‘Lolita’ Escaped Obscenity Laws and Cancel Culture

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/books/review/lolita-obscenity-cancel-culture-emily-mortimer.html

by leephillips • 5 years ago

38 76 5 years ago

I’m proud of the Times for publishing this fine appreciation of the great novel, especially in the context of their continuing slide into cowardice. But I was surprised to see its title set in quotes, not only in the headline but throughout the text. I had assumed that the Times had gotten a handle on basic typographic conventions by now.

maxerickson2• 5 years ago

They publish their own style guide. Kind of tedious to bitch about them staying consistent with it. It's not like English is actually prescriptive.

leephillips5• 5 years ago

I’ll cop to the tedious bit. But consider that, while “English” may not be prescriptive (odd idea, that), people can be. For example, the people who wrote this style guide: they were exactly prescribing usage for Times editors and writers. Yes, the thing I am tediously complaining about follows this guide. But the guide is wrong.

blakesterz• 5 years ago

They have an entire book on the basic typographic conventions they're supposed to follow there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Manual_of_S...

The one that always looks odd to me is C.I.A. and F.B.I.

leephillips5• 5 years ago

Me, too. It’s quaint, but distracting. But remember that for a good part of its history they had a period after the title of the paper on the front page.

quesera• 5 years ago

I had assumed that the Times had gotten a handle on basic typographic conventions by now.

NYT sets typographic conventions. For decades. They publish an entire in-depth guide on their style, and they adhere to it with great consistency.

They've thought a whole lot more about the issue than you, or I, ever have or ever will.

PS: Beware The New Yorker and The Atlantic.

leephillips5• 5 years ago

I applaud the New Yorker’s lonely persistence in using the dieresis.

cafard• 5 years ago

The obscenity laws are left behind, but the cancel culture is on Lolita's heels. There was an admonitory letter in the Sunday Book Review section of the Times earlier this year.

sigzero• 5 years ago

If Dr. Seuss can be cancelled everything is up for grabs.

kolektiv5• 5 years ago

Sigh. Nobody has cancelled Dr. Seuss. The publisher has decided not to publish a small number of his works which contain some stereotypes and characterisations which are pretty far from what most people would see as "fine" now. Nobody has made them do this, nobody is going round collecting and burning copies already in print. Many books stop being published all the time for all kinds of reasons - being out of step with contemporary mores and experiences is, and always has been, one of them.

tareqak• 5 years ago

False. The company that sells the books decided to cease publication and sales.

Six Dr. Seuss books — including “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” and “If I Ran the Zoo” — will stop being published because of racist and insensitive imagery, the business that preserves and protects the author’s legacy said Tuesday.
The other books affected are “McElligot’s Pool,” “On Beyond Zebra!,” “Scrambled Eggs Super!,” and “The Cat’s Quizzer.”
The decision to cease publication and sales of the books was made last year after months of discussion, the company, which was founded by Seuss’ family, told AP.

[0] https://apnews.com/article/dr-seuss-books-racist-images-d8ed...

harryf• 5 years ago

The endgame is like the burning of The Library of Alexandria. 2000 years from now scholars (assuming there are any) will talk of a "missing civilisation" that mysteriously left no cultural traces.

strathmeyer2• 5 years ago

Anything can be ruined by evil.

anaisbetts• 5 years ago

I don't know about you, but after reading https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dr-seuss-racist-cartoons, I think Dr. Seuss kind of deserves it. Like, that is full-blown, hard-R Racism.

sandworm1012• 5 years ago

> ..everything is up for grabs

Of course. This is popular media. Nothing is ever beyond criticism and sometimes that criticism leads to curtailment of broadcast or public availability. That's what freedom of speech/choice means. No movie/book/show is forever beyond reproach. Nobody can be forced to watch or read something. We are all free to organize our friends to stop watching too. When coupled to a free and competitive market, freedom of speech means unpopular works will disappear from shelves.

eplanit• 5 years ago

People should buy physical copies of movies and literature they enjoy or respect, because we're in bizarre farenheit 451 territory.

draugadrotten• 5 years ago

No. Having a taboo book in your zoom credibility bookshelf is a very bad idea.

sandworm1012• 5 years ago

If we fear that they might not be available in the future, yes, buy the physical copies. But if we fear that ownership of such material may be made illegal in the future, purchasing of objects is probably not the safest thing to do. A digital copy of an illegal book acquired anonymously and then hidden carefully using encryption is less likely to be discovered in the back of a closet years after you have forgotten you owned it.

