Posted on 08/18/2008 11:36:27 AM PDT by Borges
Macbeth is a story of murder. Would you brag about that?
I will say this — I’ve come to the conclusion that books are a dead art form.
A)They cannot compete with the electronic media in capturing the attention of the young.
B)Those parents who do instill a “love of reading” in their young do it for harmless crap.
C)The idea of a single author’s voice is quaint to the point of antique.
D) The number of people capable of reading a “difficult” book is rapidly shrinking.
E)The idea of a “dangerous book” is laughable.
Macbeth doesn’t celebrate murder as this story celebrates child sex.
Interesting. Having never read it, I never realized what the novel was really about. I’ll have to add it to my list.
I would argue that's not true at all. A beautifully composed sentence of trite nonsense is still just trite nonsense. For writing of great beauty to become a matter of great consequence, the pith of it must be seen as consequential.
I'm not a fan of art for art's sake. If the artist is unwilling or unable to talk to me on the substantive level that I demand, then I can't praise the artist except in the most superficial way. That said, superficially, Nabokov is a great artist.
It's a great work about an incredibly uncomfortable subject.
Have you read it? If you had you would know that it does no such thing. It doesn’t even mention child sex.
Julia Keller writing in the Chicago Tribune said a few years ago that Victorian novels like ‘Middlemarch’ are becoming unreadable to most people due to changes in langauge and pacing expectations.
Nabokov disliked the phrase ‘Art for Art’s sake’ since most of the people who used it like Oscar Wilde were actually ‘rank moralists’. Anyway, as I decribed ealier, he did deal with important issues. Read his ‘Lectures on Literature’ on writers like Austen , Dickens, Proust, Tolstoy. It’s illuminating.
“If you had you would know that it does no such thing. It doesn’t even mention child sex.”
It doesn’t need to. How can you possibly read a story of a 12 year old involved with a man and think that is a good thing?
It doesn’t claim it’s a good thing.
Books are becoming unreadable to most people. There is no interest in exploring the range of human emotions/flaws/foibles/follies/appetites etc.
However, there is a profound — nearly pathological — interest in the lives of the wealthy and having one’s own existing beliefs confirmed. These are jobs for electronic media.
“It doesn’t claim it’s a good thing.”
Was the story written to expose a bad thing? No, it celebrates pedophilia. Typical liberal trash: As long as the story is about loooovve. loooovve, loooovve, loooovve, frolic in the flowers and talk about loooovve. He loves her, how precious. loooovve, loooovve, loooovve.
The story was not about the demented aspects of pedophilia. It was about celebrating “love” for a child by an adult.
Nabokov didn’t write to ‘expose’ anything. It does not celebrate the beliefs and/or actions of the protagonist. Period. It uses the subject matter to deal with a great many other things that have nothing to do with pedophilia. You didn’t say if you had read it or not...if not then you’re arguing from a position of ignorance. As for liberal, Nabokov was a staunch anticommunist and a friend of William F Buckley.
Have you considered writing a novel yourself? You certainly have a way with words. ;)
It’s hilarious to use hippie rhetoric to describe a text written in the early 1950s that was actually a piece of glowing Americana.
I hear ya. My hunch is he hasn’t read it.
I hear ya. My hunch is he hasn’t read it.
“As for liberal, Nabokov was a staunch anticommunist and a friend of William F Buckley.”
We have RINOs who claim to be Republican, too. It is amazing how many people with hard-core liberal ideas think they are conservative because they are a hair to the right of their friends. Even Communists think of themselves as conservative.
A story of pediphilia told as a story of love is simply a story of pedophilia told to suckers who will look past the child rape aspect because they get teary-eyed. Go to court sometime and when the judge asks, “Did you have sex with that 12 year old?”, I don’t think you’ll get away with a flowery description of love that gets you off the hook.
Hey, that’s the first time I’ve ever double-posted. Yay! I’m a veteran FReeper now!
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