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[Faust]

/\ Ever heard of expression "A text is a text"?

[Faust]

I do too, Mona, so please phrase your comments so they don't sound patronizing, especially about literature.

And if you think that my comments boil down to "Lolita is about pedophilia," well then I can't think of a more reductive statement :-)

[mamaboy]

i hope never read nabokov again...such cold made up shite....

[Real Real]

Faust - it's not just Mona that's misreading you, then, since it looks to me like you're arguing "Lolita is about pedophilia", too.

I mean, you wrote "I think the main point is just that - that it's so easy to like HH, because he is an intelligent, witty, charming... pedophile"...you keep bringing up the pedophilia in Lolita, when I really think the pedophilia is just a way of getting into something much deeper. When you made that comment about the beauty of SS uniforms, it makes it seem like you're giving the pedophilia of Lolita the same place as you would, I don't know, Communism in Darkness at Noon, or even murder in Crime and Punishment. To do that, is, I think, an oversimplification of Lolita that obscures the depths that are actually there.

[Faust]

What I am saying that at the center of the novel is a character that comes off as sympathetic, when he should be anything but. He is just a very, very good writer (the character, remember this is his voice narrating the novel). And if you let the beauty of the prose and his charm dupe you, then you fail in a way, because you disassociate form and content. The Nazi comment is about exactly that and was given in that context, you must've misconstrued it.

And again, I think it is you guys who are reducing the novel more if you only concentrate on things like the beauty of the narrator's prose, his acute observations, his charming sophistication, etc. etc. and choose to dismiss the central moral conflict. I mean if you, the readers who are also the ladies and gentlemen of the jury, miss this central theme, then you fail to be moral yourselves.

[BECOMING-INTENSE]

i hope never read nabokov again...such cold made up shite....

Yes ... Proust is so warm, Mallarmé, Kafka and Beckett much warmer to!

[Real Real]

HH clearly fails morally. I also don't think he's particularly charming - he's ridiculous.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is this - I think if somebody focuses too much on the fact that the crime in Lolita is pedophilia, you can miss the point. HH's moral failure is his lack of curiosity about anything and anyone that doesn't filter through his particular aesthetic lens (?), I think - and that moral failure takes its shape in his pedophilia. Also, the pursuit of ecstasy/immortality/transcendence/self-creation almost always requires the development of a strong aesthetic and a sort of curiosity-limiting obsessiveness.

[DHC]

bumping some old for noobs

[Faust]

Paging Classique :-)