/lit/ - Literature

Yes, it's very good, one of the best books ever written. Though opinions vary, most people put it high up there.

It's solid, beautiful prose, great insight.

And it's nothing like what you are thinking, probably.

It really is an extraordinarily good book.

>>3242001
>wut

Only people who've never read "Lolita" think it's nasty, paedophile smut.

Truly, it's entirely too artful and heady to even be close to porn. I doubt a lot of the claims people had about popping boners while reading "Lolita" because even the sex scenes are in a wordy, collegiate manner that really isn't befitting to carnal lust.

Read the book and find out. Even if you end up not liking it, you can gain enough knowledge to roll your eyes when people are all "hueg hueg hueg, Lolita, hueg, hueg."

It gave me an erection

>>3242020
Honestly, there was only one passage that got me aroused.

OP how have you never heard of Lolita

>>3242024
>2024
>It gave me an erection

I doubt that claim.

>>3242009
I don't know if I would agree. It IS a great book, but it is also completely demoralizing, like most Nabokov. The characters are severely fucked up individuals, and you won't put the book down whistling a jaunty tune. It is probably very much like what you are thinking. Maybe worse.
For the record, I have read it twice: while it's fucking great literature, it is a difficult read, if you have any moral standards. ...but this is 4chan...

>>3242025
I'm 19 and only started seriously reading 3 years ago.

It's beautifully written, its characterization of Humbert Humbert is both compelling and controversial, and there is absolutely no depth to it beyond its surface value.

>>3242031
>>3242020

Oh, and I'm glad people in this thread aren't Humbert apologists. You get them from time to time -- people who say Lolita "seduced" Humbert Humbert, or make him out to be a victim. That's what I *would* expect from 4chan at its worst.

>>3242031
I found it uplifting in how beautiful the prose was

And the rotten characters get what's coming to them, really

>>3242050

People say that?

>how do i unreliable narrator

>>3242055
This is true.

I just wish I didn't see so much of the author in the main character. It skeeves me out even more.

>>3242041
I tend to agree. That doesn't mean the prose isn't worth enjoying, but it is very overrated, to me, due to this fact.

>>3242076
Absolutely, and not just idiots on online forums. This is from Wikipedia, but it still gives you an idea:

>Novelist Robertson Davies excused the narrator entirely, writing that the theme of Lolita is "not the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child. This is no pretty theme, but it is one with which social workers, magistrates and psychiatrists are familiar."

>>3242089
Oh dear. And I like and respect Davies...this is...well...

>>3242036
I'm 18, i've read Lolita...

>>3242001
>/lit/

>just a bunch of fucking pedophiles!

Its probably the most beautifully written prose ever. Unfortunately its style over substance. Its a chore to read

>>3242098
It's not entirely an invalid stance to take, but if you take it, we must remember that the parents of the child become the true culprits, as she is not finished cognitively developing... also, that is not what happens in that book. Sorry, forget I am on 4chan, sometimes.

>>3242122
>he thinks 'style over substance' is a thing
>a chore to read beautiful prose

you might be in the wrong board there bub

>>3242123
But it is an invalid stance to take. Any close reading of the passage where Humbert first goes to bed with Lolita will tell you that he pressured her into the relationship, not the other way around. And that's to say nothing of the decisions he made before they even exchanged a word.

>>3242167
But style over substance is a thing. Are you saying that form and content aren't two separate (though often interrelated) entities?

>>3242001
The last half of the book is senseless ramblings.
All the tension is gone. The drive that made the book interesting no longer holds.

>>3242195
>But style over substance is a thing.

lol

>Are you saying that form and content aren't two separate (though often interrelated) entities?

Yes. I recommend you stop being in high school to understand why the "difference" between them is meaningless.

>>3242212
Sure they're different. For instance, if you had simply said "nuh-uh" or "no" in that post, instead of "lol" and "I recommend you stop being in blah blah blah," the form would have been different, but the content would have been the same.

I recommend you start backing up your statements with arguments instead of condescension.

>>3242224
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/7484/aesthetics/59174/Relationship-between-form-and-conten
t

This is a really important thing in modern literary criticism, man.

>>3242224
>you start backing up your statements with arguments instead of condescension.

your recommendation is unfounded and self-serving. if you want to learn, pay me about two hundred bucks an hour and I'll make a honest effort to make you not be a retard about art criticism. education isn't free, nigger.

