I’ll write about whatever I damned well please because I am an artist, artists are free and no one can dictate to an artist that his art should serve a purpose or do anything else in particular” in Nabokov. Freedom v. totalitarianism is the core of Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister and a couple of others.
The Nabokov version of the screen play is published–it reads like like a cross between Dr. Strangelove (which should have made Kubrick love it) and a parody of Lolita, with Dr. Scott from Rocky Horror playing the shrink. Very surreal.
Yeah, I vaguely recall some quote from Nabokov to the effect that he thought there were three novel plots that could never get published in midcentury America: (1) a story about a loving marriage between an interracial couple with lots of happy children, (2) a story about an atheist who leads a happy and productive life and at an advanced age dies peacefully in his sleep, and (3) the plot of Lolita. There’s definitely something abhorrent to him in the notion that the choice of subject matter should make a book unpublishable.
Charles Bronson and Susan George’s version is very good.
It’s one of the few times that Bronson played a non-violent character.
I love the book, hate the Kubrick film, and resent that a ‘Lolita’ will forever be remembered as a sexually provacative if very young woman who is aware of her attractiveness and deliberately seeks to tempt men. It seems so sick that this idea is prevalent when the real Lolita is an innocent barely-sexual childish tomboy who is groomed, raped, and held prisoner by a pedophile (who doesn’t even love her for who she is!).
I had not an ounce of sympathy for Humbert and his desires - he’s a lunatic child abuser who destroys the innocence of a child and in the end, her entire life.
This doesn’t look like it has anything to do with the Nabakov novel.
It’s a similar idea. Middle aged guy falling in love with a 16 year old. I’ve always thought of these types of movies as Lolita movies.
Frankly, I don’t have a problem with grown men falling in love with 16-year-old girls. The problem occurrs if he acts on it, but evolutionarily it’s been a very common mating practice as the girl has been sexually mature and capable of bearing children for several years by that point. Marriage at the age of sixteen or seventeen was not all that uncomman even during my mother’s youth and as late as the fifties Jerry Lee Lewis was famously able to legally marry his cousin when she was 14.
So yeah, it may be a bad thing from the standpoint of our relatively recent concern for the psychological and emotional welfare of a female who is still emotionally immature, but I don’t think that simply being attracted to girls in that age range warrants the view that the man in question is a pedophile or pervert of some sort.
And attraction to pubescent members of the opposite sex (technically known as ephebophilia) is far from limited to males. Just today another relatively hot 33-year-old female schoolteacher was arrested for having sex with a 14-year-old male student. Link
You guys know she wasn’t sixteen, but twelve, right?
And he goes out of his way to say that she’s undeveloped. He describes her chest as being flat, for example, and has no attraction to developed, adult or matured women. It’s not like he’s into some girl who just looks older. He likes children.
Yeah, I was responding to aceplace57’s remarks about the Bronson movie.
Yeah, that’s where the comparison with the Bronson movie just fails for me. It’s not an infatuation with a sexually developed young woman–it’s an infatuation with a child just on the cusp/onset of puberty. Whole different dynamic.
Ok. It’s just that the whole, “It’s natural to be attracted to developed young teens” discussion is really out of place here. And creepily so since a lot of people are under the impression that a Lolita-type is a sexually precocious girl who seduces men who just can’t help themselves. It’s just creepy that many people’s introduction to the term is this very concept–the sexually aware young vixen. But that image that many people initially associate with Lolita is just a pervert’s dream.
Well, I can tell you that there was a 13-year-old girl dancing at the birthday party of one of my neices who had moves that most strippers would envy. My sister and I sat there watching, wondering how many times she’d be pregnant by the time she reached 18.
The fact of the matter is that there are occasionally children who are sexually precocious at that age. That doesn’t make it right to become sexually involved with them, but in the interest of fighting ignorance and all I think it’s important not to kid ourselves that kids that age are all sexual innocents. I don’t post much about sex around here because some of my relatives read the Dope, but I first tried (unsuccessfully) to do the deed when I was nine (as did my father before me, it turns out, only to be caught in the nick of time by his mother), and by the time I finally did at sixteen I was thinking I was never gonna get laid.
Children who are “sexually precocious” at that age become so because they are sexually abused. Explorations with other children do not count. The awareness and sophistication of adults is not there. Neither is the exploitation. Do not project adult sexual mentalities onto children. Their brains are not physiologically capable of adult comprehension of sex. What may appear to be sexual sophistication on the part of young adolescent or pre-adolescent children is either imitative or defensive or both. Their brains are literally not physically developed to an adult level yet, and any perception of adult sophistication is projection and illusion. They are still children, and yes, they are all innocent, without exception.
