From 'Reading Lolita in Alabama'

by Alan Barra

Nabokov disliked all ideas in literature. He didn't simply reject novelists or poets who expressed what he regarded as bad philosophical (and yes, even religious) concepts. He disliked all imaginative writers whose work contained "big ideas," and so it was not merely Camus and D.H. Lawrence and Faulkner who went into his waste basket but Balzac, Stendhal and Dostoevski as well -- writers who didn't so much express ideas as write books that could be explained or illuminated in terms of ideas.

Undeniably great writers might make the cut. Dickens, Tolstoy and, occasionally, Henry James could be salvaged in part, but only the parts that excluded concepts and adhered to Nabokov's aesthetics standards. The main point was that there was no differentiation between the good and bad ideas; for Nabokov, it was ideas themselves that ruined imaginative work.

At the core of Nabokov's aesthetic was the art of parody, which his narrator in "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" calls "the springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion." First-time readers of Nabokov are ill advised to regard that statement as facetious; Nabokov meant it to be taken literally. As Alfred Appel Jr., writes in the introduction to "The Annotated Lolita" (also published by Vintage), "because its references are either other works of art or itself, parody denies the possibility of a naturalistic fiction. Only an authorial sensibility can be responsible for the texture of parody and self-parody. It is a verbal vaudeville, a series of literary impersonations performed by the author." What pleasure it gave us to reread "Lolita" over the years and find indications of Baudelaire and Bovary, to find puns and puzzles we hadn't noticed in previous readings.

And yet, and yet ... I couldn't help feeling that I had gorged on a marvelous cake but was still hungry for something as prosaic as bread. Can the soul live on parody alone? What kind of world would it be in which the only literature was parody and its only virtue irony? If Nabokov's aesthetic were adopted by every writer -- a ridiculous notion, of course, but given his influence on so many writers over the last 50 years, a point worth considering -- what would be the outcome? Literature that alludes to other literature could only feed off itself to a point of exhaustion. From where would the primary works that would continue to satisfy this appetite come?

Precisely because of Nabokov's genius for artifice, his characters had touched something deeper in me than a reaction to verbal and technical dexterity. I found myself asking: Didn't these characters have a better chance for happiness than their creator allowed them? And was I being what Nabokov would have regarded as a philistine for asking such a question?

In his chapter on Nabokov in "A Window on Russia," Nabokov's one-time friend Edmund Wilson writes of what he calls an unfortunate characteristic that pervades all of Nabokov's work: "Everybody is always humiliated." (Wilson intensely disliked "Lolita," a fact that Wilson's latest biographer, Lewis Dabney, feels was the real origin of their feud and not, as is popularly thought, their finicky differences over Nabokov's translation of Pushkin.) I love "Lolita," but I can't help acknowledging that Wilson was on to something. In the last sentence of his essay Wilson was writing about Nabokov's last novel, "Ada," but one suspects he was really referring to "Lolita." "This is brilliance which aims to dazzle, but which cannot be anything but dull."

"Lolita" is anything but dull -- it may be the most exhilarating novel I've ever read. But there is something ultimately depressing about it, and I realize after all these years that it has to do with the author caring so little about the fact that he made his heroine so realistic to me that I could not accept her fate as just a literary device. And I deeply resented that her maker would have held me in contempt for feeling this way. Nafisi (author of 'Reading Lolita in Tehran'), I think, is wrong in seeing social and political intent in "Lolita," but she is not wrong in wanting them to be there. Some of you are going to be receiving the 50th anniversary edition of "Lolita" as my Christmas gift, and I want you to love the book as much as I do. But it will come with a little card that contains a proviso:

Reading Nabokov can be an unparalleled delight, but idealizing him, accepting literature on his terms, can negate what you loved about literature in the first place.