>the form would have been different, but the content would have been the same.

if you're (shallowly) into semiotics i guess, but this is irrelevant unless you think artistic style reduces to word choice, in which case i pity you.

>>3242201
The second half of the book is one of the most tense and scary things I have ever read.
Being followed by undercover cops while the girl you love has only a year or so before she turns into something that disgusts you, on top of the fact she is quite obviously scheming against you.
On top of it all, he only had himself to blame for setting it all up to occur.

>>3242117
I'm 12 and all my friends read garbage like Hunger Games and Game of Thrones. I hate my generation.

Oh btw I'm a girl

>>3242224
They are not disconnected from each other. You can argue that "nuh-uh", ">implying yes" and "no" just mean "no", but the form makes the understanding differentiated. We say "they are practically the same", but if you go in depth, they are not the same. In literary criticism you can afford to go to "but they are more or less divided" and take it for granted.

>>3242089
>>3242098
>everyone who does not agree with my opinion is stupid

I thought /lit/ was better than this.

>>3242305
why?????????????????????????

>The only convincing love story of our century

What does that crap even mean?

>>3242240
I'm a little familiar with the argument, but what I have issue with is more specifically Nabokov's theory of aesthetics, which he wrote in the afterword and which makes me wish he had tried to grapple with some real-world social issues or dialectic concerns (I realize that's a preference, but it's still what I like in what I read):

>I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray’s assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only in so far as it affords mewhatI shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.

>>3242261
>nigger
oh my, how shocking. 3edgy5me

>>3242298
You're right, I was really just pointing out how negative he was being.

>>3242318
I'm just that stupid.

>>3242305
>reducing stances to "opinions"

SHIGGY

>>3242322
>I was really just pointing out how negative he was being.

and you think this a worthwhile endeavor in 4chan because...?

>>3242332
Shit, when you get right down to it, there's no worthwhile endeavor to being on 4chan.

>>3242334
there's plenty more fruitful or enjoyable things to do in 4chan... there's a shakespeare thread over there...

>>3242322
>makes me wish he had tried to grapple with some real-world social issues or dialectic concerns

If he had approached his work in any way, it'd not be the work you admire, it's really odd to wish a book be that which it never could have been.

And that the author has said there's no meaning in his text doesn't mean it should obstruct you from figuring any meaning in it. The author has died.

>>3242117
I'm 16 and I've read Lolita.

>>3242349
I read it when I was 13.

I know a 10 year old that really liked No Exit.

>>3242348
That's the point. I don't admire it that much.

And I know it shouldn't matter what the author says, but when he says the book is only meant to tickle the pleasure centers of my brain, I just thought (and this is immature, I know) "fine, if this book only has emotional or sub-conscious value, i'm not going to put any effort into thinking about it after i'm done reading it."

>>3242031

You're right that it's a great book, but you seem to have misread the "characters". Not once do you get a character description or statement from that character which escapes Humbertization.

>>3242076

Humbert is not an unreliable narrator. That implies some inkling of reliability or a scale reliability existent in the text, which there is not.

>>3242123

The joke's on you if you are trying to read the book through a psychologically descriptive lens.

One more thing, people:

WHERE ARE YOUR SPOILER TAGS?

What is this, amateur hour?

>>3242419
>spoiler tags for a book written 57 years ago

>>3242431
No, spoiler tags for someone who hasn't read the fucking book.

i won $50 for an essay i wrote on it sophomore year of undergrad

best part is i'm an engineer and i was the only non-english major in the room at the award ceremony :3

>>3242515

What'd you write about it, Stephen?

>>3242028
when she came on to humbert c'mon that shit was boner-refic

>>3242024

I got on first page. No kidding and I'm not pedo or anything like that.

>tfw I just finished it.

Solid 6.9/10

>>3242324
Sensationalism ftw.

>>3242559

Nobody on /lit/ gives Nabokov less than 9/10. You clearly don't belong here.

>>3242522
the title was Doppelgänger, Doubles, and Parodies in Lolita

Won "Best Essay for a 200-Level Course," 50 dollas nigga

it's a pretty damn good essay, bitchin' comparisons.
7 pages total (double-spaced tho)

>>3242585
This is the first work of his that I've read and, while the prose and story is beautiful and entertaining in the beginning, the ending just fizzles away to a anticlimactic end. Why don't I belong here?

>>3242588
Post it.

>>3242585
Yeah, 6.9 sounds like a pretty accurate rating to me, bro

>>3242606
mkay. keep in mind I was 19 or 18 when I wrote it. i used italics at several points so i'll use **'s to replace them.

