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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Nabokov must have known this would always be true, and in interviews he took great pains to distance himself from the subject matter. "It was my most difficult book," he told the BBC in 1962, "the book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real." He neglected to mention that he had tried the same distant theme many years before and abandoned it. "Did she have a precursor?" Humbert asks disingenuously about his young love at the beginning of the novel. Indeed she did, but Nabokov denied her. In the postscript, "A Book Entitled Lolita," he wrote that he had tested a 1939 manuscript on some friends, "but I was not pleased with the thing and destroyed it sometime after moving to America in 1940." But he did not destroy it, and years later it was reprinted under the title "The Enchanter."
Of course, there are those to whom the unsavory relationship between Humbert and Lolita neither excites nor disgusts because they see it not so much in sexual but more in sociopolitical terms. For instance, Azar Nafisi's 2003 bestseller, "Reading Lolita in Tehran." I have mixed feelings about saying anything even remotely critical about Nafisi's book, as I feel a kinship with her through our common love of "Lolita;" she seems, from her book, to be exactly the kind of person I'd love to have as a friend or neighbor. "We lived in a culture," she writes of Iran, "that denied any merit to literary works, considering them important only when they were handmaidens to something seemingly more urgent -- namely ideology. This is a country where all gestures, even the most private, were interpreted in political terms."
Yes, one thinks, this is precisely the kind of society Nabokov would have despised, in fact that he denounced in "Invitation to a Beheading" and "Bend Sinister." So far, Nafisi and I are in accord. But then she writes of a "Lolita" that seems to me to have been created in another dimension. To her, "Lolita" is "the story of a twelve-year-old girl who had nowhere to go. Humbert had tried to turn her into his fantasy, into his dead love, and he had destroyed her. The desperate truth of Lolita's story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man, but the confiscation of one individual's life by another." (Emphasis Nafisi's.) Here one takes a deep breath, pauses and wonders what to say to her. I don't want to imply that she isn't free to take what she wants from "Lolita," but I say with certainty that her concerns as a reader are not in the same universe as Nabokov's as an author. Nabokov's art, she feels, "is revealed in his ability to make us feel sympathy for Humbert's victims ... without our approving of them. We condemn Humbert's acts of cruelty towards them even as we substantiate his judgment on their banality. What we have here is the first lesson in democracy: all individuals, no matter how contemptible, have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Where to begin? How to tell her that the author she so admired would have sneered at her praise? Here, again, is Nabokov from that 1962 BBC interview: "Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions." Nafisi, at least when she was living in Tehran, was in need of a great deal more than riddles with elegant solutions. I don't think Nabokov would have cared much about what she needed. "I don't give a damn for the group," he told Playboy magazine in 1964, "the community, the masses, and so forth ... there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art." And: "I have neither the intent nor the temperament to be a moralist or satirist." Mediocrity, he thought, "thrives on ideas." By which, he told Time magazine in 1969, he meant "general ideas, the big, sincere ideas which permeate a so-called great novel, and which, in the inevitable long run, amount to bloated topicalities stranded like dead whales." This is the nicest way I can think of to tell Nafisi that Nabokov didn't give a damn about anything -- politics, feminism, humanism -- that she does, at least not in any of his fiction.
Nabokov's insistence on art as pure artifice, that it be devoid of all social, political and even philosophical content, guided me to most of the great writing I would come to know before my college years. He made me forever wary of the book that could be "explained" in a few choice sentences. Where there was no ambiguity, he made me understand there was no art.
I would have come to know Gogol, Pushkin, Proust, Joyce and Kafka -- even Robert Louis Stevenson, whose "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" had been relegated to kids literature by the time I came of age -- without Nabokov, but later in life, and if I had read them much later I might have missed out on a great deal else that they led me to. He steered me away from numerous so-called giants such as André Malraux, Thomas Mann, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre (whose negative review of an early Nabokov novel was returned in spades years later in the pages of the New York Times) and Samuel Beckett (not the novels, which Nabokov loved, but the plays, which he correctly saw as full of Sartreian ideas). I've never been able to get back to them.
