Books where protagonist is the most morally vile character

[Annara Snow]

15 hours ago, Ran said:

I really don't think Nabokov was writing Lolita as a "test" for anyone. He repeatedly expressed that for him the characters and the story all existed to give "aesthetic bliss", that there was "no moral in tow" intended because moralizing and didactism were anathema to him.

Hard to square his view of a purely aesthetic effort -- one which, notably, he claimed far too many critics missed to focus instead on the alleged morality or immorality of his text -- with his intending to test anyone.

Personally I think people are projecting very hard on an imagined author. 

I don't think that "my book is meant to give an aesthetic bliss" meant "you should just admire pretty words and not think at all about the story told".

[Ran]

1 hour ago, Annara Snow said:

I don't think that "my book is meant to give an aesthetic bliss" meant "you should just admire pretty words and not think at all about the story told".

"Thinking about the story told" is not the same as "this is a test for readers", nor is it "there is a moral in it", and certainly it is not "And this and this alone is what the story means."

It is a work of great art precisely because it accepts many different readings.

[Varysblackfyre321]

On 8/1/2021 at 11:07 AM, C.T. Phipps said:

The Broken Empire Trilogy.

Jorg is pretty darn awful.

He turns into a hero though in the end.

[Rippounet]

35 minutes ago, Ran said:

It is a work of great art precisely because it accepts many different readings.

One can argue that Scar is the true hero of The Lion King: he fights for a society based on equality and merit against a caste of hereditary rulers. He rejects the divine right of kings in favor of a more democratic (/popular) system of government.
That doesn't change the fact that he's a murderer who killed his brother and exiled his nephew to take the throne.

There's always some fun discussions to be had on the various interpretations of fictional works ; quite often such discussions are interesting as they reveal much about the intent and biases of the authors. But any person who tries to start such a discussion without acknowledging the obvious and/or intended interpretation has already failed on some level or the other. Best case scenario, they failed at communicating. When the person digs in, presents their interpretation as "common," attempts to say that the obvious/intended interpretation has little to support it, and even starts being insulting to others, they only prove that they couldn't have the "fun" discussion in the first place.

[Annara Snow]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

"Thinking about the story told" is not the same as "this is a test for readers", nor is it "there is a moral in it", and certainly it is not "And this and this alone is what the story means."

It is a work of great art precisely because it accepts many different readings.

There is no "moral" in it because the moral would be way too obvious. The story Nabokov chose is that of a pedophile child abuser, aka the most despised type of person possible, and the most morally black and white story possible. HH is the kind of person even mass murderers and other worst criminals despise in prisons. If told from Dolores' POV, it would be difficult to read and painful, and still probably would not fully manage to convey the horror. Any objective narration - all you are getting is the most obvious story. Because there is no doubt about the morality of HH and that Dolores is a victim.

So instead, Nabokov made HH the narrator and played with the narrative device of Unreliable Narrator, letting HH try to charm the audience with his nice words and literary/cultural references that he tries to justify himself. 

It is a "test" by its nature, so it' seems silly to suggest that Nabokov didn't set out to do it. I'm sure he was an intelligent man, he must have realized that it would end up being a test when written like that.

If someone reads the story and fall for HH's narration and decides that Dolores is the villain and HH is a tragic victim - well, that says a lot about that person, doesn't it? Maybe there is no "single interpretation', but instead, how readers interpret the story through HH's lens says something about them. 

[john]

57 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

There's always some fun discussions to be had on the various interpretations of fictional works ; quite often such discussions are interesting as they reveal much about the intent and biases of the authors. But any person who tries to start such a discussion without acknowledging the obvious and/or intended interpretation has already failed on some level or the other. Best case scenario, they failed at communicating. When the person digs in, presents their interpretation as "common," attempts to say that the obvious/intended interpretation has little to support it, and even starts being insulting to others, they only prove that they couldn't have the "fun" discussion in the first place.