If anyone here keeps a porn collection saved on a drive somewhere, or on a bookshelf, be careful. Mistakes happen. Struggling upstart actors lie about their age. Material that was purchased legally on day one can suddenly become very dangerous to possess on day two. The laws in this area are draconian. If you have any reason to believe the material dangerous, such as a website disappearing for no apparent reason, delete the material. (This is not rare. It happens regularly. Though they would never admit it publicly, nearly every large porn studio has had some sort of issue at some point.)

Of course I would never advocate for the breaking of laws. If material is deemed illegal to possess then it must be destroyed. I speak only in the hypothetical in order to better educate those in authority on how they might discover and destroy illegal works of art.

strathmeyer2• 5 years ago

Books were burned not digital copies.

maxwell2• 5 years ago

Due to lack of interest.

zajio1am• 5 years ago

Why physical copies? You can keep DRM-less digital copies on your storage, and you are as safe as with physical copies.

andagainagain• 5 years ago

People should buy things they want to own. When you rent things, there is explicitly no guarantee you'll have access to it later. Books, music, videos - the only way you can guarantee you'll have access to it is by owning it.

That said, we are not even remotely in farenheit 451 territory. And the author of this article doesn't spend much effort even trying to claim or defend that position.

ltbarcly33• 5 years ago

In Lolita the pedophile is explicitly a creep. He's the bad guy, it's an exploration of a sick mind.

Not that content matters at all in this debate. Certainly I would say if you wanted to cancel Lolita, you would have to cancel Silence of the Lambs and any other fiction about serial killers, right? Since abusing and then killing them and then eating them is at least as bad as abusing them, but not killing them and not eating them?

However, I don't think that really gets to the heart of this. Morons have been locally banning books since books have existed. This isn't new at all. I think the real 'story' here is the response to it. Any time some small confederacy of imbeciles manages to announce that something is 'canceled', the media blasts it through a loud speaker and there is a huge response.

The fraction of people who change their behavior in any way due to something being canceled is tiny. Most people just don't care. The actual way these pressure campaigns work is to convince people that decision makers personally know, and who are not really paying attention, that some situation is vaguely 'icky'.

For example, the whole thing with Gina Carino. What she said was stupid and ignorant, but I doubt it would have reduced the popularity of The Mandalorian by even 1%. However, in the minds of Disney executives, people in their social circle might judge them if they keep Carino around. The exec's friends won't know the details, all they'll know is Disney didn't fire someone 'gross'. It will be a topic of conversation, the execs will have to talk about the situation at parties, and it's not easy to explain a nuanced decision. It's so much easier to just fire someone. So, because these campaigns get picked up by the media and amplified, they can get people fired because it's just the easiest way for those making the decisions wash their hands of the situation, even though maybe 0.001% of people really care about the situation at all. (For the record, I think Gina is a horrible actress and the stuff she said was extremely ignorant, so I don't care if she gets fired or not. The point is, I don't really care, if they didn't fire her I would still watch the show.)

That's why I think the content doesn't matter at all. Any book is equally likely to end up canceled, all it takes is a handful of people who are trying to make a name for themselves by being outraged on Twitter, and for the media to keep amplifying the phony, self serving outrage they are Tweeting. At that point, it's just easier for people making decisions to ban whatever content or person the fake outrage is targeting.

Mediterraneo10• 5 years ago

In Lolita the pedophile is explicitly a creep. He's the bad guy, it's an exploration of a sick mind.

Nabokov explored infatuations with "nymphets" in multiple works, Lolita was just the most famous. This has led many (even big fans of the writer) to assume that Nabokov did feel a certain attraction that he apparently never acted on, though this observation does not imply that he or the works deserve condemnation or scorn.

ojnabieoot3• 5 years ago

However, in the minds of Disney executives, people in their social circle might judge them if they keep Carino [sic] around.

