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mitty
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 3:42 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 02 Aug 2004 Posts: 1359 Location: Way Down Yonder.......
Also, the child was acting as the mother did. I can't place it in the book, but in the movies, Lolita mentions something about her mother having a "crush" on Quilty. Maybe thats why she did. Even though Quilty used her as badly as Humbert, possibly worse. To Quilty she was nothing more than a chess piece, and abandoned her. Humbert, in his own (granted twisted) way loved her.

I liked Mel Griffith in the newer movie, but to me Shelley Winters caught the character more accurately.

This child was headed in the direction of being used.....by somebody.
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pedersencr
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 3:59 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 921 Location: New Orleans
Mitty,
The discussion absolutely goes where the members of this Forum want it to go! So, Mitty, full speed ahead!

Like you, I have read the book and seen both movies and, as the intervening posts have suggested, the hinge of the matter is the degree to which Humbert or Lolita was the initiator. Contributing now as contributor, rather than moderator, I think that the book and the movies suffered different constraints in the degree to which they could show or even discuss the Humbert/Lolita encounters. The result, to me, is that the movies each show diferent views of the matter, and they both convey a significantly different, much more sterile impression than the written version in the book.

I think that Humbert comes off as much more evil in the book because the focus can be much more on his inner completely sociopathic nature than can be portrayed simply through his external behavior in the movies. And, on the other hand, neither of the movie Lolitas looks like a twelve year old, at least to my eyes, so the limited erotic behavior that could be shown on screen doesn't strike me as so inappropriate in the movies for the 16 or 17 year old actresses that they actually were. Consider, for comparison the recent The Door in the Floor where Kim Basinger has much more graphically explicit sexual encounters with a young upperclassman from Exeter(?).

Since reading the book I have been left wrestling with the question "So, Lolita, how did a nice girl like you end up in a fix like this?" and Nabokov has been placing every difficulty in the way of concluding that she was such a nice girl to begin with.

Charles
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Marj
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 4:08 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 10497 Location: Manhattan
I do agree that sexuality was repressed in America and in no decade was this more evident than in the 1950's. So, important is this decade to the book, that even the Jeremy Iron's remake of Lolita, is still set, and rightfully so, in the fifties.

However I don't think this was the case in other countries. I remember when my cousin first came to America. She was born and raised in Brazil. She was about 13 at the time and her Brazilian boyfriend was 24. While I was dumbfounded she was dumbfounded by my being dumbfounded!
I really need to go back to bed! Rolling Eyes

She was clearly more mature than American girls, physically and emotionally. And I do think this is so in other countries, as well.

But this does bring us back to Charles and Yambu's question about Europe seducing America. I think it's a relevant point.

Mitty, I do like your point about Lolita's relationship with her mother. I always thought she was somewhat of an after thought to the mother. And she was certainly "in the way." And I think Lolita knew it and thrived on one upping her at every chance she got.
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mitty
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 4:17 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 02 Aug 2004 Posts: 1359 Location: Way Down Yonder.......
Charles; I agree the book does depict Humbert as far more "evil" if you wish. But it also tells more of his inner turmoil regarding his actions. His ideal of the perfect "woman" was formed by the tragic death of the girl Annabel. He was frozen in time as it were. YES, his actions were monsterous, and selfish, but he would not have been able to succeed in any seduction, if Charlotte had not been as she was.

The idea that a woman with a nubile child/young woman as Lolita would take in a male lodger to begin with is so irresponsible, as to be criminal. And the way she literally threw herself at a practically unknown man is stupid to say the least. She had no thoughts about the way this would affect her daughter, what example this would set. This was not the first time the mother had acted in such a manner. According to Lolita, her mother had a crush on Quilty. Was the mother simply attracted to men with twisted libidos? What does that say about her? I'd like to know. Of course that is beyond the realm of possible, but interesting to me.
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mitty
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 4:25 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 02 Aug 2004 Posts: 1359 Location: Way Down Yonder.......
Marj; My own great-great (I think that enough greats!) grandmother was only 14 when she married. Her whole family was killed in some sort of epidemic in Mexico (they had immigrated from Spain), and she was palmed off to a man 28, and thus came to New Orleans. But she never even liked her own children. And every successive generation married in their late 20's. Maybe the later German infusion was more uptight. Laughing