And then there’s those that start off by sarcastically mentioning something that’s already been mentioned, follow that up with a proclamation that they are  the best on this subject and there’s no point in arguing with them while dropping a little taunt that there’s a secret gotcha waiting in the wings … which turns out to be that those that disagree with them are a pedophile. All the while making no attempt to argue but instead expressing frustration that an argument can even be conceived of. And then having the gall to complain about insults when their entire posting manner is a pure expression of superiority.

And I didn’t start the discussion, I raised an additional point about a book that had already been mentioned. I thought it was interesting that Lolita can be conceived as a villain in a thread about villain protagonists. I also didn’t say that the ‘obvious interpretation’ has little to support it. You only think so because I don’t argue the same way as you do, if you can call it that. I make a point and then I defend it as necessary, I don’t prevaricate on all the ways my position can be attacked. I leave that to you and end up disappointed. That you don’t have the mechanics to handle such a discussion without going through the hand holding of first raising the ‘obvious interpretation’ is no fault of mine. If that’s what you want, go back to the junior years of high school, I guess.

Anyway, I’m done with this. You have a tenacity I can’t match, to go along with an arrogance and lack of generosity that I admit I can match, and no doubt do from time to time, but probably should try harder to avoid.

Still happy to discuss whether literature should be enjoyable or worthwhile and whether authors can legitimately include a test for the reader in their book.

[Rippounet]

7 minutes ago, Annara Snow said:

If someone reads the story and fall for HH's narration and decides that Dolores is the villain and HH is a tragic victim - well, that says a lot about that person, doesn't it?

Yeah, Lolita is really a book which you just can't play the "death of the author" game with.

[Ran]

1 hour ago, Annara Snow said:

It is a "test" by its nature

A test of what? Literacy? Anyone who can read it has passed it. 

George Plimpton interviewed Nabokov in The Paris Review many years ago. The opening exchange underscores to me that Nabokov's aim was not about morality, about some character being good or some character being bad:

Quote

 Your  sense  of  the  immorality  of  the  relationship between Humbert Humbert and Lolita is very strong. In Hollywood
and New York, however, relationships are frequent  between  men of  forty and girls very little older than Lolita. They marry-- to no particular public outrage; rather, public cooing. 

 No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong;  it is Humbert's sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere.

Death of the author and all, of course! But very hard for me, personally, to find as more than trifling any interpretation of Lolita that is not primarily driven by aesthetic considerations, because it was the aesthetics of prose and structure, the enchantment of the story, the frisson it caused in a good reader, that were Nabokov's guiding principle and goal. 

 

[Annara Snow]

4 hours ago, Ran said:

A test of what? Literacy? Anyone who can read it has passed it. 

George Plimpton interviewed Nabokov in The Paris Review many years ago. The opening exchange underscores to me that Nabokov's aim was not about morality, about some character being good or some character being bad:

Death of the author and all, of course! But very hard for me, personally, to find as more than trifling any interpretation of Lolita that is not primarily driven by aesthetic considerations, because it was the aesthetics of prose and structure, the enchantment of the story, the frisson it caused in a good reader, that were Nabokov's guiding principle and goal. 

 

And what does that mean for you? What makes the book about aesthetics more than some other? What is its aesthetic? Can you elaborate on that?

So far, you have only been repeating "It's all about aesthetics!" without explaining what that means.

If it has nothing to do with the narrative structure, what is it about? Pretty words? 

[Annara Snow]

4 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Yeah, Lolita is really a book which you just can't play the "death of the author" game with.

I think you can.

If you just focus on the text, while ignoring any statements by the author etc. - that is "Death of the Author" approach. It is what I've been doing in this thread.

On the other hand, you could focus on author's statements, as @Ran has been constantly doing here to try to prove his idea (and taking some statements a little too ltierally, I'd say), then you focusing on the Word of God instread of the text, the opposite of Death of the Author.

[Rippounet]

2 hours ago, Annara Snow said:

I think you can.

