"Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov
The emigrant literature - the lore of the West European literary model. A philosophy of life in a strange way interwoven with the philosophy of others. Vladimir Nabokov is a literary emigrant and also part of the West European literary context. Like his heroine, he is one and the other. Just as she is the woman in the child and the child in the woman. A male look at the femininity in all its complexity, incomprehension, indecisiveness for the thinking of the other sex. The question is when a woman is born in a child. And whether the child does not use the female in itself to subordinate the adult who seeks both the woman and the child because it paradoxically links the two into one.
" Lolita" is not a novel about the pathological anomalies. "Lolita" is a novel about the increasingly sophisticated sensitivity of modern man - that of the 20th century, leaving the patriarchal, striving to become aware of the world in another, new and different way. "Lolita" is a novel about unclear provoked desire for growth, which has not been done properly, for meeting the ages in love as a conflict and pain. Who's hurt in "Lolita"? The answers are not one-sided. The man who has not understood how to be the father of the unborn child is hurt. And how to be the man of the child, who is also a woman. This is a novel of the temptation to surrender, to abandon and obey the innocent - vicious manipulations of someone you can not identify because Lolita can not be identified, that is, it can, but only as Lolita. Lolita is not among the other children, and even less is a woman among the newly-married women. Lolita can not even be a maiden, she misses vital stages, progressive moves of development, she misses herself because she will not know who it is and not accidentally in the novel she will leave the world without finding her place in it . Lolita is a child, tempted to grow, though she would not want that. Lolita has unraveled the subliminal desires hidden in the depths of the subconscious and has given him an object and image. Few are the children from whom Lolita could be born. She is and is not a child. Revealing to the male look an eternally desirable, dreamed and craving innocence.
Lolita's wish is a wish for innocence, not to be born, but simply experienced. It is, however, dramatic to return to reality for the one who wished it. Then he discovers that natural human relationships - age, family, human have gone wrong, reassigned and can not be recognized in them, as well as the habitual human roles that are totally intertwined and thus can not be qualitatively and morally - socially identifiable. That is why the relationship with a Lolita is unproductive. Any link in which the oblique or overturned opium variant is present is doomed to total failure. And if Oedipus remove his eyes because of the blindness of his instinct who has not called Nabokov's heroine can not be spared - he will complain of an irretrievable loss without knowing exactly what he complains about - the child or the woman, but in all cases something that is experienced with pain and shame, with joy and despair. He complains about something he can not call himself a form of love. In this complaint, he simultaneously overlooked the image of both the father and the abandoned man. Lolita is not a novel about unauthorized sex, but about the unrecognizable and surprising self that you are thrown in others, or what you can never possess at the same time - the different instances of their incompatibility - the father and the man, the protector and the loving, the benefactor and the manipulator. Nabokov's novel confirms the questions that pose the complexity and ambiguity of human nature. It shows how fragile morality is in its traditional forms if it is provoked by gusts and instincts that we do not even suspect we carry in ourselves. And at the same time it reveals how important it is to be in place, and how secure the man is when he is in his allowed territory. Only then will his victims and losses be less and will be much easier to experience and overcome. Human drought will not lose its multiplicity, but will retain its moral identity, its inner unity, its spiritual harmony. Until a new Lolita appears, no matter in what we will recognize it ...
A great novel never should have been filmed even by a great maestro like Mr. Kubrick.
Well.... maybe you are right about that.... :D but still Kubrick make a good movie of the novel. The same feeling as you I have with Orson Welles's "The Trial", I really not wanted to see movie adaptation of this book but still the film is also a masterpiece
Looks really promising, I’ll definitely take a look at it.
Very nice :)
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Herbert Herbert's narration may be considered from the psychiatrist's armchair. If you wish to put your finger on the pathology in Mr. Herbert's case, Mr. Herbert readily helps you. He is perfectly qualified to diagnose himself and plays no games with you like he had with the psychiatrists he visited. However, to seek a diagnosis is to miss the thrust of the novel.
Mr. Herbert writes of Lolita, not of himself. His affection is contextual, not plot. She is the protagonist. He writes for love of her to honor her, to engrave her name in history, to speak to her from afar and later from beyond the grave. The story is her story - as he knew it, that is as a love story of his love for her.
Think of all the greatest maxims about love that you can. Love is blind. The heart does not choose who it loves. Love knows no law. Love can make no transgression. Love attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses. Nabokov presents a love so scandalous, even abhorrent and in such scintillatingly suggestive description, that the reader is on the edge of his tolerance. He feels the tension in Mr. Herbert's heart between the truth of these maxims, morality and the ethics of his culture (and the reader's own).
Could Herbert Herbert help loving whomsoever he loves? It is never wrong to love. And yet ... Lolita, Dolores, Dolly, Sweet Lolita, the nymphette. Can he ever be forgiven? No one can ever be sorry for having loved, but he feels remorse...
Thats the question: Did he really love her? I rather agree that he wants what Lolita embodies, the endearing innocence of the child. He behaves more like a predator even though he claims to be the victim. The fascinating part is they both, herbert herbert and lolita thrive on manipulating the other. Once they get what they thought they wanted or needed they lose the interest.
Oh but he did love her! Truly. Without a doubt. But did he know how to love? And was his love requited? It was not. He did not learn to love until the end after he had lost her.
Yes, he mourned his loss, but isn't that something you also do when you lose a possession? He tortures himself over her, tries to satisfy her needs, but does he really care about her? Can he even care about her? She will age, she will change, will he love her then? Isn't growing with another person and standing by her side through changes is what love is about? Otherwise its a fling, a passion, a need to be satisfied.
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All you say would be right if we were speaking, not of Herbert, but of a typical perverted neophyte in love. Herbert loves Lolita still when she outgrows the ripe, tender age of nymphetude. He cares that she was mistreated, that she receives a proper education, that she lives happily with her husband. By the very end his fixation with Lolita metamorphoses into what is recognizably - and touchingly so - love. The question I asked myself was "was it really love before then?" I think yes in a sense, but an unhealthy, ugly 'love.'
Excellent comment about it, upvote!
Nicely written comment. Its an interesting perspective and i liked that you mentioned a little background on nabokov. He created one of the great characters of literature, a figure that embodies the prototype and shows up in so many facettes. As the story goes i can only imagine it playing in the USA though, just as Don Quijote belongs to Spain and Oblomov to Russia.