The modern narrative surrounding Lolita

[mrlolicon93]

This is kinda tied to one of my old post here.

https://forum.map-union.org/viewtopic.php?p=2873#p2873

Recently i just finished reading the lolita novel and i really enjoyed it and all of it's nuance.

Humbert and Lolita are both awful people but Nabokov does a great job with his style of writing making you sympathize with them and it truly is a great tragic love story.

However what i have seen on social media is that in recent years the modern narrative being pushed is that the book is about child sexual abuse and that it is a warning to let people know about predators or how Nabokov wanted to expose pedo Hollywood and was a champion of CSA victims' rights and a strict opponent of sexualizing children and how HH is a unreliable narrator.

In reality none of this is true and if you actually read the book it isn't as black and white as people on social media are making it out to be.

Humbert is a narcissistic asshole who sees himself as better than everyone else and does awful things like repeatedly touch Lolita when she does not want it or lie to her about her mother being sick and doesn't tell her about her mother's death right away.

However at the same time he also does good things like try to be a good father he takes her to movies and out to lunch he buys her a bike for her birthday and lets her hangout with friends.

Lolita obviously loved him at first but fell out of love with him once she hit her teenage years and went from being a typical tomboy kid to a bitchy teenage girl who seduces Humbert to get money from him like in the 90s film.

Also, while Lolita to a certain extent is a victim there were parts where she clearly was the initiator and wanted it as well such as the scene where they have sex in the hotel room and she tells Humbert about a sexual experience she had at camp.

At the end of the book Humbert kills Quilty and is arrested and at the very end apologizes for his actions and says he does not care if he is found guilty or not nor what people think of him all he ask is for people to try and understand him.

Nabokov is on record calling it a love story saying my book is about love not sex and that Lolita has no moral message i think antis on social media wanna like Lolita so bad because of how well it is written but they can't seem to engage with anything beyond a surface acceptable position and looking at something old with a 2024 PC lens.

What do you guys think?

[Artaxerxes II]

As someone who read the story halfway through, I largely agree with your take. Just a little nitpick though: Nabokov wrote the story by intentionally turning Humbert into an unreliable narrator. So how you perceive Humbert's actions heavily depends on how much you trust him. Is he telling the truth, or is he embellishing his reputation to you, the reader? After all, some see the death of Dolores' mother via a car accident as being committed by HH, others see it as a genuine incident.

That point is salient and really drives home the best quality of that book: Namely, its ambiguity which leaves with many speculations, making the kind of work that will be discussed for ages as readers try to determine a "truth" which may not exist. Kind of like how people (even academic scholars) will interpret Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree in contrasting ways.

As for antis and their interpretation of Lolita, I don't think their assessment is accurate as they ignore Nabokov's other works and their opinions are tinted with contemporary prejudices which may not reflect social attitudes when the book was first published.

One thing that may suprise you is how often does attraction to pubescent women often crops up in his works, some of which are entires on this list: https://wiki.yesmap.net/wiki/Minor_attr ... Literature

[mrlolicon93]

As someone who read the story halfway through, I largely agree with your take. Just a little nitpick though: Nabokov wrote the story by intentionally turning Humbert into an unreliable narrator. So how you perceive Humbert's actions heavily depends on how much you trust him. Is he telling the truth, or is he embellishing his reputation to you, the reader? After all, some see the death of Dolores' mother via a car accident as being committed by HH, others see it as a genuine incident.

That point is salient and really drives home the best quality of that book: Namely, its ambiguity which leaves with many speculations, making the kind of work that will be discussed for ages as readers try to determine a "truth" which may not exist. Kind of like how people (even academic scholars) will interpret Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree in contrasting ways.

As for antis and their interpretation of Lolita, I don't think their assessment is accurate as they ignore Nabokov's other works and their opinions are tinted with contemporary prejudices which may not reflect social attitudes when the book was first published.

One thing that may suprise you is how often does attraction to pubescent women often crops up in his works, some of which are entires on this list: https://wiki.yesmap.net/wiki/Minor_attr ... Literature

Ah good point.

Yeah when reading i like how Charlotte's death was written in a vague way making it ambiguous and up for interpretation as opposed to the movies where we know what's shown on screen is what actually happened.

Still though i don't really buy into the modern narrative that HH is unreliable 100% of the time i think antis on social media just don't wanna sympathize with a flawed complex character that just so happens to be a map.

A lot of people seem to take John Rey Jr PHD at face value and believe what he is saying in the forward section when in reality that's just Nabokov mocking moralfags and people who overanalyze literature.

