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JK Rowling is a special kind of fucked up (hexbear.net)

submitted 9 months ago by FourteenEyes@hexbear.net to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net

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[-] RonPaulyShore@hexbear.net 15 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I had to dig up my dog-eared copy. *Lolita *is many things, but I'd contend it is, in part, a story of love (unrequited, damaging, enduring; about the reflection that comes from lost love), that it is tragic, and even if foregrounding the love story doesn't strike you as the most felicitous reading, it is a plausible reading, shared by others, making Rowling's comment totally unremarkable.

Some opinions RE *Lolita *as love story:

Amy Hungerford:

(recognizing the love-story reading/framing of the novel)

*Lolita *is, I think, for Nabokov, a kind of chess problem. The chess problem is: how can Nabokov make us identify with a pedophile? How can he produce, from these debased ingredients, what Lionel Trilling called it–and you have this blurb on your back cover– “the greatest love story of our time”? That’s a question for you: is it the greatest love story of our time? Was Lionel Trilling–a great mid-century literary critic–was he seduced by Humbert? What would it mean to be the greatest love story of our time? But certainly Nabokov has in mind the rhetoric of love stories, the shape of love stories, and he’s using those, with all the skill he can muster, to try to make us enter in to the ecstasy that he describes at the heart of this kind of logical problem, the setting up of this logical problem. So, in a way we are the solvers of this problem for him; we are the other half that completes the aesthetic experience; we are there to participate in it with him.

Lionel Trilling (arguing that the novel is about love).

More Trilling (discussing the book w/ Nabokov, contending the same).

Gregor von Rezzori:

(contending the same, and source of common book jacket quote)

At one point a heated discussion arose over the possible interpretation of *Lolita *as a grandiose metaphor of the classic European’s hopeless love for a young, seductive, barbaric America. In his afterword to the novel Nabokov himself mentions this as the naïve theory of one of the publishers who turned the book down. And although there can’t be the slightest doubt that Nabokov did not mean to limit *Lolita *to that interpretation, there is no reason to exclude it as one of the novel’s many dimensions. The point, I felt, became obvious when one drew the line between *Lolita *as a delightfully frivolous story on the verge of pornography and *Lolita *as a literary masterpiece, the only convincing love story of our century. If one accepted it as the latter, there was no longer a question of whether to read it as “old Europe debauching young America” or as “young America debauching old Europe.” It simply stood as one of the great examples of passion in literature, a deeply touching story of unfulfillable longing, of suffering through love, love of such ardor that though it concentrated on its subject monomaniacally, it actually aimed beyond it, until it flowed back into the great Eros that had called it into being. Every passionate love can find its image in Humbert Humbert’s boundless love for Lolita, I said; why should it not also reflect the longing of us Europeans for the fulfillment of our childhood dreams about America? As for myself, that longing had become irresistible from the moment, in our translation, when we arrived at Lolita and Humbert’s crisscrossing of the United States. I vowed then that someday humble humble me would follow in their tracks.

But textually, (spoiling):

*Lolita *is colorably about love and is a love story (however unrequited). Humbert, selfishly, jealously lusts after Dolores, by his own monstrousness actions, loses her (losing what you're longing for, precising by your longing, this is tragedy, no?). He finds her years later, aged out for pedophilic interest, and no longer a great beauty, and yet still has great love for her: "I insist the world know how much I loved Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another's child . . . . Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque part où nous ne serons jamais séparés; . . . Come just as you are."

She has moved on. Years later and without her, he can reflect on his perversity and solipsism:

[N]othing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. . . . a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze has been depraved of her childhood by a maniac . . . .

[I]t struck me . . . that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a place gate--dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions . . . .

He then finds and kills Quilty, (his foil, the unrepentant pervert) and in closing, upon hearing the din of children playing, finally shows empathy/compassion.

And soon I realized that all of these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but these came from the streets of the transparent town, with the women at home and the men away. Reader, what I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic, one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost inarticulate spurt of vivid laughter or the crack of a bat or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.

Humbert's story/memoir, which started as some self-pitying, arrogant, indulgent exculpation, ends, he recognizes, as an artefact toward his lost love/ his great love -- "I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita." From the Forward, we know HH wants to publish only after he and Dolores are dead; he means to not to burden her more anymore.

It's beautiful, not just Nabokov's mastery of language and tone and allusion, but even the sentiment. And it's very relatable, for those of us wretches (but who are, emphatically, **not **perverts, I assure you), who have lost great loves through our own selfish actions/ inactions. Surely there are many, valid reasons to dislike Rowling: her books show a conspicuous deferral to power and hierarchy; her politics show a conspicuous and callous cruelty. This short characterization of Lolita, which is shared by critics and authors, and which is not foreclosed by the text, is not one of them.