”Although there is nothing obviously salacious about his work, Norman Rockwell, the most widely known American illustrator from the twenties through the fifties, was a sort of patron saint of both the Boy and Girl Scouts….’That Dali is really Norman Rockwell’s twin brother kidnapped by Gypsies in babyhood’ ” ( Vladimir Nabokov in Pnin)
Norman Rockwell
The author of Lolita, Nabokov and his strained tension between hormonal impulse, instinct and tenuous ambiguity towards moral propriety is in effect an inverse recognition, a more phantasmagorical realization of Rockwell’s(1894-1978) more sublime expression of the same passions. Lolita was infamous for its controversial subject, that of a middle aged man obsessed with a young adolescent girl. The infatuation leads to tragic consequences making the work a moral paen to Prometheus. Prometheus stole Fire from Zeus to give to humanity and this deceit led to the ”gift” of Pandora to mankind; only small shards of hope remained sealed in the box after the more extreme passions escaped.
Lolita, is a fatalistic adventure in which the pedophilia and pornography act as sub-text to a not so Puritanical America. Rockwell seemed to approach the issue seamlessly and perhaps even more dangerously from within through accepted social contexts imbued with humanism and a strain of atheistic libertarianism.
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