for anyone who has read the novel Lolita

amother

Sun, Sep 23 2012, 7:36 pm

I have just read this book and it left me disturbed about something so maybe someone here who has read it can answer my question. don't you think this book is very disturbing - it attempts to make you (the reader) feel pity for a disgusting pedophile? and it attempts to make the reader think that pedophiles are just a bit "ill" and that it's not their fault that they have this "sickness" Don't you find it disturbing that this seems like the overall message of the book, and that more, it even attempts to make you feel SORRY for Humbert, and that this is very wrong and dangerous considering that this is a very famous book and many people will read it and take away this message?

amother

Sun, Sep 23 2012, 7:57 pm

I agree that it is disturbing. The book is meant to be disturbing, though. It's literature and not concerned with being a PSA, educational, providing good role models or anything else. If anything, it's impressive that it becomes possible to almost understand the guy while it's something so so far from what most people find comprehensible.

amother

Sun, Sep 23 2012, 8:13 pm

Yeah it took me a while to get through the book, I had to read this a student. the first time I started to read it I got really disturbed at one point and kind of felt sick. I brought it back to the library and didn't get it again until a few weeks later. I got through it then, but felt really disturbed still. I think the way it is so beautifully written is what sucks you in , even though what you are reading is horrific. I agree with you that Humbert is a monster. To answer your question, I don't think that the book suggests that you should feel sorry for him, it just delves very deeply into the mind and passions of a man who is, by his own admission sick in his soul. Despite that Lolita is not exactly a saint, it definitely establishes her as the victim and yields a much sadder picture of what happens to her and how it affects her. It's a very difficult book to understand.

amother

Sun, Sep 23 2012, 8:25 pm

amother wrote:

but don't you think it is wrong that it makes people "understand" a pedophile and his mind? I'm not being attacking I just find it disturbing since it is considered an important classic novel

marshmellow

Sun, Sep 23 2012, 8:35 pm

maybe but in literature people can write whatever they want. a writer is not G-d so they don't know (or maybe even care) what's good, what's bad. they just want a good story

bluebird

Sun, Sep 23 2012, 8:46 pm

It's meant to be disturbing. It's not at all meant to make you understand pedophiles, nor is it written to be in any way to be really descriptive of actual pedophiles.

Nabokov himself says: "Humbert Humbert is a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear “touching.”"

http://www.theparisreview.org/.....bokov

http://www.unz.org/Pub/Encount.....00073

amother

Fri, Sep 28 2012, 3:51 pm

Look, the problem with HH isn't even that he is a pedophile. The problem is that he's a PSYCHOPATH. He only views other people as means to his own ends.

Remember at the beginning of the book, where he's talking about how pedophilia is accepted in various societies? Regarding India, he says, "Old men of eighty copulate with girls of eight, and nobody minds."

Well, presumably the children who are being raped mind! But it *doesn't occur to him* because they don't exist as humans for him. In his mind, pedophilia is only a societal problem. He wants to sleep with little girls and society won't let him.

He knew Lo was crying every night. He knew she hated him and hated being raped by him. He didn't care because his attitude to her was one of *complete dehumanization.*

In college I took a course on Nabokov. I wrote a paper comparing Lolita to another novel, Pnin. Now Pnin is not a vulnerable orphan twelve-year-old girl. He's a fifty-two-year-old college professor. But the novel explores the same issues of objectifying another person. Lo is set up as a sx object. Pnin is set up as an object of ridicule. Both works are interested in the phenomenon of dehumanization. HH takes it to a repulsive extreme. But objectification is not always like that. Sometimes it looks pretty mild, pretty parve. Sometimes we're just chuckling at that weird "space cadet" next door.

Here are some excerpts from my essay: "Both Lolita and Pnin were written with the same novel in mind – Don Quixote – and both are interested in the question of objectification and the dangers involved in turning another human being into an object of desire (Lo) or ridicule (Pnin). It is significant that these two novels, like Cervantes’, are titled with the name of the characters that is being objectified in one way or another. Thus, in both cases, Nabokov is concerned with very similar ethical and literary questions that informed the writing of these novels....

And even if the reader only laughs at Pnin, there is still nothing preposterous about doing so. Lolita, in its s-xual objectification of a twelve-year-old girl, is shocking. But there is nothing shocking about making an eccentric, middle-aged male professor the object of fun – it is not viewed as a degrading or violent act.... If Nabokov wants to explore, then, the idea that any objectification of a human being is a violence done to him, then Pnin, in its very subtlety and elusivity, in the domestic banality of its scenes, evokes that idea with a greater power than could ever be imagined upon first reading. With Pnin, Nabokov brings objectification home, just as he took it to shocking extremes and defamiliarized it in Lolita...

The allure of Pnin's domesticity conceals what Humbert’s perversions so starkly reveal – the violence perpetrated by objectification to which Nabokov wants to draw attention. It is noteworthy that two such different novels have such similar projects and a common predecessor – Cervantes’ novel. Viewed from this perspective, Pnin may be called the ultimate achievement, because it does not rely on shock or alienation for its power. Nabokov can take the most familiar, domestic moments and turn them into scenes from a Quixotian universe where characters are held up as objects of revulsion or ridicule and the audience readily assents."

Hope this clarified Nabokov's "project," as it were.