In the heavy tide of rhetorical devices in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, only a scant few are as persistent throughout the novel as the motif of the doppelgänger – the human double, or look-alike. Nabokov uses these doubles, or the implication of a double, extensively, not only to convey similarities between two people or elements, but also to parody one or the other. For each individual instance in which a double appears, however, we still need to ask, “Why did Nabokov put this *here*? Why did he decide to apply this motif to these two things, and how does that change our understanding of the work?” If we wish to really dissect this motif, we should split the appearances of doppelgänger into three areas in which they present themselves: the men who are doubles of Humbert, the girls who are twins of Dolores, and the idea that the book itself is a parody of other books.

To start, consider the titular Lolita, Dolores. Nearly her entire presence in the novel, or at the very least her being dragged into its chain of events, is as the twin of Humbert’s original love, Annabel. It is actually an interesting question to wonder whether the “Lolita” of the book’s title is meant in reference to Dolores, or to Annabel – and in the fact that we even need to ask this question, we have our first example. Within the first sentence Humbert writes about Dolores, he says that she *is* Annabel: “...without the least warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses” (Nabokov 39). [con't]

>>3242622

The fact that the first way Nabokov describes her is as *being* Annabel, not merely resembling her, speaks in layers and layers: not only metaphorically, but as a psychological snapshot of Humbert (to say that it is a *profile* of him would be too much, especially considering his open mockery of succinct psychoanalyses). The way the segment is written tells us that, at this moment, H.H. is simply unable to tell whether he is looking at Dolly or Bel – the two have blurred together in his possibly-unreliable mind, and that is what the real implication of this moment might be: Humbert’s instability, rather than any actual similarities between the two girls.

This brings us to another of the points made here, by this motif. How similar are Dolores and Annabel, *really*? Yes, they physically resemble one-another. What about their personalities? This is only brought up once Dolores starts causing problems for Humbert; at first, he could not care less about Dolly’s independent identity, apart from how superficially “precocious” she might behave. What we see is the doppelgänger motif being used to highlight Humbert’s own solipsism – his complete disregard for the consciousnesses of others. In Humbert’s mind, Dolores and Annabel fuse together because they look alike, and their differences – their personalities – mean nothing to him.

>>3242622
>>3242626
Decent premise but you don't have to post the entire 7 page essay piece by piece. Upload it somewhere like pastebin.

>>3242626

Of course, Humbert acknowledges his confusion of Lo with Annabel – but only by making comparisons between the two; he does not outright acknowledge that he has mentally superimposed Annabel into Dolores’ place. However, once he begins to realize that Dolores’ character is nothing like that of Annabel (that damned personality again!), these comparisons grow fewer and further in-between. One hint at their inherent difference is the passage on pages 118-119, wherein Humbert takes Lo to several seascapes, to re-live and complete his long-ago-interrupted coitus with Annabel, as “the rational pursuit of a purely theoretical thrill,” – but all of the experiences are lackluster, dispassionate, marred by gray seas or howling wind or gritty sand; Humbert says of Dolores in one of these encounters, “for the first time in my life, I had as little desire for her as for a manatee.” The significance here, what Nabokov is trying to point out, is that these girls are indeed very different from one-another.

With Annabel, we can move to the next set of twins: because Annabel Leigh is such a clear allusion to Annabel Lee, one’s eyebrows are raised to consider Edgar Allan Poe – specifically, the perfect mirroring of Poe’s life and troubles with those of Humbert: both men loved and lost girls far younger than themselves, both fought mental demons and instability, both dealt with issues of alcohol, both exhibited self-obsessed, solipsist behavior (although in Poe’s case, this was through his characters). [cont'd]

>>3242628
lol k hold on. here's the rest of that paragraph:

The fact that the two men are so similar on these points gives us some scaffolding, upon which we might be able to construct some information about Humbert that we might not otherwise have access to. The principal bit here concerns the *degree* of Humbert’s mental instability – it is well-known that Poe suffered from Manic-Depressive Bipolar Disorder (although in the 1950’s, when Nabokov was writing, it may not have been so precisely categorized). By illuminating such connections between the two men, could Nabokov be making a further hint at the degree to which H.H. was afflicted? His numerous stays in mental asylums (21, 22, 184) are already evidence enough to that effect.

ok here

http://pastebin.com/bKBtvznK

Reading now and this line killed me, "You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go." UGH