Lolita was in the news again earlier this month.
It isn’t the first time the classic 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov has been interrogated and found guilty. It’s a controversial novel, after all, was shocking when originally published, and continues to disturb and spark debate. Narrated by an aging man obsessed with a twelve-year-old girl, latest critics are claiming that if authors don’t intentionally distance themselves from the grossness of their characters, they’re implicated in the immorality.
Daisy Willow of the Daily Beast wrote that Nabokov has “basically been cancelled” for composing Lolita, with “today’
The pushback was quick. Novelist Aaron Gwyn quipped back in response on X:
You’re right, scribbler for The Daily Beast: Nabokov has been so thoroughly ‘cancelled for writing Lolita’ that the 70-year-old novel has never gone out of print, has sold 50 million copies, and is currently outperforming most newly released novels on Amazon (by a lot).
You might think Lolita’s detractors would be religious conservatives, but progressives are leading most of today’s literary cancellations. Lolita isn’t alone.
Certain groups boycotted J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books when they first came out in the early 2000s. Conservative religious parents were unnerved by the wands and witchcraft in the tales about the “boy who lived,” while progressives generally championed the series. Twenty some years on, though, and Rowling has become castigated, not by the religious right, but by the fringes of the far left. How’d that happen?
Rowling kept on being a normal progressive while the rest of the tribe moved onto more radical waters. Rowling’s views on biological sex and questioning some of the consequences of the transgender movement have put her in the far left’s crosshairs time and again. Rowling is also a big fan of Lolita, once noting how its final lines “made her cry.” She got blasted for that, too.
Today people who write (and read) books that don’t overtly champion a certain political point of view are to be denied entry into the camp of the enlightened. If authors don’t pay homage to liberal consensus, they’re “problematic.” Enjoying Harry Potter is harder than it used to be. There are consequences for loving the work of a traitor.
The leftists trying to cancel Lolita and Rowling have a problem that goes deeper than their simple distaste for these books. They misunderstand why we read fiction, and where its true power lies.
C. S. Lewis wrote that we have to read books on their own terms, suspending, for the time being, our judgment in order to receive what the book is trying to say. We might end up hating the book, but at least we gave it a chance. Today, however, if you like Lolita, it means you “approve” of the narrator’s heinous inclinations. If you still read Harry Potter, you could be a transphobe. If you don’t wrestle long and hard with Ernest Hemingway’s series of failed marriages, you don’t get to sit back and enjoy For Whom the Bell Tolls. Critics assume that Nabokov approved of his character’s evil just because he, well, wrote about it.
I don’t mean to say that literature shouldn’t involve moral, political, or religious themes or questions, or that novelists can’t have strong points of view. Just read The Brothers Karamazov or Anna Karenina. These are deeply moral, even religious, novels that ask the ultimate questions of our existence. But these books aren’t cloaking an agenda in a story; they provoke contemplation through story. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings lacks overt reference to a God figure. And yet, Tolkien himself said that the “religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”
While authors do have moral failings, and while those do matter, it’s essential to remember that the novelist is an artist, an observer, and a storyteller. They are not a pundit.
Fiction, as Rowling posted on X, is not intended to be a human resources manual. It’s meant to be a compelling catalog of the human experience, an imaginative excursion into the minds of others. Stories reorient our perspective, not by telling us what to believe, but by showing us something we might have otherwise missed or need to confront. It cultivates the imagination to help us see the world in a slightly altered light, which might end up influencing how we decide to act. It offers characters who are worth emulating for their virtue and characters, like the narrator in Lolita, who serve as a warning to the world. At its best, fiction does more than simply dictate and instruct — it also delights.
Peter Biles is a writer and a contributor for Young Voices. A novelist as well as an essayist, he is the author of Hillbilly Hymn, Keep, and Through the Eye of Old Man Kyle.
