Posted on 01/18/2008 6:35:32 AM PST by forkinsocket
Subject matter is not what makes something crude. The treatment does. The subject matter of King Lear is crude. Despite the subject matter ‘Lolita’’ does not contain any descriptions of sexual acts. Nabokov regarded Cervntes zs crude even when he was a struggling writer in Berlin and Paris in the 1920s. His idea of great writers are Joyce and Proust.
Sounds like you haven’t actually read Lolita since there is nothing remotely titillating about the content once you get past the subject matter itself.
How is Nabokov responsible even partially for the ‘degeneration of Western Literature’? He was one of the most sensitive prose stylists and critics to ever write in English.
And though its been nearly 30 years since I read Nabokov, I seem to remember a scene w/ HH and Lolita on a couch that was more than suggestive. The entire book hides its perversity beneath a thin veneer of culture and oh such sensitivity. Such exquisite treatment!
And that treatment is why he bears responsiblity, if only in part, for the decadence that so warps our culture. Now any subject, any treatment, if it is tricked out in appropriate sophistication, can achieve ART. Art for its own sake- completed divorced from the fecundity, the main spring which is the supporting reality of human life-the vulgar. Art now is an end in itself; narcissistic, onanistic, and pointless. Sort of like Proust.
Honestly, I've read only very little of Proust, as you might imagine he don't do it for me. Joyce, at least his standard prose, I like very much.
His prose is always suggestive but never vulgar. L isn’t really about pedophillia. It’s about modernism colliding wiht postmodernism, the Old World coliding with the new, and postwar American pop culture which had never been treated seriously before. ‘Art for Art’s sake’ goes back to the 19th century.
You should totally read Lolita. It’s fantastic.
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