And its not only in the 19th century. I know a family that every successive generation of daughters marry at fifteen. These are not uneducated red-necks either. They are educated, "nice" people.
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Joe Vitus
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 5:31 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 14498 Location: Houston
Marj,

Sorry, just catching up. "Annabelle Lee" is a poem by Poe in which the narrator mourns the death of a woman he grew up with, and loved, and who has died. The narrator of this poem isn't a maniac, but by citing a work by Poe, and twining his identity with Humbert, perhaps Nabokov alludes to the possibility that his protagonist, like so many of Poe's, is not in his right mind and not to be trusted as a source of information.
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pedersencr
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 6:06 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 921 Location: New Orleans
Mitty,
This post elaborates on one difference between book and films.

For the moment, Humbert to me is so far off the scale that I am even reluctant to consider him in any nuanced manner -- although I have to say that my opinion is changing since seeing the Adrain Lyne film. But that will have to keep.

When I look at Lolita I see a girl who, at camp at age 12. fell into having sex with one Charlie (my namesake, ugh!). The previous year she had had a relationshup with one of the girl campers, she said. And at age 10 Clare Quilty pulled her onto his lap against her will, with no clear indication of any sexual awareness at all on her part. All of this according to the book. And all of which sounds to me like the sexual "explorations" that commonly take place on a peer to peer basis as children grow up.

Missing from Lolita is any sense of decorum or modesty that such things are not appropriate with grownups, which should have come from her parents.

The major 'couch scene' early in the book (and only in the book) has Lolita's legs flopped across Jumbert's lap and him rubbing himself against her legs, seemingly to climax, again without clear indication of sexual awareness on her part (unless I missed it). The part of that scene that absolutely boggles my mind is, not especially Lolita's behavior, but the absolute lack of intervention by Charlotte.

Nabokov seems to have delberately populated his book with characters who are particularly dumb and unobservant. I can't imagine a mother who wouldn't have noticed something not quite right about that picture and at least have said "Lolita, sit up!" or "We don't put our feet on other people's laps. Put your feet on the floor!" or something much more direct like "Stop that! and go up to bed." If the mother really guessed what was actually happening, Humbert would have gotten the immediate heave ho and, probably, the cops called.

So, clearly, Charlotte wasn't doing the upbringing she should have been. That doesn't come across so clearly in the films IMO.

Charles
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yambu
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 6:08 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 23 May 2004 Posts: 6441 Location: SF Bay Area
pedersencr wrote:
The very (very) little I ever learned about Russian pronunciation made me wonder if he didn't have the Russian in mind when he wrote that three-step description. Especially that "t," which makes all the difference in how an American sounds when trying to pronounce Nabokov's beloved original language....

You have to be careful with your Russian t's. One word is written "matb", which means mother. The b is not a letter, but indicates that the t is pronounced like the t in "material". Another word is "mat", with the t pronounced as in "cat". The latter means motherfucker.

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pedersencr
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 6:36 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 921 Location: New Orleans
Joe Vitus wrote:
perhaps Nabokov alludes to the possibility that his protagonist, like so many of Poe's, is not in his right mind and not to be trusted as a source of information.


Joe,
Hope you (and Marj) don't mind my offering a comment on your post addressed to Marj.

Humbert himself expreses the fear that he is losing his mind a couple times as I recall, as his control over Lolita is unraveling later in the book.
And even if he is not crazy, he does presumably have a motivation as he adresses us 'the members of the jury' to lie and to put things in their best and least incriminating light (although he says not).