If you just focus on the text, while ignoring any statements by the author etc. - that is "Death of the Author" approach. It is what I've been doing in this thread.

Ok. But if we're still talking about whether Lolita is the victim, Nabokov's statements have always matched his text...

From that very same interview referenced by Ran above:

Quote

A third critic has said that you "diminish" your characters "to the point where they become ciphers in a cosmic farce. " I disagree; Humbert, while comic, retains a touching and insistent quality-- that of the spoiled artist.

I would put it differently: Humbert Humbert is a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear "touching." That epithet, in its true, tear-iridized sense, can only apply to my poor little girl. Besides, how can I "diminish" to the level of ciphers, et cetera, characters that I have invented myself? One can "diminish" a biographee, but not an eidolon.

I probably shouldn't have mentioned "death of the author" in the first place (I was never a literature major), but I still don't see how you can use Nabokov's text to ignore his intentions, or vice-versa... Both the text and Nabokov's declarations lead to the same conclusion: "Humbert Humbert is a monster who can write beautifully - about monstrous things." 

@Ran I stand corrected. I think (?). But then, Nabokov kept clarifying (eventually, in what were, for him, very strong terms) that Lolita was but a "poor child" in his book. He may have claimed not to care for public morals, but he obviously disliked Lolita being read as perverse. Isn't there a paradox here?

[john]

15 hours ago, Annara Snow said:

If told from Dolores' POV, it would be difficult to read and painful, and still probably would not fully manage to convey the horror. Any objective narration - all you are getting is the most obvious story. Because there is no doubt about the morality of HH and that Dolores is a victim.

Ok, this seems like a slightly different tack on the argument. So you’re saying it’s better to ignore a character’s voice, to fail to characterise them for the sake of your message (since you’re rejecting the word moral), that this gets the point across more clearly? How could this possibly be?

I hope I’ve made it clear, or Ran has more eloquently than I managed, that Lolita isn’t some kind of crusade against child abuse, but if it were this would be a terrible way to do it. And why are the only three options Humbert’s unreliable POV, Dolores’s POV or an objective narrator, how about you stick to the POV you’ve got but have Humbert back down a little, slip up more, report more direct speech from Dolores that gives her a chance to form a character.

And you should ask yourself why you need to look for a moral (or a message, or an obvious interpretation) to understand/appreciate a piece of fiction in the first place. It’s not Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

[Ran]

13 hours ago, Annara Snow said:

And what does that mean for you? What makes the book about aesthetics more than some other? What is its aesthetic? Can you elaborate on that?

It is precisely because Nabokov writes with such elegance and complexity that Lolita is interesting. In the hands of another writer, this could have been the stuff of pulp literature, lurid but slight: a wicked man and a wronged child, or a temptress nymph and a man enslaved, or a murderous quarrel in a taboo love triangle. The "pretty words" are essential in elevating the text.

13 hours ago, Annara Snow said:

So far, you have only been repeating "It's all about aesthetics!" without explaining what that means.

I personally find it more interesting to discuss Lolita in terms of its aesthetics -- the way Nabokov weaves in parody, the intertextuality (e.g. the deliberate echo of Poe's "Annabel Lee" in the kingdom by the sea in Humbert's Annabel Leigh in his princedom by the sea), his playing with time, the way the narrative parallels Humbert and Quitly as doppelgängers, and certainly the beauty of its prose, the humor and wit in it and the way they lead us inexorably on Humbert's spiraling path downward to his doom -- than trying to draw real world lessons out of it or try to parse its plot for clues as to who the villains and victims are.

I suppose part of the reason why I feel that way is in part because, yes, the author was a noted and perhaps even an extreme aesthete, and I'd like to understand the text in those terms in part because so much literature is not particularly aesthetically-minded, or is aesthetically-minded but is also morally-minded. It makes a change of pace.

(Nabokov's lecture on good readers and good writers is interesting in this regard, to see something of how he himself framed the act of reading and writing a text.)

