Posted on 02/23/2015 9:41:24 AM PST by Borges
One of Lolita’s first supporters, the great critic Lionel Trilling, addressed what is perhaps a central issue at the heart of this controversial novel, when he warned of the moral difficulty in interpreting a book with such an eloquent narrator: “We find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents… We have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting.”
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Anyone interested in this thread should read this long article by Sarah Weinman.
http://penguinrandomhouse.ca/hazlitt/longreads/real-lolita
It’s called the real Lolita.
Art can be used in many ways. It can inspire, for certain, and I always love for art to inspire me, but it can also caution us.
1984 and Brave New World, for example, caution us against too much reliance upon government to do what is best for us.
Lolita, likewise, cautions us not to be so sympathetic and understanding of a person that we end up condoning what they do without judgment.
I think in 10 to 15 years, Lolita will be banned on college campuses again. This time not because it describes the mind set and behaviors of a predator, but because it contains the condemnation of the reader in finding sympathy for the predator.
You are supposed to be disgusted by Humbert, and should be. And yet his arguments for how he abuses Lolita, that he truly loves her and it is just the way he is, are the arguments that modern liberals use to excuse all of their depravity.
When you catch yourself smiling at descriptions or clever passages written by this man (the novel is in first person), you suddenly remember that he is an awful and miserably immoral monster.
That is the cautionary tale of Lolita. Very charming, smart, caring people can be absolute demons in human form. And we need to remember that.
Actually that sentence is more sublime than my description. Understand the lines being drawn there. Our FANTASIES have accepted what we KNOW to be revolting. It’s not drawing you to accept the bad, it’s drawing you to fantasize about the bad, and remember it’s bad. You are still revolted in the end, but for that time, you DREAMED.
It’s not meaningless at all. Art, good art, should rattle WITHIN your head, not just around it. In our current world we are constantly surrounded by “art”, mass produced music, TV shows that mark time, generic paintings that exist to break up the monotony of blank walls. It’s all very ignorable, you can be exposed to it all day every day and never give it a second thought. We forget that real art is supposed to give you that second thought, and preferably a 3rd and 4th. There was a thread this weekend about “messed up” art, that actually consisted mostly of religious art from the Renaissance, but it was religious art with some “oomph”, so some of it was nude (sublime Virgin Mary), some of it was bloody (horrible sin), and all of it was challenging. You had to think about it, you couldn’t just hang it on a wall in a hotel and walk past it.
It’s a good book. It makes you think. It makes you acknowledge. It doesn’t make the behavior good, it simply points out that you’re not very many bad decisions from the same path.
Lots of people prefer not to be challenged. Frankly, they’re all pathetic wastes of flesh. You’ll never be really good at being you if you don’t challenge yourself.
For my money, that is what people need to be cautioned against.
Good analysis. Art puts things outside the viewer, so that we can be our true selves as God intended us to be.
If Lolita didn’t seduce you, you wouldn’t really get it. That goes for everyone, no matter what your sexual inclinations.
To my mind the idea that art has to be challenging is a contemporary idea that is more political that artistic.
Artist want to express themselves.
To put something down or create something that is a manifestation of what is inside of them. To create something fixed in time and space, ie made eternal, that manifests something real that is temporal.
Or, sometimes great art is done for a pay check.
Great art can even be done to “challenge” or shock, or for political reasons, but usually doing art for such a reason creates stilted non-lasting pseudo-art.
But épater la bourgeoisie or to challenge those exposed to a work of art is most decidedly not the purpose of art.
Zappa, Bosch, Escher, Nabokov, Stravinsky, Picasso... All the real artists want to challenge you, and themselves.
It can’t be the only role, because without something else to go with that role it can’t challenge. It still has to be good, and has to reflect some aspect of reality. But it has to reflect it in a way that makes you think.
Lolita is a masterpiece. It’s one of the great American novels about America.
The statement offers nothing about to what end art is supposed to challenge. You're right, it's not meaningless; it's worse: it's innuendo. not intended as such, I gather, but that's what it is.
The end to which art is "supposed to challenge" is Truth.
How do I know this? Because art appeals to the imagination. The imagination is part of a humanity that is made in the image of God. It has a purpose as much a hand and a foot and a mind do. It serves the mind. The function of knowledge is the understanding of Truth.
That is actually a left wing trope.
Le surrealisme au servicedu revolucion .
I'll have to take your word for that. But if it is, it's not because "we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting" if that is the end of the matter.
If Art reiterates cliches it’s not good art.
Lolita is not ‘corrupt propaganda’. Have you read it? Nabokov was a staunch conservative.
Left wingers only say that about art when they’re not in power, once they are its’ “Art must serve the needs of the State.”
Bad news. It is #72 in this list, which the author put in date order rather than by rating.
Robert McCrum selects the definitive 100 novels written in English
http://www.theguardian.com/books/series/the-100-best-novels
1 – The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)
2 – Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719)
3 - Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
4 – Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1748)
5 – Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)
6 – The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)
7 – Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
8 – Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
9 – Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock (1818)
10 – The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1838)
11 – Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli (1845)
12 – Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
13 – Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
14 – Vanity Fair by William Thackeray (1848)
15 – David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
16 – The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
17 – Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
18 – Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
19 – The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)
20 – Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)
21 – Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)
22 – The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (1875)
23 – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)
24 – Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
25 – Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (1889)
26 – The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)
27 – The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)
28 – New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)
29 – Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)
30 – The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)
31 – Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
32 – Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
33 – Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)
34 – Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)
35 – The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
36 – The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
37 – Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe
38 – The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)
39 – The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)
40 – Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1911)
41 - The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
42 - The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
43 - The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
44 – Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Maugham (1915)
45 - The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)
46 – Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
47 – Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
48 – A Passage to India by EM Forster (1924)
49 – Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925)
50 – Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
51 – The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
52 – Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)
53 – The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
54 – The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929)
55 – As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)
56 – Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
57 – Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)
58 – Nineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos (1932)
59 - Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)
60 – Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)
61 – Murphy by Samuel Beckett (1938)
62 – The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
63 – Party Going by Henry Green (1939)
64 – At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien (1939)
65 – The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
66 – Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse (1946)
67 – All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
68 – Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
69 – The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen (1948)
70 – Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
71 – The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
72 – The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
73 – The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
74 – Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
75 – Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
#72
What are you talking about? It condemns the pedophile character in no uncertain terms. If you liked Macbeth does that mean you are a murderer?
Ever read Macbeth? Part of the play’s genius is realizing how much you can sympathize with a brilliant character who is slowly revealed to be evil.
I appreciate value of that.
That’s what Lolita does.
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