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The question about everything was, would it bring a blush into the cheek of the young person? And the inconvenience of the young person was that, according to Mr Podsnap, she seemed always liable to burst into blushes when there was no need at all. There appeared to be no line of demarcation between the young person’s excessive innocence, and another person’s guiltiest knowledge. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend L olita is an entirely different kettle of fish. All the works under discussion are necessarily very different from each other, of course. Each of the books entailed different difficulties, and the conditions in which they were—and sometimes were not—published were different as well. The case of Lolita differs greatly from all those we have looked at so far, both in itself and in terms of the history of its publication. Social mores and legal precedents changed during the mid twentieth century with remarkable speed, and at a certain point, around 1957 in both the United States and England—one hundred years after the trials of Flaubert and Baudelaire and the passing of England’s first obscenity law—literary prosecutions became subject to a law of diminishing return. Unprecedentedly , and in a remarkably short span, each decision in favor of the publisher of an “obscene” work made it all the less likely that further obscenity prosecutions would lead to suppression of the book in question. The eventual result was, of course, that such prosecutions ceased altogether , around the same time that the Motion Picture Production Code was finally being replaced by the Ratings Code in the United States, and the inheritors of the Vice Society mantle became increasingly preoccupied with nonliterary forms of objectionable material (of course, the Legion of Decency had already been exerting immense influence in Hollywood since before the Hays Code was instituted). Before 1957, conditions chapter seven  Vladimir Nabokov Lolitigation 187 had been very different: whatever the individual outcome, obscenity cases, far from contributing to a free-speech snowball effect such as occurred in the late 1950s, had tended rather to spur both governmental and social forces to renewed efforts to control artistic production. Flaubert’s victory made the suppression of some of Baudelaire’s poems all but inevitable; the finding against Jonathan Cape in the British Well of Loneliness trial made publishers even less willing to take on books like Lady Chatterley and also discouraged others from attempting to tackle the subject of homosexuality ; and so on. But in the 1950s things began changing rapidly. Nabokov’s novel, which he finished in 1954 and was unable at first to publish in the United States and therefore brought out in Paris in 1955, came along just before these matters reached a head, with the Roth case in the United States in 1957, and the revised Obscene Publications Act in England shortly thereafter, each of which resulted in the successive Chatterley decisions in the relevant countries. Lolita effectively broke the by-then established rules of rule-breaking, in that it diverged radically from the twentieth-century pattern of books that violated the bounds of acceptability with four-letter words and descriptions of sex acts. It bears as little resemblance to Tropic of Cancer, with the latter’s wild antiartistry, as it does to the humorless didacticism of The Well of Loneliness or Lady Chatterley’s Lover. And, although Nabokov considered Ulysses the greatest novel of the twentieth century, his own linguistic extravagance and adherence to the ideal of artistic integrity have little in common with the sort of formal experimentation increasingly favored by Joyce (his admiration for the Irish writer stops short at the defiantly experimental Finnegans Wake). In addition to the literary ways in which it differs from its censored predecessors, Lolita also offers an exception to the history of literary censorship in two further particulars: first, it is the only English-language work to have been banned for obscenity in France but not in America; and second, its subject —what Humbert Humbert, its narrator, lyrically calls “nympholepsy” or, more clinically, “pederosis,” now known as pedophilia—has only become more taboo in the half-century since its initial publication. Lolita has, bizarrely enough, the most in common with The Well of Loneliness in terms of the censorship history of “classic” works, in that both managed to offend solely on the basis of their subject matter and in the absence of either vulgar language or explicit descriptions of sexual encounters . (It is...

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