Lolita: A sexual prodigy

 

 

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita reached United States on August 18, 1958, after creating publishing furore in Paris and later United Kingdom. A literary pièce de résistance, Lolita blurred the line between explicit and exquisite to the extent that few families dared to christen the girl child Lolita thereafter! Sharon Prabhakar, singer and theatre artist – famously Evita – suggests such tales are best left to fiction…

I’ve always admired people who turned the mundane into magic. After all, Newton discovered gravity; man took his first step on the moon; penicillin and the modern medicines have saved life.

On the flipside, the mini, the bikini, high heels, low heels all add up to making the world a fun place, but I’m afraid I draw the line at anything that robs children of their innocence. Childhood is a precious short-lived gift. Children should be protected, guided and nurtured.

When I first read Lolita, I wondered why this young tender girl yearned for adulthood… it would be her anyway in matter of time! A child’s emotions need decoding, not accelerating. A child’s confused emotion needs figuring out, they are not to be celebrated.

The printed word runs the risk of acceptability in society’s mind. It’s the risk creative people take when they inflict their views on the world by default. You see, by default, words do trigger images. It would be very simple for me to say ‘to each his own’ and I do. But there is one nagging thought in my mind – if words do trigger images, then images trigger feelings and reactions. This is a proven fact.

This is how wars happen, soldiers are programmed with, you guessed it, words.

I’m not a protagonist; you asked me for my opinion and I’ve given you the same. The world is not in a nice place currently – wars, rapes, incest, killings... all in the name of the higher power – it’s all happening and it’s all very frightening.

Had you asked me about creative controversies some 15 years ago, my answer, perhaps, would have been quite different. It would have been one of challenge and pushing the envelope. Today, we need to spread goodness and healing

So all creative gurus you have the power to inspire, you have the power to embalm the world and make it a safer place and we can start by giving back our children their lost innocence...