Resumo de Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

The smuggest of the eighteenth century recognized satire when it hit them in the face. The modernd evaluation of values seems to have deprived them of the ability to distinguish love from lust and rape. Only the editors of The New Republic, speaking in their editorial columns (after the fact of their review, and against their reviewer, who had done the usual with Lolita), smelled a rat. The editors of The New Republic, to their credit, cannot stomach the idea advanced by the critical gentry that no moral judgment of the brutal and tawdry central theme of Lolita should be made. Nabokov of saying that the moral abomination he describes does not matter, since it is no worse than the tawdriness of our social scene ? a view of the fruits of liberalism that very much upsets them. Nabokov is implying some sort of relation between the horror of his plot and the social scene; but they reverse his meaning. The editors of The New Republic, with justice, attack the indecentblindness of Lionel Trilling, who writes of the perverted protagonist of Lolita:"In recent fiction no lover has thought of his beloved with so much tenderness." But if the latter is true, it does not change the situation much. It is so much more exhilarating to the spirit if the evil that human beings have created is castigated by the conscious vigor of a human being, not by the mere accident ofthe mirror, the momentary unpurposeful reflection of evil back upon evil. Above all Lolita seems to an assertion of the power of the comic spirit to wrest delight and truth from the most outlandish materials. It is so much more exhilarating to the spirit if the evil that human beings have created is castigated by the conscious vigor of a human being, not by the mere accident of the mirror, the momentary unpurposeful reflection of evil back upon evil. And now, 50 years later, it?s hard not to see Lolita as a marker for the end of the world (including the larger way in which education has been abandoned) and the shattering of complexartifacts of civilization like the novel. Technically it is brilliant, Peter-de-Vries humor in a major key, combined with an eye for the revealing, clinching detail of social behavior. This is still one of the funniest and one of the saddest books that will be published this yearThere is no clinical,sociological, or mythic seriousness about Lolita, but it flames with atremendous perversity of an unexpected kind.

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