Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0003800, Mon, 22 Mar 1999 11:49:47 -0800

Subject
Re: Australia's Senator Draper and the Lolita Movie (fwd)
Date
Body
Many thanks to Paul Tudor for his coverage of the 'Lolita' affair in Oz. We
learn that the assiduous congressperson Draperforced
> herself through the novel Lolita. Many times, Trish Draper wanted to pitch
> it, "just rip it up and throw it in the bin" to end her "traumatising
> experience". But she had to read it, says the South Australian MP, to have
> credibility in her personal battle to have the new film version banned -

Quite so., And further...

In fact, Draper has seen the original film already,
> presumably with minimal traumatisation: "I vaguely remember James Mason",
> who played Humbert Humbert, the middle-aged man who falls for his teenage
> stepdaughter and kills her mother in the process of seducing the child.

And with minimal comprehension, too! I hate to climb onto an old bandwagon, but
I am adding Ms Draper to my list of people so stupefied by their own
righteousness as to be unable to follow the simplest plot-features of book or
film. Humbert didn't kill Charlotte in the book, he didn't do it in Kubrick's
film, and I'm assured he didn't do it in Lyne's film either. That there is a
causal relationship between Charlotte's discovery of HH's real intentions and
her subsequent accident is undeniable. But in no other sense did Humbert kill
her. Why censorious types in Australia, as well as the British and American
examples previously exposed on this list, should want to believe this of
Humbert, possibly the world's least plausible murderer (as the Quilty affair
shows) I do not know.

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