The modern narrative surrounding Lolita

[mrlolicon93]

Coming back to this thread again.

I figured i would leave these here to give more context to some of the very awful takes surrounding Lolita i was talking about.

I don't mean to come off as misogynistic so i apologize if i do.

I'm not sure why... but a lot of the people who have bad takes on Lolita seem to be women especially women who are far left politically speaking but that really isn't surprising considering this is the Twitter crowd pushing their modern pc views onto a book that is 70-years old.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcJfMSeSZNs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_FhTcaCvFQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK-FfPukV-o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38Ju_pVaUa4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPANXxV1iFo

In almost all of these videos they all seem to say the same thing as if it is some kind of circle-jerk.

Humbert bad Lolita is a victim Humbert completely unreliable because pedophile and male therefore not trustworthy Nabokov was a victim of CSA (Even though there is no real evidence) Nabokov hates pedophiles and wrote Lolita to expose predators (Completely ignoring his other work LOL) No girls allowed on book covers (Even though he is on video showing that he owned a few copies with girls on the front cover and praised them on camera) Lolita movies bad because they romanticize abuse (No you are just watching the movies wrong LOL) and of course some bullshit about #MeToo and the patriarchy,

You get the idea.

There is also. The Lolita Podcast by Jamie Loftus and if you listen to it not only does she leave out a lot of context surrounding Lolita and Nabokov but judging by the way she carries herself and speaks you can tell she hates men.

This all pretty much backs up my point that they can't seem to engage with anything beyond a surface acceptable position and looking at something old with a modern day PC lens.

The problem though is that when looking at media like Lolita with only a surface acceptable position you are basically removing the book of all of it's nuance and simplifying it.

[LittlePrincessLover]

Taken on face value Lolita had other older men lovers outside of Humbert so she wasn’t some completely innocent little girl. She adored Quilty and didn’t cast bad light on him despite some of his terrible qualities. But Humbert is entirely blamed for ruining her. Lolita was a bit of a minx and just as manipulative in lots of ways. Humbert’s downfall was being too infatuated with her and she could use it against him. Quilty was more attractive to her because he was more comfortable and confident in his attraction to nymphets.

[mrlolicon93]

Taken on face value Lolita had other older men lovers outside of Humbert so she wasn’t some completely innocent little girl. She adored Quilty and didn’t cast bad light on him despite some of his terrible qualities. But Humbert is entirely blamed for ruining her. Lolita was a bit of a minx and just as manipulative in lots of ways. Humbert’s downfall was being too infatuated with her and she could use it against him. Quilty was more attractive to her because he was more comfortable and confident in his attraction to nymphets.

Very true but Dolores also, had a fascination and interest in Hollywood movies and the entertainment industry and she wanted to be apart of that world.

Quilty was a playwriter or television producer if you follow the Kubrick continuity so he had connections to that world that Lolita aspired to be apart of.

So when she ran off with him to get away from Humbert she only wanted to be with him but in reality she meant nothing to him and he just wanted to use her for CP and when she refused to participate in it he kicked her out and threw her out on the street which shows that despite Humbert's messed up moral code and being a POS himself too he did actually love her and he still somewhat had a sense of humanity within him.

[mrlolicon93]

Lolita was recently reissued in the US to celebrate the upcoming 70th anniversary of the novel.

The new 2025 edition has an introduction by Claire Messud an American/Canadian female novelist and literature and creative writing professor and feminist.

In the new introduction she basically calls Lolita problematic describes Humbert as a rapist and continues to spread misinformation and obvious bs about Nabokov such as the famous he didn't want any girls on the book cover because he didn't want to sexualize the character Dolores Haze which is not actually true.

Although she points out that Nabokov states in the Lolita Afterward that the book has no moral message she still tries to push a moral message onto it and she even brings up #MeToo and Harvey Weinstein and she even takes the John Rey Jr. Forward seriously even though Nabokov says you're not supposed to and he is just a parody character mocking moralist.

Just more bs surrounding this great novel.

I have a feeling if another Lolita movie were made today it would be woke and a straight forward anti-pedo propaganda movie with all the nuance from the original novel removed.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/in-its-purest-form/

[PorcelainLark]

We now know clearly, thanks to Sarah Weinman’s 2018 book The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World, that Nabokov was aware, when writing, of the actual two-year kidnapping of 11-year-old Sally Horner by Frank La Salle, in 1948—a real event mirrored in his fiction. Lolita might thus have been construed, even then, as some version of “topical trash.”

The Enchanter, was written in 1939. Nabokov already had the ideas that would lead to Lolita before that kidnapping.

To insist upon our own projected vision—to “solipsize” Lolita and Humbert both, if you will, or to reduce them to symbols or types, or more broadly to read without rigorous attention to the finer details of the text; to be shoddy, inadequate readers—is equally to be condemned.

Oh, the irony.

The trouble is Messud makes several true statements, which give the impression of a coherent argument, but are actually non-sequiturs.

[mrlolicon93]

We now know clearly, thanks to Sarah Weinman’s 2018 book The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World, that Nabokov was aware, when writing, of the actual two-year kidnapping of 11-year-old Sally Horner by Frank La Salle, in 1948—a real event mirrored in his fiction. Lolita might thus have been construed, even then, as some version of “topical trash.”

The Enchanter, was written in 1939. Nabokov already had the ideas that would lead to Lolita before that kidnapping.

To insist upon our own projected vision—to “solipsize” Lolita and Humbert both, if you will, or to reduce them to symbols or types, or more broadly to read without rigorous attention to the finer details of the text; to be shoddy, inadequate readers—is equally to be condemned.

Oh, the irony.

The trouble is Messud makes several true statements, which give the impression of a coherent argument, but are actually non-sequiturs.

Exactly Nabokov even mentions The Enchanter in the Afterward as the precursor to Lolita and i agree she tries to make a coherent argument and sound smart but she comes off as anything but.

Just because it sounds like you know what you're talking about doesn't mean you actually do know what it is you are talking about.