“Lolita, misunderstanding a fantasy”, on Arte: the story of a disastrous misunderstanding

ARTE – WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 13 AT 10:35 P.M. – DOCUMENTARY

With her glasses, her lollipop and her red lipstick (Stanley Kubrick’s movie poster), Lolita has long (yet?) Been seen as the forbidden fruit that begs to be eaten. However, Lolita is a little girl – she is 12 years old – which does not prevent her from saying: “Look what you did to me. I should call the police and tell them you raped me ”, as Vladimir Nabokov writes in his book Lolita, published in 1955 in France, and three years later in the United States.

So how did an abused child become an erotic icon in the collective imagination? How did we arrive at such a disastrous misunderstanding? The documentary of Arte, Lolita, mistaken about a fantasy, intends to take stock of the issue.

First by going back to the genesis of the book. Vladimir Nabokov knew that the book would be a time bomb: in fact, it exploded in the mid-1950s. By attacking the taboo of pedophilia, the American writer of Russian origin is shocking. Deemed immoral and perverse, the manuscript is refused by all the major American publishers, and it is finally in France that the book will be published, thanks to Maurice Girodias, founder of The Olympia Press, where these books are published. read only with one hand – which Nabokov ignores then.

“A poor child who is debauchery”

The Home Office has it banned – censorship will last for a year. But, as often, the sulphurous atmosphere which surrounds the book – and displeases Nabokov, who wanted a literary triumph and not a scandal – attracts many readers: the book soon became a worldwide success.

In 1962, Stanley Kubrick wears Lolita on screen, putting aside the pedophile side of the story, which contributes to fuel misunderstanding and to make Lolita an antonomasia, figure of speech which consists in using a proper name as a common noun. Invited, in 1975, on the set of the program “Apostrophes”, Vladimir Nabokov corrects a scolding Bernard Pivot: Lolita is not a perverse young girl, but “A poor child who is debauchery”.

But it is undoubtedly in Japan where the image of Lolita has been the most perverted, as evidenced by the use of young girls in manga, in which child pornography is permitted.

A total misunderstanding for Vanessa Springora. For the author of Consent (Grasset, 2020), Lolita is a condemnation of pedophilia: “I felt taken into account thanks to this book. I identified with her a lot ”, affirms the one who, at 13, met a man thirty-six years her senior – Gabriel Matzneff. When the question is asked, at the end of the documentary, on the possibility or not of publishing a work such as Lolita At the time of #metoo, Vanessa Springora is adamant: to deprive oneself of such a masterpiece would be “Aberrant”.