However, he is the one telling us the whole book, so that if one decides not to accept what he says, it seems to me one is left with the problem of finding a truth to replace his lie. I haven't found that an easy thing to do in trying, for example, to replace Lolita with a more virtuous girl than he describes. Other than to say "He is all wrong. She is innocent and whatever she did she did under duress" and then try to reconcile that version with his story by essentially rewriting every crucial scene in the book. I would be glad to hear how anyone else fares along this line.

And of course Humbert throughout is up against the age-old prosecutor's question that we see in courtroom dramas over and over again: "Were you lying then, or are you lying now?"

So I agree with you but it is not a simple thing to rectify. Except to say "Balderdash!" to his assertion that "She seduced me."
Charles
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pedersencr
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 6:45 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 921 Location: New Orleans
Yambu,
Yes, I agree re the Russian "t"s. I was supposing that Nabokov meant the hard "t" as in eto, rather than the soft "t" as in znatb, for the pronunciation of Lolita, considering where he put the tongue. A Cyrillic font would be handy just this once Smile
Charles
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Marj
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 7:34 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 10497 Location: Manhattan
Charlie (oops!) and Yambu,

Maybe it's this flu, but I have been trying without much success to "hear" your T sound, as well as the correct sound the pronunciation of Lolita should have.
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Melody
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 7:53 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 2242 Location: TX
pedersencr wrote:
The major 'couch scene' early in the book (and only in the book) has Lolita's legs flopped across Jumbert's lap and him rubbing himself against her legs, seemingly to climax, again without clear indication of sexual awareness on her part (unless I missed it). The part of that scene that absolutely boggles my mind is, not especially Lolita's behavior, but the absolute lack of intervention by Charlotte.


Charles, Charlotte is not home when the couch scene unfolds. She's at church, I believe, Lolita having thrown a fit and refused to accompany Charlotte. Humbert comes downstairs in his robe or smoking jacket and takes advantage of the situation. Lolita is apparently clueless as to the effect she has on him at this point.

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Marj
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 8:00 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 10497 Location: Manhattan
Charlie, (darn, did it again!)

Just to clarify, are you saying Lolita was more a victim of circumstance, ie Bad parenting?

If so how would you describe Humbert's movtives? Obsession, love, lust or a combination of all of the above? Although I do have a problem equating love and obsession. No matter how sexy Calvin Klein would like obsession to appear.
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pedersencr
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 8:19 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 921 Location: New Orleans
OKMarjie, Smile
On the pronunciaton of Lolita I am completely unprincipled. I just pronounce it the way it looks in English and ignore Nabokov's three steps of the tongue.
On Russian T's, I can't even begin to think of describing them carefully in words and I don't have my grammar handy to copy out of. But if you say "at" your usual way and notice where the tip of the tongue hits the top of your mouth, and then slide the tip of your tongue forward and down to the back of your teeth, then you'll have it in about the right place for the Russian hard "t" that I think Nabokov was talking about for the third step in pronouncing Lolita. Why he was thinking of that as a pronunciation for Lolita in American English -- except that the three taps of the tongue make a neat literary progression down the palate to the teeth -- is something I wonder about (but not too hard Smile ).
As far as hearing the difference, it is possible that it is more noticeable in pronouncing Russian words (which have somewhat different vowel sounds than English) than it is in pronouncing an American word such as "at" with a Russian hard "t" (assuming that you can even get your tongue to do it).
And as for the Russian soft "t"? Fugeddaboudit!
Back to regular programming?
Charles
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Melody
Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 8:23 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 2242 Location: TX
Humbert reveals himself over and over to be out of his mind. And while I'm not a prude by ANY means, I happen to have a 15-year-old daughter (and so probably should have waited a few years to read this) and I find his actions revolting. All his talk of European morals is pure bullshit to attempt to conceal (or gloat about) his sickness.

Humbert slips up now and again, revealing what I consider to be Lolita's true nature -- that of a scared little girl, rather than sexy nymphet. Consider this passage at the end of Part Two, Chapter 3:


Quote:
We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night -- every night, every night -- the moment I feigned sleep.

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