S.Blackwell: [...] He can't stop exploiting Dolly, who, having
escaped him physically, is recaptured by him aesthetically (or just
narratively). She has very little voice in HH's text. He has total control over
her enduring image (and the necessity of her death means that she can't correct
the record: he assures himself the last word).
J.Aisenberg:
I've come across this maddening notion... either justifies anything a
character does or mystically rots their souls inside out. Isn't this what's
underlying Jansy's point about H.H. "only" be in jail for Q's murder? If I
understood the point, isn't this why it seems strange then for Humbert
to have gone into all that side business about his crimes against Lolita, which
to modern readers is really is far more damning than his killing? ...This
is an interesting legal and social development, which affects
responses to the book, I think.
K.Montserrat: I have one question:
Does someone know if these legal concepts you're talking about, were the same 50
years ago, I mean, when the novel Lolita was published in the United
States?
JM:
On-line dictionaries are a disappointment in that they bring, as Aisenberg and
Studdard believe it to be correct, the origin of "pederast" linked to
the Greek for "paidos", child .
For example, online entry
on pederasty :"sodomy with a boy," 1609,
from Mod.L. pćderastia, from Gk. paiderastia "love of boys," from paiderastes "pederast," from pais (gen. paidos) "child, boy" (see pedo-) + erastes "lover," from erasthai "to love." Pederast is 1730s, from Fr. pédéraste, from Gk. paiderastes.
Paidos, as in pediatrics or pedophily,
is not the word used in "pederast". Pederasty has no
original link with "paidos" in anything I learned in the past. I'll have to find my archives but in Latin, as used by Catullus in
an exemplary fashion, it means "bottom" ( any bottom, a boys' or a
girl's, adult or still "paidos") I'm sure others can help. It is a
very strange misconception ( mine? It could be, online dics have been very
impressively authoritativw in their "etymological" information and I
speak no Greek)
I vote for S.Blackwell's third hypothesis concerning HH's confessions.
After all, we mustn't forget that Lolita is entirely a creation of HH's. As it
happens with a work of fiction, to discuss legal variations and
interpretation, or varying ages of consent along history, is nice but not
necessary to understand the novel itself. "Lolita", by its presentation of
exploitation, violence, complaisance, perversion, aso aso ... serves in a
most "universal" way, independently of culture or of age. It does
stimulate, as only a work of art can do, the development of one's sensitivity to
existing legal concepts, social blindness, the need to understand what's
happening around us.But, as I see it, the novel Lolita
is "self-explanatory": its treasures lie in the novel per se, and in the
way we deal with what HH can provoke in every reader.
HH brings to us the portrait of a very
powerful twisted mind ( unfortunately easily found anywhere and at all
times):Through HH Nabokov effectively demonstrates how such
minds function.