shocking

by Scunty

Posted to Utterances on 2003-08-19 09:52:00

Parent message is 503293
i honestly don’t understand why people have to do this.

Nabokov wasn’t a “shock artist” and a lot of the time most of these so called shock artists are in fact making a valid social point. In the case of Nabokov (extricated from his homeland by communism and stalked by nazis), he wrote about social change (very adroitly may i add), the main themes to his work echo Dosteyevsky, moral turpitude (invitation), dislocation from the populist trend (Bend Sinister) and in the case of Lolita the destruction of innocence.
It seems plain stupid (you seem to have touched a nerve here) to say Nabokov intended to shock and outrage the moral majority (should that be Moron Majority perhaps). The characters in his books, humbert humbert included define their own world, ultimately this is what everyone does, it’s why no one is perfect and that we are all differant, if we all saw the world the same way (twelve year old pop stars as gods and liiving lives through the plots of our favorite soaps) then we might as well admit to being thoughtless automatons. Read more nabokov don’t just believe what the critics tell you to think based on a single book. Creating controversy is just presenting a different world.