"Just look at the text, damn it! 'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.' See that? Not just 'fire of my loins,' which you respond to clearly enough; but also, which you don't see at all, 'light of my life'! See that?"
That is a beleaguered office mate I once had, trying hard to complicate the point of view of a student, a student who said he regarded the novel as "porn, pure porn, and I should know."
My colleague, maybe not displaying the calm and respectful manner we all don when dealing with students, still managed to catch in his quivering paws one enduring conflict that has marked responses to the novel: love or lust, romantic classic or evasive testimony to perversion?
Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, published in America 50 years ago, has engendered the most embarrassed, looking-sideways-for-the-exit, highfalutin, and obscurantist talk of any book ever written — any. Only a handful of critics have been forthright, most famously, Lionel Trilling: "Lolita is about love. Perhaps I shall be better understood if I put the statement in this form: Lolita is not about sex, but about love."
Charles Deemer teaches screenwriting at Portland State University. He is a playwright, novelist, screenwriter, and pioneer in hyperdrama. He was the editor of Oregon Literary Review and the artistic director of Small Screen Video.
"Having written almost daily for over 40 years, I can say that writing is not a job or a vocation or a profession--it is an existence. It is a way of being in the world."
"Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street." Mary Ellen Lease, 1890
"All humanity's troubles come from not knowing how to sit still in one room," - Blaise Pascal.
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