TERRIBLE events like the child abuse scandal that is continuing to unfold in Belgium don't just make us face the unthinkable. They also force us to re think assumptions including the ones we generally make about art, culture and censorship. In Britain and America, Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita, about a middle aged man's sexual obsession with a 12 year old girl, has become the focus for an emotional debate about the role of art in the creation of images that can serve to normalise paedophilia.
A new film of the book by Adrian (Fatal Attraction) Lyne, a director whose works' most obvious quality has been crass misogyny, is in post production. In spite of star casting - Jeremy Irons as Humbert Humbert, Melanie Griffiths as Lolita's mother - American distributors, aware that tolerance for sexualised images of children and sympathetic portrayals of paedophiles has evaporated, seem reluctant to take it on.
In some ways what is happening now is a replay of what happened to the book itself 40 years ago. Then, no respectable American publisher would touch Nabokov's novel. The novelist William Styron, who tried to get Random House to publish it, was told by the editor in chief Hiram Haydn: "That loathsome novel will be published over my dead body." He had, he said, a daughter the same age as the abused girl in the novel.
In later years, after Lolita became an international bestseller and one of the iconic books of the modern age, Haydn was seen in the same light as the record company executive who turned down The Beatles. Is it time to revise that view, and to see him as a brave man who stood out against the fashionable view that Nabokov's literary genius outweighed all questions of morality? Is Lolita, one of the first books to emerge into the mainstream from the realms of pornography (it was first published by the Olympia Press in Paris, much better known for titles like White Thighs and The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe), about to be the first modern classic to disappear back into the underworld of pornography?
These are not stupid questions. Childhood is defined by culture, not by nature. One of the reasons that literary representations of childhood are so important is that, historically, the modern idea of childhood was, as Neil Postman put it, "an outgrowth of literacy". With the invention of the printing press adulthood was gradually equated with literacy, and a child became, in effect, someone who was still at school, learning to read.
And just as the idea of childhood is a cultural construct, so is the contemporary sensitivity to sexualised images of children. It is astonishing, for instance to look now at the photographs of preadolescent girls taken by Charles Dodgson, the author - as Lewis Carroll - of the Alice books that themselves did so much to shape our perceptions of children. His obsessively gathered images of wholly or partially naked girls are much more directly sexual than the Calvin Klein ads that caused such an uproar in the United States last year. Many of them are, in fact, child pornography. These days, their discovery would spark headlines of the "Top Author and Oxford Don Revealed as Child Porn Sex Beast" variety.
Dodgson's case is worth remembering in the row over Lolita, because it is a reminder that there is no straight road between the values of life and art. Even though it was written by a child pornographer, and even though we have to read it with a certain dark knowledge at the back of our minds, Alice in Wonderland is still a wonderful book. Not only does it continue to give great pleasure to children but it also helps to sustain the idea of childhood as a special and protected domain.
And roughly the same thing is true of Lolita; the fact that we cannot read it innocently doesn't mean that we shouldn't read it at all Apart altogether from its intrinsic virtues - its brilliant reflections on language and narrative - it is a presence that cannot be made to disappear. Its title, and the word "nymphet" which Nabokov coined, have entered the language, carrying with them an undoubted encouragement for paedophiles. But what is in the language doesn't go away merely because right thinking people decide that it should.
THIS is why demands for Lolita to be sent back to the exterior darkness of pornography are misconceived. At the very least, we need the book in order to understand where some of the images and assumptions that contribute to modern culture's erosion of childhood come from. At the most, the book's imaginative excursion into a world that most of us prefer not to think about can tell us things that we need to know about paedophile obsessions themselves.
None of this, of course, necessarily applies to Adrian Lyne's forthcoming film. It is, as yet, unfinished, but is reported to be far more sexually explicit than Stanley Kubrick's restrained and meticulous 1962 version. While judgement has to be suspended until the film is completed, the fact that Hollywood studios are wary of a movie on such a subject by someone like Lyne is in itself encouraging. It is a welcome sign that commercial culture is beginning to think again about its responsibility to protect the idea of childhood that it has done so much to threaten. Such a rare intrusion of morality into the business of making money should not be deflected by misplaced attacks on a complex and subtle novel.
