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Of course, Lolita is neither a pornographic novel nor pornographic film. But most of the criticism of both the 1955 novel and the 1962 and 1998 films debates whether it is or is not pornographic and ignores the adaptation of Nabokov's novel, particularly the aesthetic problems of visualizing a rhetorically rich text. My theory is that this novel triumphs because of its hero/narrator's literary language; the films ignore it and create other interpretations of the main character. But literary characters are inseparable from the language that forms them. In stripping the hero, Humbert Humbert, of the novel's linguistic leaps into thought, memory, and imagination, laden with literary allusions, the film directors leave a naked character, a cinematic Emperor without clothes. He is no longer a poet, obsessed with creating his aesthetic dream; he is a pedophile.
Gentlemen and women of the jury, as Humbert would say, here's my telling example of how the films do not adequately translate the language of the novel: In the novel, Nabokov writes of Humbert's first glimpse of Dolores Haze aka Lolita in 38 typeset lines: "I was still walking behind Mrs. Haze and ... there was my [lost] Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses.
"It was the same child-the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair....And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess (lost, kidnapped, discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at the king and his hounds) . . . the twenty-five years I had lived since then, tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished."
He goes on about how he found it "most difficult to express with adequate force that flash, that shiver, that impact of passionate recognition" as his "glance slithered over the kneeling child." While he "passed by her in my adult disguise (a great big handsome hunk of movieland manhood), the vacuum of my soul managed to suck in every detail of her bright beauty". . . of that "princedom by the sea" he says in parody of Poe, ending with "All I know is that while the Haze woman and I went down the steps into the breathless garden, my knees were like reflection of knees...