This is too reductive an understanding. A far bigger issue is that many many actors, technicians, directors, and so on probably don’t want to work with someone like Carano - particularly nonwhite and non-cis people, but also outspoken progressives like Mark Hamill. She isn’t merely very conservative, but a racist nutjob. She’s bad for business even if she doesn’t immediately impact viewership.

This is by the way an issue of “cancel culture” that is too often ignored: it’s not just a moral judgment about an individual, it’s a judgment that they can’t be trusted to treat nonwhites/LGBT/etc with decency. Or, in the case of Dr. Seuss, it’s a judgment by the estate that Seuss’s legacy is tarnished by the outdated racist imagery he used and that some works shouldn’t be continually reprinted.

ltbarcly33• 5 years ago

Whether she actually is racist (and I agree she seems to be given the facts available) doesn't seem to matter regarding Disney's decision.

My point is that these decisions aren't made in any way based on anything but social pressure. As you mention, the people working with her have known she is a crazy racist for a long time, and nothing was done. She got fired after 'public outrage' took hold. Media amplification of tweets is not a good system for truth finding.

As for Dr. Seuss, I'm not defending racist images. Those images have been in those books for nearly 100 years though, and almost every child and adult in the western world has seen them over and over and over. Many probably noticed them. It may well be overdue to address them. Twitter driven social pressure campaigns trying to eliminate the entire library of his books overnight by personally targeting a handful of people with the power to pull the books from shelves isn't a reasonable way for society to make these decisions.

Spinnaker_• 5 years ago

Humbert is a creep and absolutely the bad guy. The genius is that he's also a sympathetic character and the reader is forced to struggle with that. Very few works are able to do this so well. It's the reason why it's a masterpiece as well as why it's so uncomfortable.

hugh4life• 5 years ago

If you want to get canceled, say that Vladimir Vladimirovich was obviously partly confessing when writing a story about Humbert Humbert.

Hiding in Plain Sight: Nabokov and Pedophilia https://www.jstor.org/stable/40754944?seq=1

crumbshot• 5 years ago

The headline doesn't really match the detail of the article, which notes that the work was subjected both to the obscenity laws of the time and what has been contemporarily rebranded as 'cancel culture':

It had been initially rejected by all the big publishing houses in the United States, so Nabokov resorted to the pornographic French publisher Olympia Press, only to have it banned in France and also in Argentina, New Zealand, South Africa and Australia. In England, all copies were seized by customs from 1955 until 1959, when it was finally published to huge consternation and controversy.

tarboreus• 5 years ago

This is actually a great article. The Times seems really split down the middle right now, you get these great articles that would fit in with the paper at its peak, and then you have some real dross. They're basically becoming their own sort of tech giant, like Google, they have tons of factions and the right hand doesn't know what the left, top, bottom, charm, strange, up, down, or left hands are doing.

leephillips5• 5 years ago

They’ve always had a dizzying mixture of world-class, unique reportage and writing, and idiotic filler. What’s happening now, which is new and depressing, is stuff like firing a top reporter because the Daily Beast recycled some boring complaints by a couple of teenage girls.

tablespoon4• 5 years ago

This is actually a great article. The Times seems really split down the middle right now, you get these great articles that would fit in with the paper at its peak, and then you have some real dross. They're basically becoming their own sort of tech giant, like Google, they have tons of factions and the right hand doesn't know what the left, top, bottom, charm, strange, up, down, or left hands are doing.

Which really makes the people who talk about it as a monolithic boogeyman look pretty foolish.

hprotagonist• 5 years ago

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/14/nabokov-steinb...

America construes itself as a game that anybody can play, and Russians know how to play it well, as we learn and relearn. In “Lolita,” Nabokov gave us a copy of ourselves we couldn’t tell from the original. No American writer has done the reverse—has written a novel about Russia that understood the country so profoundly, and that Russians themselves read widely and loved. “Lolita” is an American book in a way that no novel by a native-born American is a Russian book. It’s an American masterpiece of the atrocious-hilarious, like “Huckleberry Finn.” We encounter these works as best we can, and fail to civilize them, and pass by in our generations, and they remain.

‘Lolita’ Escaped Obscenity Laws and Cancel Culture

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