What i got from reading it is that it is a repent criminal's apology/auto biography and HH isn't really manipulating the reader but is manipulating the other characters in the story.

While there are parts where he may come off as unreliable i feel for the most part he is being genuine because i don't think unreliable narrators tell on themselves and go out of their way to incriminate themselves even more which is something Humbert does regularly.

I think he even mentions that he had multiple underage girlfriends before Lolita came into his life.

[mrlolicon93]

Coming back to this thread i found an interesting comment in a Reddit thread about Lolita that was posted a few days ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/literature/com ... ?rdt=52807

it's annoying and kind of sad at the same time to see that most commenters buy into the bullshit modern narrative being pushed that the book is about abuse however one comment stood out and that was this one which says the following.

(Quote) America has been in the grips of child molestation mania for the last 30 years. Republicans and Evangelicals manufacture hardcore violent CSI: Special Victims-type urban fantasies on a daily basis. Why? Nobody likes positive young lust stories—that’s sick. Any story that portrays teen sex in a positive light condones child abuse. But if the story is portrayed as violent sex crime—well, that’s the very essence of CSI: Special Victims and the trash talk shows where Sally Jesse Raphael asks for more details. When it’s in the context of violence, trauma, horror, and darkness, everyone wants more details. Not because they enjoy thinking about these things, but because they’re amateur researchers in criminal psychology and want to help stop all the Satanic-Jewish-Illuminati paedophile rings and child sex traffickers. Totally different motivation.

But while horrific paedophile underground fantasies may be a Republican-Evangelical cottage industry, all of us are affected by it because the stories shift the baseline. All teen sex is rape, and decent people will adjust their memories about their teenage years accordingly, for fear of standing out as being pro-sex and thus pro-baby rape.

There is nothing more harmful than teen sex. As some of the redditors said above, “teen” and “sex” simply cannot be combined. We cannot say, “Jack and Jill had sex.” Doing so sexualizes children and condones baby rape. The proper phrasing is, “Jack and Jill are both child molesters. And they are also both victims of child sexual assault.”

This is now legal reality—In over 20 states, if two 14 year-olds have sex, both are arrested and placed on the sex offender registry for child molestation. Both also go to therapy for being victims of the most traumatic thing anyone can endure.

Another side effect of the new gothic-horror mold: If child is raped, that’s bad. But if a child initiates sex and enjoys it, that’s worse than bad. It means that the initiator has gone completely crazy. Healthy people cannot feel lust or enjoy sex before age 18, 17, 16, 15, or 14 (depending on the state). Ergo girls who initiate sex with full intelligence and awareness and past experience are not sexually active teens, they are Stockholm syndrome zombies acting out past trauma.

(An analog just occurred to me: Being killed by Big Brother is scary. But being alive and saying, “I love Big Brother” is absolutely terrifying. Because then we know: the insides have been corrupted.)

Things have changed a lot since the days when (according to American folk discernment) teen sex was sex rather than self-rape. These days, only doctors, psychologists, and literature profs (see below) see teen sex as healthy. (Disclaimer: I’m a lit prof.) In the current folk metaphysics, teen sex isn’t just bad, it’s worse than murder.

To save the metaphysics, we must be consistent with the punishment. The result? America now has over 250,000 kids as young as seven on the sex offender registry—just to hammer the point home. Sex is always harmful because it is essentially and intrinsically exploitative and abusive on a level completely inaccessible to empirical observation.

Anyway, to understand this shift from Weird Science, Private Lessons, and Little Darlings to Jewish liberals raping babies underneath pizzerias and Hillary Clinton bathing in child blood, I strongly recommend Erotic Innocence by James Kincaid. He is the only historian (English dept., believe it or not) who has really nailed how it is that we got to a place where arresting toddlers for playing doctor is normal, and every sexual tendency is a symptom of past abuse.(Unquote)

Any thoughts on this?

[PorcelainLark]

Any thoughts on this?

I don't know, I think there are a lot of morbidly curious asexuals out there. It's kind of like when gay men side with women about issues in heterosexual dating, there's nothing directly at stake for them. I think there's a kind of synergy on the internet between morbid curiosity, low libido/asexuality, and sadism/revenge fantasies.
The satisfaction of seeing a "sexual abuser" mobbed, comes at the price of the suffering of children. The more vile the crimes, the more merciless the sadist can be in their revenge fantasy.
I think it's also a big problem for sexuality more generally. If you have people who are trying shape norms surrounding sexuality that are only interested in sexuality as an excuse to indulge in cruelty against others, then the norms will be intended to make people fail. There are a lot of sexless sadists out there, whose opinions are unassailable because they have no stake in sexuality.