The Magic in the Forest (or in the Trees)
The Magic in the Forest (or in the Trees)
Lolita is disturbing – when I actually step back and think about it: A man who falls deeply, madly in love with a young girl, never really notices that at times she is unwilling to stay with him, and objectifies her, never troubling to learn about her internal self. Everyone, please find your best teenage voices and say it with me: Creeeee-pyyyyyyyyy! (Yes, feel free to disagree with my assessment.) But the beauty – if you can call it that; sometimes it seems more like a terrible beauty – is that Nabokov’s writing is so intricate, so wondrously shadowy and complex that I found myself fully engrossed in the story. I barely registered warnings going off in the back of my head, the ones reminding me of the implications of Humbert’s behavior. It’s not a particularly pleasant feeling: Beauty over badness – I can’t see the forests for the trees. But that is the joy of Nabokov, and the power of his linguistic skills
On another note, Humbert calls the nymphet “magical” – a young woman who catches men in her spell. But when I read his description of nymphets, however, I thought not of spells and enchantments but instead of the many discussions the media has nowadays about overly sexualized/promiscuous young children. It’s all too common – both the discussion and, I believe, the actual presence of children with too much sexual knowledge – but we seem to blame the internet and technology instead of magic spells for modern-day nymphets. I wonder what a modern-day Humbert would think of this. Would he consider magic the cause of his desires? Would he blame the nymphets themselves, for acting promiscuously and “asking” to be seen as sexual beings? Would he see a society that adores youth: smooth, burnished, airbrushed pseudo-youth? And how would he be treated today? He would be diagnosed with a disorder, that’s for sure. Pedophilia is the DSM-IV (the text that lists all commonly accepted psychological/psychiatric disorders for the US) under paraphilia (sexual deviation). I wonder if Humbert (and Nabokov, because he makes no secret of his distrust of psychiatry, especially Freudian psychoanalysis) would see his disorder as such, and especially as not just a disorder, but also a deviation. But he might just spin a web of words, and make me forget all over again.
Tags: language, promiscuity, psychiatry, psychology
