It could have been that he never even read it, but just saw the trailer for the Jermy Irons movie or something. I would tend to think that anybody motivated and literate enough to read the entire book would be intelligent enough to understand the subtext. By the ending it’s not even subtext.
I don’t know. When was that trailer shown? I’m only 20. It would have been like two or three years ago that I heard it. Aren’t all the film adaptations a lot older than that?
OK, I’ll admit I’ve only skimmed the book a couple of times and watched the remake once, so my basic knowledge of the story is from several watchings of the Kubrick movie, so bear with me~
Did she ever sleep with Quilty or did he emotionally/mentally seduce her & try to get her to do porn films but not have sex with her himself? I thought she’d lost her virginity to CQ but another discussion, also on SDMB I think, got me to thinking the latter.
Also, in the book, doesn’t Mr. Haze commit suicide upon finding out he has cancer?
You’re probably right. Maybe that’s just what he thinks the book is about based on trailers or hearing other people talk about it.
AClockworkMelon, the movies came out in '62 and '97.
She definitely didn’t lose her virginity to Quilty. She had sex with a boy named Charlie at camp. But I believe she does have an actual affair with Quilty: he follows them on the road. He does try to get her to make porn later.
Not that I remember. I know Jean Farlow dies of cancer a while after Charlotte dies and her husband is distraught, but I don’t remember Charlotte saying what happened to her husband.
Yeah, but it’s not quite clear if that was full-penetration intercourse or something approximating it: Humbert speaks of her not realizing the difference “between a child’s life and mine”, and while that may just be his coy way of talking about comparative penis size, it might be that (whether HH himself realizes it or not) the act itself wasn’t completely familiar to her previously.
I think I remember that after Humbert first has sex with her she complains about the pain and needs to get some “feminine hygiene product” for bleeding, but I’m not sure.
Personally, I liked the Jeremy Irons version better, mainly because it “went after” American kitsch culture; which was also a theme of the book.
That said, I won’t agree that Kubrick was such a cynic that he jettisoned any moral aspect present in the book. I prefer to believe that he respected his audience enough to allow them to draw their own conclusions, as I myself did during the scene when Humbert is pleading with Lolita while she’s in nymph makeup from the school play. “Jesus Christ you loser, just leave her alone already!”
I have no credentials as a movie or literary critic, although, inspired by this thread, I did ask my mom to tell me more about her Catholic high school-mate Joanne McNabb, who was married and then dumped by Hampton Fancher for Sue Lyon. It made me aware that there’s a lot of Humberts & Quiltys out there. But any actual Lolitas? Girls who’ve only just reached puberty and think grown men are big, dumb animals to manipulate? I don’t know and I don’t care.
After reading this thread today, I decided it was time for another re-read. I’m a lot older and know more of the world than I did when I read it last. So off to the library I went. They had several things by Nabokov, but no Lolita. No problem, I thought. I decided to check and see if they had it on audio. Nope. Maybe the movie? Nope. Then I checked the computer. My library does not have a copy of *Lolita *at all, period, end of discussion.
What kind of a library doesn’t have a classic novel like this???
Fortunately, Half Price Books had it, and I bought it, but I’m still shocked that a reasonably sized library does not have Lolita. Censorship!!
My school library that was (well, still is) four floors tall, and has a fiction section of only one row of shelves. (I’m talking the size of a single 4 tiered house bookshelf.) I saw very few people using that library for anything other than the computers.
I’ve read lolita two or three times I think, and never watched any of the movies. I remember that the first time I read it, when I was in my late teens, I only read the first part of the book, so up until she ran away from him if I’m not mistaken. I had then tried to read all that part where he tries to track back who followed them, but I found it a bore and drop it and didn’t finish the book.
There was also a lot of the subtext that went over my head so my general impression of the book had been one of a very young girl for the seduction of whom he elaborates all those scenarios, when she would have been totally open to sex from the start. And then she’s a whiner and a pain in the ass even though she lives a great life. I mean, she even runs away while he thought him in the hospital, without saying goodbye! He had brought her stuff! How crappy it was of her!!!
It’s only on further rereadings, and growing up myself, that I read it in its entirety and that the whole subtext hit me. I was able to appreciate how humbert rationalize his actions, manipulates her, and how much little dolores suffers.
It made me think a bit about the guy I went with for two/three years when I was 15yo. He was 38yo, married with kids, we only met up strickly for sex, but he had told me he was in love with me, I fell in love, and thought our relationship was great! He even gave me a gift! A 5 dollars fountain pain in plastic! At the time I thought it was a great gift too.
It’s only ten years after that I have second thoughts about that relationship.
I’m always a bit conflicted about what I think about Quilty. It’s been over a decade since I’ve read the book. I know he’s no angel, but Lolita chose him, at least. But is she so damaged that her choices mean nothing anymore? Is Quilty just her means of escape from Humbert? Does she care for him at all? Pretty much all we see of Quilty is through Humbert’s eyes, so I’m not sure how much of him is colored by jealousy and spite (and a bit of projection). Is he really no better than Humbert?
HH does claim to really love Lolita, and tries to demonstrate it by noble acts (vengeance on Quilty, giving Lolita her preserved inheritance (in itself a demonstration of how superior his effete Europeaness is to American money-grubbing), being concerned for her welfare and pursuing her for her own safety after she is too old for him to get off on any more). We readers are supposed to see through this, however–she doesn’t want his cheap protection and these “noble” acts are absolutely nothing in the balance against what he did to her. His “love” is for an imaginary creature, always out of reach, not for a real person.