13 hours ago, Annara Snow said:

If it has nothing to do with the narrative structure, what is it about?

Narrative structure is certainly a part of the aesthetics of any good work, and Lolita has a particularly complex structure where Nabokov plays with time, flashing backward and forward through devices such as the diary, sometimes eliding the relation in time of a passage in relation to things around it. It's a pleasure to read it and see how beautifully it's put together.

 

[Annara Snow]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

It is precisely because Nabokov writes with such elegance and complexity that Lolita is interesting. In the hands of another writer, this could have been the stuff of pulp literature, lurid but slight: a wicked man and a wronged child, or a temptress nymph and a man enslaved, or a murderous quarrel in a taboo love triangle. The "pretty words" are essential in elevating the text.

I personally find it more interesting to discuss Lolita in terms of its aesthetics -- the way Nabokov weaves in parody, the intertextuality (e.g. the deliberate echo of Poe's "Annabel Lee" in the kingdom by the sea in Humbert's Annabel Leigh in his princedom by the sea), his playing with time, the way the narrative parallels Humbert and Quitly as doppelgängers, and certainly the beauty of its prose, the humor and wit in it and the way they lead us inexorably on Humbert's spiraling path downward to his doom -- than trying to draw real world lessons out of it or try to parse its plot for clues as to who the villains and victims are.

I suppose part of the reason why I feel that way is in part because, yes, the author was a noted and perhaps even an extreme aesthete, and I'd like to understand the text in those terms in part because so much literature is not particularly aesthetically-minded, or is aesthetically-minded but is also morally-minded. It makes a change of pace.

(Nabokov's lecture on good readers and good writers is interesting in this regard, to see something of how he himself framed the act of reading and writing a text.)

Narrative structure is certainly a part of the aesthetics of any good work, and Lolita has a particularly complex structure where Nabokov plays with time, flashing backward and forward through devices such as the diary, sometimes eliding the relation in time of a passage in relation to things around it. It's a pleasure to read it and see how beautifully it's put together.

 

Narrative structure is also, first and foremost, that it is a first person POV of sn Unreliable Narrator. The facr that this narrator is a pedophile child abuer is impossible to avoid while discussing the book, just like it's impossible to miss while reading it.

Same thing with the compare and contrast of HH and Clare Quilty. Why is this character used that way? My answer is - because he is a similar kind of monster, but the difference is that Quilty never pretends that he is not. Which is why HH hates him, seeing a reflection of himself, without any of his self-justifying BS.

What would your answer be? 

You seem to have this weird idea that 'aesthetics" means you can (and should) ignore the actual content of the story. This is not how fiction wotks, or human beings work. It's impossible not to form opinioms and make judgments abort the characters while reading. No one reads a story while only thinking "oh I really like the structure of this" while having no opinion on the characters. If most people did, that would probably mean it's a badly written book that fails to engage the reader with the characters and the story. I don't think that's the case here. 

It's funny that you are so adamantly trying to prove that the book can not be seen as a test for the readers- but you are only proving the opposite. You are saying that the story could be read as either about a child abuser and a victim, or about a young vixen and a poor guy whose life she ruined? How is that not a test then? Because those interpretations say a lot about the audience, and the culture and society that fosters ways of thinking where some of these interpretations may be relatively uncommon.

[Annara Snow]

3 hours ago, john said:

Ok, this seems like a slightly different tack on the argument. So you’re saying it’s better to ignore a character’s voice, to fail to characterise them for the sake of your message (since you’re rejecting the word moral), that this gets the point across more clearly? How could this possibly be?

I hope I’ve made it clear, or Ran has more eloquently than I managed, that Lolita isn’t some kind of crusade against child abuse, but if it were this would be a terrible way to do it. And why are the only three options Humbert’s unreliable POV, Dolores’s POV or an objective narrator, how about you stick to the POV you’ve got but have Humbert back down a little, slip up more, report more direct speech from Dolores that gives her a chance to form a character.

