I don’t understand this. You know from the heel that Achilles is going to argue with Agamemnon and lose Patroclos? You know from the heel that Achilles has to choose between a short but glorious life and a long but dull one?
These things are the tragedy of Achilles, not that he gets shot in the heel.
A lot of stage tragedies tell you what’s going to happen from the outset. Medea and Romeo and Juliet, for example. But when you talk about the mythology of the time, it’s not really intended to shock people with some surprise emotional punch: It’s like when people watch Titanic today – it’s not really a shock and a surprise that the ship sinks. It’s just the story and everyone knows going in that it’s going to be a tragedy. The argument is that the craft of telling the story isn’t in an emotional suckerpunch by surprise-killing a protagonist, it’s in causing the audience to become so absorbed in the characters that they feel a true dread and sadness at the inevitable.
I always liked that Titus Andronicus starts with the voiceover from Titus saying, “I wanna tell you about the time I almost died.”
Speaking of Lolita, here’s an unpopular opinion: Nabokov’s screenplay for Lolita would have made a terrible film. It commits the worst screenwriting sin, telling not showing, on almost every page. Kubrick was right to make the changes he did.
Yeah, I agree… Creep and a perv may be overstating, but at the very least any guy who tells you he loves Lolita has some unexamined misogyny. Extra bonus arsehole points if he tries to then justify the use of rape or sexual assault as a metaphor for what-fucking-ever his college prof told him it was a metaphor for (*see Clockwork Orange for further examples of this nonsense masquerading as critical analysis); he will go on to tell you you’re over-sensitive or that you just need to have a sense of humour about these things, or that you’re a frigid bitch :P
If anyone is curious, see the movie The War Zone for a work that doesn’t just use sexual assault as a plot point or a punchline, but treats it the way it should be treated.
The fact that Lolita engenders this kind of response 56 years after publication is just incredible. If people today think fans of the book are pervy, what did they think during the Eisenhower administration?
I’m beginning to wonder how many people condemning Lolita in this thread have actually read it.
I’m guessing about the same because a) general prudity was higher in the US, but b) fear and horror of pedophiles was lower.
erikg–it was banned, IIRC. The fact is that the book and the fanbase are two entirely different things and the Cult of Lolita is something very different from the work itself. I wouldn’t put it exactly at the level of people who lovelovelove Ayn Rand (mostly because there isn’t really much of anything to recommend her crap), but it’s definitely in that same orbit. When I would ask guys why they loved Lolita, I got more than one “it’s just so well-written” replies, which is just such a fucking hedge. That’s a little like saying you like the painting because it’s so well-painted, isn’t it?
One of my favorite critiques of people’s relationship with the book was in the nonfiction Reading Lolita in Tehran. Nafisi draws a lot of parallels between Lolita and the people of Iran, but she really digs into the narrative.
Do women not like Lolita?
why they loved Lolita, I got more than one “it’s just so well-written” replies, which is just such a fucking hedge. That’s a little like saying you like the painting because it’s so well-painted, isn’t it?
Is that not a reason to like something? People liked Michael Jordan as a basketball player because he was incredibly good at basketball. Reading Lolita is like watching Nabokov juggle chainsaws.
When I would ask women, they would give me a better reason than “it’s so well-written.” They could talk about things like unreliable narrator and the pathology of subverting Lo’s identity to an adolescent fantasy. I never got hand-wavy “I just really like the writing” answers when I ask women that question.
And no, it’s not a reason to like a book in a liberal arts environment. If I say I like Michael Jordan as a basketball player because I like watching him play basketball, that’s about as acceptable as my non-sports-watching ass should be expected to say in mixed company. But if I’m trying to discuss playoffs around the watercooler and I talk about how great Jordan is when he’s playing the basketball I’d be laughed back to my desk. If you can’t talk about the fundamentals of what makes him a good basketball player, even if it’s something as stupid as “he really knows how to set up a good layup,” then you shouldn’t swagger up to the watercooler and talk about how great Jordan is and accuse anyone who thinks maybe he wasn’t better than Abdul-Jabbar of hating basketball, or not having sufficiently watched Jordan, or having some weird anti-basketball complex.
So you suspect the men who told you they liked the writing were using that as a smoke screen to hide the fact that they were getting off on Humbert’s crimes?
Wait, so Michael Jordan is a pedophile?
Yes.
One of my ways of getting to know someone is to ask them what their favorite books are and then talking to them about that. If someone tells me that their favorite book is a story about a guy who repeatedly rapes a pre-teen and insists that she seduced him, and that their tale is the most tragic romance of all, and the person I’m talking to gives me no indication that he understands that Humbert is not the reader’s ally, or that there’s more going on than what the narrator is saying, then I don’t think it’s inappropriate to get cagey that this person probably just gets excited by the thought of having hot sex with young girls and likes the respectable, literary veneer that saying Lolita is his favorite book gives his fantasy. In the absence of critical analysis, I can only conclude that their favorite part of the book is the content.
Maybe he’s just embarrassed that his favorite book is the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book he read last week, and he’s doing a shitty job of covering it.
That’s way too simplistic. There’s still some distance between a guy with regular, unexamined common-or-garden variety sexism and a pervert. We’re all the product of wiring laid in by our parents and our peers; by our communities and whatever cultural influences we absorbed or chose for ourselves. And to many of us that wiring is invisible, but it informs everything from our performance of gender to our taste in movies and books and things like diet soda and sexual desire. It is complicated and messy and can never be boiled down to a binary equation: if this, then that.
I think there are guys who get off on Lolita but most of them like it because in college they were taught to defend the canon.
Actually, the “Yes” was in response to azzl’s question about Jordan being a pedophile. :p
Well he did try to bring back the Hitler mustache.
Are you saying he only has one testicle? No wonder he’s a pedophile!
Which still isn’t titillating. So it’s not really a useful pedo-indicator, and thus far all you’ve shown is an inability to be self-reflective about your own shallow critical talking points when you knock those of others. More worrisome, you are able to grant people the benefit of the doubt only when they offer an analysis that is nuts and debases the work (eg the America analogy) or are women themselves, thus providing them with pedo-immunity.
I’m also curious about this much-vaunted liberal arts environment of yours, though, as that term could well encompass a bunch of math majors who accidentally stumbled across a book without equations in it. What I know from my one experience in college is that the number one variable in what most students tell you about their reading tastes is pretentious bullshit designed to create the appearance of being well-read or engender controversy to be edgy. “It’s well-written” may be a shield for inappropriate or disgusting sexual predilections, but only to the same extent that
is a cover for concealing hatred of men behind some faux-scholarly litmus test. Which is to say, probably not in any significant way. Those guys may be creeps, but it isn’t because of Lolita and it doesn’t say anything of substance about others who like it, regardless of whether they possess the correct gender for appreciating without lustful thoughts.