Quilty as a character is almost a symbol–one of those doubles that Nabokov loves. Part real, and part HH’s fantasy.
Quilty is Hubert’s Shadow, in a Jungian sense. Lolita of course is his Anima. Hard to live a good life when you are projecting your complexes all over the place…
The problem of the 97 film is that Lolita is so hot that it gives the wrong message (before calling the FBI, the girl that plays Lolita is my same age).
When I saw Lolita I thought this guy Humbert was the luckiest pedantic asshole I’ve ever seen and I was very attracted to Lolita.
Of course, later I read the book: the movie gets the book wrong. The only way a movie adaption would works if they cast a flat chested 12 year old as Lolita.
The book is magnificent. I wish I could write spanish half as well as Mr. Nabokov writes english: he is an artisan.
That’s pretty much how I felt about it, too, at first. Then when I went back, I realized that of course she’s a pain in the ass–she’s being kept a sexual prisoner against her will. And Hum even tells her that if she tells anyone she’ll end up in some awful reformatory school.
I agree with those who said that his giving her the money was an empty gesture. I don’t think he ever loved her. If he loved her, how could he go on raping and essentially torturing her, even knowing she was crying herself to sleep every night? But the fact that he manages to turn things around so that many people do see him as a victim of a seductress is fascinating, and I think fairly true of how many pedophiles rationalize things to themselves–she was coming onto me, she wanted it, etc. It’s frightening but fascinating.
It shows what a brilliant writer Nabakov was that he could make a pedophile’s apologia so superficially persuasive that some readers really get taken in by it. I don’t think I really got how dishonest, deluded and self-serving Humbert’s narration was on the first reading either. Reader’s are so accustomed to accepting first person narration as an accurate and definition acount of events, that it’s easy to get taken in by Humbert. You have toread it with the awraeness that he’s hustling you. Then it nakes sense.
I think it’s possible that Nabakov might have turned his concept so well that it almost worls against him. I don’t know of a novel that has whooshed as many people as Lolita. It’s suppose to be a satire, a joke. It’s a scumbag child molester trying to hustle and manipulate the reader, but he’s so erudite, and so good at it, that it almost works.
I also agree that Nabokov is so good as a pure writer that it’s almost distracting. Tuirns of phrase are so gorgeous that it takes you out of the story. I wouldn’t change a word, though. It’s one of the best English novels of the 20th Century
What Dio said. This bit from Part II, Chapter 7, is instructive. I’ll spoiler it for reasons that shortly become clear:
For those who don’t speak VileScumWhoNeedtoBeShotinTheGroinese, I’ll translate:
Those were good times.
But, Skald, I know he was a sick weirdo pedophile. There is no question there. And we know we can’t trust his account of things. But at the same time, he seems to give a lot of honesty even when he doesn’t mean to. The girl was different. She wasn’t like other little girls he liked. She was a sexually aware (in her naive childish way) child who thought she knew how to exploit that with this sicko. That’s not to say she wasn’t innocent. She was, because all children are when it comes to sex with adults who are the ones with the responsibility to not be inappropriate with kids. But she wasn’t conventionally innocent in the same way most little girls are. That is, most little girls aren’t in control of thier sexuality in a way that allows them to use it with adults. That is not to take anything away from her victimhood. I maintain she is a victim. However, acknowledging that she isn’t ‘conventionally innocent’ makes the story more layered and interesting to me.
Hey, I’m glad our conversation is moving back to this thread. I hope it doesn’t count as a revived zombie because it wasn’t too long ago.
Nzinga, I don’t think we can trust him when he says this girl is different. He says that there are girls who are different, who are nymphets. But based on what? He never makes it clear. I think it’s just the fact that they’re attractive to him that makes them “different.” It’s just very convenient that all little girls he thinks are sexy are the ones who happen to be perverse and good at bewitching old pedos.
And I think that a lot of people see Lolita as different than so called normal, innocent little girls. Except I think we have to get away from the idea that there are sexually seductive girls and there are normal, innocent ones. We’re all sexual and most girls are intrigued by the idea of their own sexuality. If I’d known an older guy who was interested in me, I might have responded much as she had. When I was around 12 or 13, I was having those thoughts. I never really had much opportunity to act on them, but I’m sure I might well have if I had. I don’t think that would have made me any less innocent.
What does “conventionally innocent” mean?
I maintain that none of HH’s account of Dolores’ character and motivations are trusthworthy. I honestly can’t imagine how anyone could think otherwise. If he were saying, “Black people are categorically stupid, lazy, and sexually rapacious,” and then recounted a story in which all the black persons behaved that way, we’d all go :rolleyes: at him.
OK, I’ll say what I said in the thread on misrepresented literary characters:
Lolita leaves Humbert to be with an even more degenerate perv, Claire Quilty, with whom she is in love.
Yeah, Humbert is a wretch, but it would be a boring book if that were the whole point.
The joke of the book is that Humbert had built Lolita up in his mind to be this sexually innocent nymphet, but then it turns out that she is actually more sexually sophisticated than Humbert. By the end of the book, the power dynamic is reversed, and Humbert has been completely humbled by this girl. To the point that she patronizingly calls him “Honey” when she refuses to run away with him (a sobriquet that grieves him when he hears it, because he recognizes the shift in power it represents).