Subject
Auberon Waugh: Book of the Century (fwd)
Date
Body
Book of the Century: 63: Auberon Waugh makes his choice
(Daily Telegraph, London, 3rd April 1999)
I was reluctant to appoint V.V.Nabokov's Lolita (1955) as the Book of the
Century after William Boyd's eloquent case for preferring the same author's
Pale Fire (1962). Pale Fire is undoubtedly the more finely written of the
two. My reason for preferring Lolita is that Pale Fire had a serious,
polemical intention which failed. Lolita, on the other hand, whatever its
intention, has had a profound effect on attitudes which reaches into many
aspects of everyday life.
First I should dispose of Pale Fire with its 999 lines of gibberish verse
followed by some 250 pages of analytical commentary by a madman obsessed with
a fantasy that he is the exiled king of Zembla. Its purpose was to ridicule
the pretension and egomania of academic criticism. Partly because Nabokov
overestimated the intelligence of his readership, there was no move to reform
or close down the English departments of universities.
The effect of Lolita, by contrast, has been enormous. I imagine that every
Daily Telegraph reader will know that it describes the lecherous desire,
later tortured love, of a 37-year-old professor for a 12-year-old schoolgirl
called Dolores Haze, who seduces and later deserts him. The book has all the
perverse humour, the irony and unexpectedness of Nabokov's other
masterpieces. Its main trouble lay in his suggestion that a significant
proportion of pre-pubescent girls may be prepared to exploit their sexuality
to grown-up males.
In the furious rejection of this idea, a new morality has been born. The word
"paedophilia" did not exist in the English language in 1955, when Nabokov
wrote Lolita. Paederasty referred exclusively to homosexual relations between
men and boys. Heterosexual activity between men and young girls was known to
exist, but it was thought to be confined to the family, usually working-class
families (almost certainly the product of poor housing). Nobody talked about
it.
Forty years after Lolita became generally available it seems we can talk
about nothing else. Whole areas of local and national government are devoting
to discouraging it. Teachers live in terror of being unjustly denounced. More
important than that, absolutely everyone agrees that paedophilia is wrong.
People may frown on murder and rape, but the first can be understandable and
the second is confused by male suspicions that it may be impossible, even
when it is not the invention of some hysterical or vindictive woman. But we
all agree that paedophilia is wrong. At last we have a common, shared
morality. This is quite an achievement for a mere novelist.
[transcribed by Charles HW]