McFate

It can be difficult, or at least problematic, to characterize obscenity in this day and time; we're so jaded, careless and personally over-exposed in ways that even the most extroverted would have found obscene just decades earlier that it can be difficult to establish benchmarks in any way other than arbitrarily.

So we might harken back to other eras for contrast. Now, often we do this to verify and showcase the fruits of our own openness, to show how prudish our forebears were in service to illuminating our own sense of civilization - unmindful of the connections we re-establish to our present and prudish pageantry.

Nonetheless, the shocking travesties of the past do carry a certain quaintness in our minds when harvested this much later, set in a frames of 1s and 0s and ogled, as it were. They comfort us, in a way, and reassure with objective relief about how things have changed for the better. And have they.

Take, for instance, Nabokov's Lolita. Dealing as it does with one of three taboos of mid-century book publishing, the then-unknown Nabokov, in order to safeguard his tenured status at Cornell, tried to publish the book anonymously. After being rejected by Simon & Schuster, Viking, New Directions and many others because of its pornographic content, Lolita was finally published under his own name in 1955 by Olympia Press in Paris.

The initial run of 5,000 sold out and brought him recognition in Europe. Heated debates by critics in England - both on the book and about the relative safety of young girls - captured the interest of U.S. publishers, leading to the first American edition by Putnam and Sons in 1958. With the repetitive use of words like obscene, incest, scandal and pornography in subsequent book reviews, Lolita's commercial success was assured, and further, a lesson had been learned. But what lesson? One, obviously, that societal mores can be overwhelmed by financial performance. It is silly to even ask whether the successful book, rather than the supposedly pornographic manuscript, has more value.

If a societal taboo can be overwhelmed by financial success, when it is not one but the other which has by far the more deleterious implication, can we determine which is which? The question is, which is more obscene - a cunning literary treatment of an adult man's fascination with a pre-pubescent girl, or abandoning a supposedly absolute moral line because it is a proven money-maker?

Now don't you feel better?