And you should ask yourself why you need to look for a moral (or a message, or an obvious interpretation) to understand/appreciate a piece of fiction in the first place. It’s not Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Dude, I don't know if you have really failed to understand each one of my arguments or if you are just determined to use Straw Men. In any case, I'm not gonna bother replying to you - I've said everything in my replies to Ran.

[john]

3 hours ago, Annara Snow said:

Dude, I don't know if you have really failed to understand each one of my arguments or if you are just determined to use Straw Men. In any case, I'm not gonna bother replying to you - I've said everything in my replies to Ran.

What’s a straw man there? And ‘a book doesn’t need a moral when it is obviously about something’ or ‘you have to think about things when you read’ are not arguments.

That the narrator is a rapist murderer is impossible to miss. Agreed. So, having understood that and, with the minimum possible level of basic courtesy, assuming that every other reader also understands it, we move on to discuss other things. As Ran and I have done.

eta - oh yeah, and I just want to add, and then I genuinely will stop talking about Lolita.

RE the ‘test’ - There is no test. There’s no authorial test, there’s no test made up by the reader, there’s no inadvertent test, there’s no conceptual test. The very idea of the test is self important bullshit. The only people who want a test to somehow ensnare the very small subset of readers who are looking for excuses for pedophiles are the much larger subset of readers who are looking for excuses to believe they are more special than others.

[Varysblackfyre321]

@Rippounet

If there is a test for the novel what would be the utilitarian purpose?

I'll admit to having not read Lolita.

Also some books that may meet the op’s criteria Iron gold and Dark age by Pierce Brown. I see the central protagonist to be the fasict warlord who's pov we get to follow.

 

[Rippounet]

19 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

@Rippounet

If there is a test for the novel what would be the utilitarian purpose?

Thanks for asking. TBH, I couldn't solve the paradox(es) of Nabokov's project until tonight. How could Lolita end up being a test inadvertently? How could Nabokov claim his book to have "no moral in tow" while consistently clarifying that Lolita was always meant to be the victim? I no doubt knew the answers once, but I just couldn't remember what they were on my own anymore. I'm not good with literature and literary concepts, I almost always need help.
Ran did give the answer: it is all about aesthetics. But a very specific type of aesthetic project: to create beauty out of sordidness. It's no accident that Nabokov's words echoed Edgar Allan Poe's, who said "The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world." Poe, who toyed with the idea of the love and death of a child-girl in Annabel Lee, and created disturbing beauty in The Crow. Just like Beaudelaire's poem A carcass (Une charogne), Lolita is meant to create beauty and provide bliss to the reader thanks to a challenging subject. It is meant to create something exquisite and aesthetically pleasing out of the morally revulsing, to make literature itself into a sin.
And that's how it becomes a test. To perceive the beauty of the text, the reader needs a modicum of sensitivity to literature. But to truly feel the bliss, the thrill of sin, the special mix of delight and guilt brough only by the forbidden, the reader must know that they are transgressing. Hence why the foreword explicitly warns the reader, and why Humbert Humbert regularly reminds the reader that he is a monster. As one literary scholar put it: to read Lolita as perverse is to miss the point ethically and aesthetically. Because Lolita is all about making the reader complicit, in spite of themselves. That's how Nabokov asserts the power of literature - and his own.

[Zorral]

 Not quite. Because otherwise Nabokov would not have concluded the novel with the scenes we have,  starting with the obvious of how damaged Dolores is, how unhappy, and with him on trial.

I have never been able ever to read many of the scenes in that novel without revulsion and disgust and anger, and sheer hatred for HH, Quilty and the others like them to him HH refers.

The only scenes for me that are filled with aesthetic -- historic -- pleasure are the ones that are of the places, the roads and highways of 1950's USA.

[Larry of the Lawn]

Just an aside, but I reread this thread on my phone, and one of the new board features is that when there is a considerable amount of time that passes between posts we get a fun little note that says "three months later".

It has a bracing narrative effect that I quite enjoy.