Well, I can tell you I wasn’t sexually abused and what I did wasn’t “exploration”; it was a clumsy but nevertheless full on attempt at intercourse. But having said that, you are moving the goalposts. I never said they had an adult comprehension of sex, merely that they can indeed have interest in sex, and, as in the case of the kid dancing at my neice’s party, an interest in being sexually provocative. They certainly don’t necessarily comprehend the complexity of emotion that goes with it, nor fully appreciate the possible consequences of it in terms of disease and pregnancy or upon their own future behavior, but it’s naive to think that kids that age have no interest in nor comprehension of sex itself.
But this whole conversation about sexually precocious kids just seems irrelevant. Lolita in the book wasn’t some sexually advanced child. Yes, she’d had sex when she went to the summer camp, but that wasn’t with an adult. Plus, we’re only seeing that from Hum’s POV–how do we know that her first time was all that consensual? He thinks she’s some debauched vixen, but she may have been coerced there as well.
She also does seem interested in Humbert, but so many young girls DO play around with flirtation without really knowing what it means. A normal adult doesn’t react or read anything into it–a pedophile like Humbert thinks it means she’s coming onto him. That she views this as a “relationship.” She may have had a crush but she was miles away from where he was.
Kids have ideas about sex and experimentation and so on but that’s not what this book is about. It’s not about some 12 year old with “stripper moves.” It’s about a young girl who’s repeatedly raped and abused by her stepfather.
Welll, the conversation is bouncing around. There has been a strong undercurrent to the thread that kids that age know nothing about nor have any interest in sex so they can’t be acting in a provocative manner, and I was seeking to rebut that based on my own experience and my own observation.
I understand you want to keep the focus on Lolita as a twelve-year-old girl, but there have been other comments to the thread regarding pubescent girls in the main that have largely passed unchallenged and which I thought needed to be addressed, as I said, in the interest of keeping things on an even keel and fighting ignorance.
ETA: Having said that and making my point, I’ll try to limit any further comments to the subject of Lolita and/or Nobokov and the novel itself.
Sorry, I meant to address this too. Humbert isn’t a pedophile. As someone sexually attracted to pubescent girls he’s a hebephile. This is a distinction without a difference in many people’s mind, no doubt, but I’m sort of a strict constrictionist when it comes to these sorts of things. (I intensely dislike the terms “homophobe” for example, because the people it’s used to refer to generally aren’t phobic.)
According to this article in Wiki, hebephiles outnumber pedophiles, and interestingly enough, according to the Canadian study referred to in the article, hebephiles score directly midway between pedophiles and teleiophiles (people, even young people, with a preference for adults) in I.Q. and memory test scores and school grade failures, whereas pedophiles score lowest on the first two measures and highest on the last. Hebephiles also score midway between pedophiles and teleiophiles in rates of non-right-handedness, physical height and rates of childhood head injuries. So it looks like hebephiles in very many ways have become physiologically stunted almost exactly halfway between attraction to children and attraction to adults.
And now I’ll bow out except for possible future comments on Lolita. I just think it’s good to keep the terms accurate. This country is in something of a pedophile hysteria these days and while it’s understandable that people (myself very much included) want to protect children all they can, it’s still unfair and inaccurate to label people as pedophiles when they are not in point of fact sexually attracted to prepubescent children. It’s also important in my mind to keep in mind the fact that pedophiles and hebephiles and ephebophiles (generally those sexually attracted to 15-to-19-year-olds) all come by their predilictions genetically - i.e., they can’t help it. So I find myself thinking that though they should most certainly control themselves and be punished or locked away if they don’t, I think it’s wrong to revile them and demonize them as evil.
Plus I’m getting tired of getting the evil-eye every time some little kid smiles at me and I smile back. I love little kids and have ever since my daughter was born and opened my eyes to how delightful they are, but woe betide any grown man these days who even allows his eyes to even land on a child, much less smile at one no matter how benign the circumstances. I can be standing in line at the grocery store these days with some little kid in the cart ahead of me and I find myself hoping he or she doesn’t notice me - or even worse smile at me - because then I have to risk ignoring the poor kid and making him or her feel bad, or smile back and get looked at like a pervert by anyone who notices, especially the parents. It’s ridiculous.
I mean they all come by their predilections seriously…:smack:
Why don’t I ever spot these things on preview?